There’s a difference between “young and naive” and “young and stupidly naive.”
Today’s college jkids thinking they’re automatically going to make six-figure salaries thanks to their college degrees is the latter. Let’s look at this clip from Dave Ramsey’s show:
“Current college students expect to…a hundred and three thousand eight hundred and eighty dollars in their first job.”
“Yeah, that’s a problem.”
“I interviewed a bunch of high schoolers, and when I talked to them, they all were, like, ‘Well, yeah, I’m gonna make six figures when I graduate,’ and I was like ‘What makes you think that,’ right? There’s no reality.”
“They are way overestimating their starting salaries.”
I’ll never forget a college prep after school program I was in during high school. They were supposed to be telling us how to fill out applications and talking about student loans. The instructors actually said that you won’t need to pay off your student loans; they don’t expect you to. When I told my dad that, he pulled me out of there immediately.
Can you earn six figures right out college? Potentially…if you’re getting a highly technical degree (Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, etc.) and you already have demonstrable mastery of some highly technical skills. Say, you’re getting a CS degree and you already know C and JavaScript, and you have multiple projects on GitHub that demonstrate coding ability, and maybe a desirable technical cert or two, then yes, a six figure salary right out of school is certainly possible.
But if you have a Liberal Arts degree? No. Not unless your last name is “Clinton” or “Biden.”
People who have told kids “Hey, you can party for four years, get a degree, waltz into a six figure salary and have the government forgive your student debt” have done them a grave disservice. Life is hard, and earning a living is work. I worked a lot of crappy jobs immediately after college (retail sales, phone sales) before bootstrapping my way into a technical writing career. (It didn’t help that I’m a smart ass.) There were a lot of post-college roommates, cheap used cars, and pasta, rice and ramen meals along the way.
Earning a college degree does not hand you a “Get Out Of Poverty Free” card, it only gives you a chance to get out of poverty, and not a very good one if you’re dragging a ton of student debt behind. The best way to avoid the boat anchor of student debt is to avoid taking out student debt. And there are a whole lot of decent paying trade jobs out there (welder, plumber, electrician, HVAC, etc.) that don’t require college degrees to get your foot in the door.
College graduates need to avoid the debt trap of a lavish lifestyle. Live modestly, pay off your debts, and build wealth. And realize that it may be many years (if ever) before you’re pulling down a six-figure income.
I’ve covered Peter Zeihan videos on China’s crashing demographics before. We already knew China was “the fastest aging society in human history, with the largest sex imbalance in human history.” Now he’s dug into new some new data.
It’s much worse than he thought.
“We’ve gotten some new data out of the Chinese that has made it way to the U.N, and so the updates have allowed us to update our assessment, and oh my God, it’s bad.”
“Here is the new data, and as you can see, the number of children who are under age 5 has just collapsed, and they’re now roughly twice as many that are age 15 as age 5.”
“What happened back in 2017, well before Covid, is that we had a sudden collapse in the birth rate, roughly 40% over the next five years among the Chinese, the ethnic Han population, and more than 50 percent among a lot of the minorities. And that is before Covid, which saw anecdotally the birth rate drops considerably more.”
“We’re never going to get good data on death rate, or at least not anytime soon, because the Chinese, when they did the reopening, just stopped collecting the data on deaths and Covid and everything because they didn’t want the world to know how many Chinese died, so they don’t know.”
And if you look at the data from the Shanghai Academy of Science, it’s even worse than the official state numbers.
“China aged past the point of demographic no return over 20 years, ago and it wasn’t just this year that India became the world’s most populous country, that probably happened roughly a decade ago. And it wasn’t in 2018 that the average Chinese aged past the average American, that was probably roughly in 2007 or 2008.”
“This is not a country that is in demographic decay, this is a country that is in the advanced stages of demographic collapse. And this is going to be the final decade that China can exist as a modern industrialized nation state, because it simply isn’t going to have the people to even try.”
“Labor costs you’re having now or as low as they’re ever going to be. Consumption is as high as it’s ever going to be.”
“So even before you consider the political complications or issues with operating environment or energy access or geopolitical risk or regulational risk, the numbers just aren’t there anymore so you have to ask yourself why you’re still there.”
Add to that the fact that China economy is probably overstated by 60%, and it looks like China’s brief days in the sun are already over.
I have an in-process post titled “League of the Boned” in embryonic form, which was going to be about how each country in the League has been screwed by deficit spending, high interest rates and endemic corruption. But there so much boning to write about, and so many members of the League, that I thought it best to split it up into individual posts.
First up is Turkey, not because it’s the most boned, but the one whose immediate boning is made more acute by recent events, namely Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s reelection.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s supporters are celebrating after Turkey’s long-time president won Sunday’s vote, securing another five years in power.
“The entire nation of 85 million won,” he told cheering crowds outside his enormous palace on the edge of Ankara.
But his call for unity sounded hollow as he ridiculed his opponent Kemal Kilicdaroglu – and took aim at a jailed Kurdish leader and the LGBT community.
The opposition leader denounced “the most unfair election in recent years”.
Mr Kilicdaroglu said the president’s political party had mobilised all the means of the state against him and he did not explicitly admit defeat.
International observers said on Monday that, as with the first round on 14 May, media bias and limits to freedom of expression had “created an unlevel playing field, and contributed to an unjustified advantage” for Mr Erdogan.
President Erdogan ended with just over 52% of the vote, based on near-complete unofficial results. Almost half the electorate in this deeply polarised country did not back his authoritarian vision of Turkey.
Ultimately, Mr Kilicdaroglu was no match for the well-drilled Erdogan campaign, even if he took the president to a run-off second round for the first time since the post was made directly elected in 2014.
But he barely dented his rival’s first-round lead, falling more than two million votes behind.
Snip.
The president admitted that tackling inflation was Turkey’s most urgent issue.
The question is whether he is prepared to take the necessary measures to do so. At an annual rate of almost 44%, inflation seeps into everyone’s lives.
The cost of food, rent and other everyday goods has soared, exacerbated by Mr Erdogan’s refusal to observe orthodox economic policy and raise interest rates.
The Turkish lira has hit record lows against the dollar and the central bank has struggled to meet surging demand for foreign currency.
“If they continue with low interest rates, as Erdogan has signalled, the only other option is stricter capital controls,” warns Selva Demiralp, professor of economics at Koc university in Istanbul.
Tiny problem: Strict capital controls tend not to work. By the standards of the Middle East, Turkey is fairly open and fairly modern, and getting around currency controls is one of the use cases that cryptocurrencies are ideal for.
Indeed, the currency problem is so severe that Turkey’s foreign currency reserves just turned negative.
The Turkish central bank’s net forex reserves dropped into negative territory for the first time since 2002, standing at $-151.3 million on May 19, as the bank – following Erdogan’s strict orders – scrambled to counter demand for hard currencies (USD, gold, crypto) ahead of Sunday’s runoff vote.
Forex demand in Turkey surged to record levels ahead of May 14 on companies’ and individuals’ expectations that the lira, which lost 44% in 2021 and 30% in 2022, will plunge after the vote (spoiler alert: those fears have been justified).
As we discussed last week, the central bank’s forex reserves have sagged in recent years due to costly market interventions and other efforts to cool forex demand. The bank’s net reserves dropped by $2.48 billion in the week to May 19, to their lowest level since February 2002. They have dropped $27.7 billion since the end of 2022, and were at negative $3 billion as of May 19. The net forex reserves would be even more negative if outstanding swaps, courtesy of foreign central banks and which stood at $33.50 billion on Wednesday, are deducted (as they should be since the CBRT will have to repay these at some point).
And while the endgame here is clear to all, few are willing to say it out loud for fear of retaliation by the Erdogan regime (no really, he has been known to throw people in jail for recommending a Turkish lira short); yet one bank which decided to double down on Goldman’s dire view of how it all plays out is Morgan Stanley, which in a note last week (available to pro subscribers in the usual place), wrote that the turkish lira plummeting to 28 by the end of the year, is likely in the cards (in our view, that’s a rather optimistic take since the lira is about to become the new Bolivar where soon new zeroes are added daily if not hourly).
This is, I think, a bit of an exaggeration, since Turkey is a much bigger and more important country (and economy) than Venezuela, and while they’ve done several terribly stupid things with their economy, they haven’t gone full socialist starvation scenario on it.
The biggest concern when Erdogan came to party was his Islamist roots, and how he dismantled Turkey’s own peculiar systems of checks and balances, namely that anytime the government would move too far in an Islamist direction, the military would step in, depose the current government, rule for a while, and then step down once things had calmed down again. That doesn’t look very much like classic western democracy, but it served well enough for Turkey, partially insulating it from the wild swings between different despots common in the rest of the Islamic world.
The bad news is that Erdogan demolished those checks and balances in his drive to centralize power in his own hands, purging the military of anyone he thought might possibly oppose him. The good news is that, after all that, he turned out to mostly be a typical Middle Eastern strongman rather than a fervent jihadi. The bad news is that he’s also a complete economic ignoramus, and his stupidity is making Turkey’s economic problems much worse.
Here Patrick Boyle explains just how stupid:
On Erdogan’s idea that low-interest rates can cure inflation: “The official annual inflation rate in Turkey was 43.7% as of April. This is actually down from the 80% inflation rate that Turkey saw the prior year. There is no guarantee that this slowdown will persist. There is in fact widespread suspicion that the official numbers understate an inflation rate that according to independent experts is actually closer to 100%.”
The February earthquakes didn’t help.
“Another term for President Erdoğan would likely imply a continuation of the current policies with a heightened risk of persistent very high inflation and severe currency pressures.”
“The high inflation, along with government largess and efforts to prop up the currency are threatening economic growth and could push the country into a deep recession.”
The Lira is trading near record lows against the dollar.
“Net foreign assets, a proxy for the size of Turkey’s foreign currency holdings, have declined to minus $13 billion dollars from $1.4 billion dollars a year ago, according to central bank data.”
“Those figures include billions of dollars in funds borrowed from the domestic banking system through swaps. Pressure on international reserves has been ‘significant in recent weeks’ as the government made efforts to prop up the economy ahead of Sunday’s elections.”
“Turkey’s foreign currency and gold reserves tumbled $17 billion dollars in the six weeks leading up to the first round of the election according to the FT, a decline of 15 percent.”
“Turkey had a painful experience of high and chronic inflation from 1975 through to 2004 caused by political instability, poor institutions, high public sector budget deficits and depreciation of the Turkish Lira which culminated in a severe financial crisis in 2000-2001.”
“The establishment of an independent central bank in 2001, which focused mainly on fighting inflation along with tight fiscal policies implemented at the same time brought inflation under control.”
“During his election campaign, Erdogan showed no intention of changing his policies, doubling down on his claims that low interest rates would help the economy grow by providing cheap credit to increase Turkish manufacturing and exports. ‘You will see as the interest rates go down, so will inflation’ he told supporters in Istanbul in April.”
With the cost-of-living crisis on many voters’ minds, Erdogan launched a range of expensive policies in the lead up to the election aimed at reducing the immediate impact of inflation on voters. He raised the minimum wage repeatedly, announced a free month of natural gas for consumers, reduced electricity prices increased civil servant salaries and changed government policies to allow millions of Turks to receive early government pensions. Just days before the first round of the election He gave a 45% pay rise to 700,000 Turkish public sector workers, saying he would “not let anyone be crushed by inflation”.
So he combated inflation by guaranteeing there would be more inflation, just like Joe Biden.
Boyle thinks Turkeys problems can be solved by adopting sane economic policies. “For a country in crisis, Turkey’s problems are not that difficult to solve – it is not a total basket case economy like some other emerging markets. The country mostly just needs a sensible interest rate policy and an independent central bank. Turkey has a lot of positives, it has a diversified economy, growth is good, it has good demographics and an educated workforce.”
This is true, but it was also true before Erdogan got into power and screwed things up. Peter Zeihan thinks that Turkey has the right mix of geography and demographics to be a future regional power. But there’s an awful difficult present to get through before that happens…
The decline of California under one-party Democrat rule has been one of the long-running themes of this blog. Today Victor Davis Hanson discusses how California’s wealthy destroyed the middle class with policies whose baleful effects they knew wouldn’t fall on them.
“The irony is that, as we created more wealth and more leisure, because of the very success of the middle class citizen, the middle class citizen and his central role in western government was forgotten.”
“California in the 1960s had the largest middle class in the United States. California had the finest educational system. California invented the idea of a modern freeway and a modern airport.”
“California had a state where two-thirds of the people lived with one-third of the precipitation, and yet they built the greatest transference of water with reservoirs and aqueducts the world had ever seen.”
“California had the most successful oil, timber and mineral industries in the world. They had some of the finest universities…Again this was a product of, both democratic governors and Republican governors.”
“However, today when we look at California, it’s got the highest number of homeless people in the United States. Half of all of America’s homeless live in California.”
“One-third of all the welfare recipients in the United States live in California. One-fifth of all Californians live below the poverty line.”
“California yet has the highest taxes in the country in the aggregate, the highest property taxes because of the enormous assessed evaluations…highest sales tax at over 10 to 11%, highest income tax at up to 13.2%.”
“The result of all of that that is is the middle class finds itself unable to pay and be competitive with other businesses in other states.”
“They look at all of these higher taxes, and they say themselves ‘I’m willing to pay it if I’m economically viable,’ but the regulations that the state creates fall heavily on the small farmer, the hardware store owner, the tire [store?] owner, but not necessarily on the Silicon Valley corporation that has an array of lawyers, or legal teams, or analysts, or economists, that find ways not to pay it.
“And so the middle class leaves, they vote with their feet they go to places where it’s more conducive for middle class livelihoods. We’ve lost somewhere between 8 and 12 million people of the middle class.”
At the same time, America has allowed in 20 million illegal aliens, half of which have ended up in California.
“We have not built an aqueduct in California in about 40 years. The schools that were rated in the top 10 percent of comparative state rankings are now in the bottom 10 percent. The airports are decrepit.”
“That the more taxes I pay, the worse schools I get.”
“In this period, there was about five trillion dollars in market capitalization that grew out of Silicon Valley alone. And we created sort of a medieval caste, a wealthy caste of Barons and Lords that were not subject to the consequences of their own ideology. So they had so much wealth they felt they were exempt from worries about taxation.”
“We created a very, very wealthy elite that was not subject to the consequences of their own ideology.”
Whether out of virtue signaling and guilt, or whether out of contrived political necessity, they made a political alliance with the very poor of California. And the poor said “Give us more entitlements, tax the middle class, transfer that money to us we need it.” And the wealthy said “Yes, we will open the borders. We’ll transfer money, but you have to vote for issues that we’re in favor of. And we’re in favor of them precisely because they don’t affect us.”
And of course, the left’s disdain for the middle class shows up in their language: They’re the “bitter clingers,” the “deplorables,” the “chumps and dregs of society.”
“Muscular labor was no longer essential to the American experiment. In other words, you could make have things made overseas in China or southeast Asia or Mexico. And the great middle class territory of the middle west of the United States—Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana—started to become hollowed out.”
“We’ve taken the middle class, the backbone of citizenship, and we’ve eroded it and destroyed it.”
A Soros-backed DA is stepping down, a Harvard prof lying about playing footsie with commies sentenced, and another Democratic fundraiser convicted of fraud. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Good news, everyone! Soros-backed St. Louis Democrat DA Kim Gardner has resigned.
On Thursday, a progressive prosecutor who was notoriously funded by far-left billionaire George Soros announced her resignation, after months of bipartisan pressure to do so.
Fox News reports that Kim Gardner, the Circuit Attorney for St. Louis, announced that her resignation will be effective June 1st. Gardner was one of the first prosecutors in the country to be bankrolled by Soros, who has since expanded his efforts to other major cities across the country. She was first elected in 2016 and re-elected in 2020, largely due to Soros’ financial backing. Prior to her resignation announcement, she had declared her intention to run for a third term in 2024.
After years of criticism for being soft on crime and siding with criminals over victims, Gardner faced a whole new wave of criticism from both parties over an incident in February: Teenage volleyball player Janae Edmonson, who was visiting St. Louis from Tennessee for a tournament, was hit by an out-of-control car while crossing the road; although Edmonson survived, she had to have both of her legs amputated.
The driver of the car was Daniel Riley, a man who was out on bond while awaiting trial for an armed robbery case. It was later revealed that Riley had violated the terms of bond dozens of times, but was never arrested. When the blame turned to Gardner for failing to keep him off the streets, she falsely claimed that her office had attempted to have Riley jailed once again, only to be denied by a judge; there are no records of her office filing any such motion or otherwise seeking the revocation of Riley’s bond.
Following the Edmonson incident, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R-Mo.) filed a petition quo warranto, the process by which the state attorney general can fire a prosecutor who has been determined to be neglectful of her duties. Bailey claimed that as many as 12,000 criminal cases have been dismissed due to Gardner’s failures, with another 9,000 having been thrown out right before they were set to go to trial, due to Garnder’s office refusing to provide evidence and speedy trials for defendants.
After Gardner’s announcement, Bailey released a statement demanding that she vacate her office immediately, rather than wait for another month.
Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin said he will pull his mercenaries out of the meat grinder that is the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut on May 10, one day after Russia’s Victory Day Celebrations, which Russian president Vladimir Putin is expected to use to shore up support for the Russian invasion.
The Wagner Group, a well-known mercenary unit known to be one of Russia’s most competent fighting divisions, is leading the charge on Bakhmut, a city that that has gained outsized symbolic importance.
“I am withdrawing the Wagner PMC units from Bakhmut, because in the absence of ammunition they are doomed to senseless death,” Prigozhin said in full military fatigues and carrying an automatic weapon. The video he released showed him surrounded by masked Wagner fighters. Prigozhin also released a statement to the same effect.
His forces had no choice but to withdraw to rear bases to “lick the wounds,” said Prigozhin, as translated by the Washington Post. If Wagner goes through with the withdrawal, it would be viewed as catastrophic in terms of morale. The Russian invasion has ground to a standstill after large-scale Russian and Ukrainian offensives last year. Kyiv, which has been amassing ammunitions including tanks and fighter jets, is expected to launch a fresh counterattack in the very near future.
Prigozhin also launched a remarkable video tirade overnight on Telegram in which he displayed bodies of dozens of Wagner soldiers killed in Bakhmut. He angrily laid into the Russian Defense minister Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff of the Russian armed forces, for supplying Wagner with only 30 percent of the ammunition that’s needed.
The statement released today claimed that number was even lower, standing at 10 percent.
One caveat is that we’ve heard complaints from Prigozhin about his ammo supply before.
Russian soldiers dig trenches in horse graveyard in occupied Ukraine. Now they have anthrax.
“Biden CIA chief met with Epstein several times after financier convicted of child sex crime. Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns had three meetings with Jeffrey Epstein in 2014, when the top spy official was deputy secretary of state and after Epstein was convicted of child sex exploitation.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“Harvard chemistry professor sentenced for lying about ties to CCP…Former Harvard University Chemistry Department Chair Charles M. Lieber was sentenced Wednesday to time served and over $80,000 in fines for committing fraud and for failing to disclose his connections to the Chinese Communist Party.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
New Jersey Democratic campaign strategist James Devine was charged with election fraud for allegedly submitting more than 1,900 fake petitions to help secure a 2021 Democratic gubernatorial primary ballot spot for candidate Lisa McCormick, New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin announced Tuesday.
Devine was McCormick’s campaign manager and sent the fake voter certifications to the New Jersey Secretary of State’s Division of Elections via email in April 2021, but the New Jersey Democratic State Committee challenged his attempt days later, arguing that all the forms featured same the style of signature and at least one of the named voters was deceased, Platkin said.
A judge subsequently took McCormick off the primary ballot, and Devine is now charged with third-degree offenses concerning nomination certificates or petitions, tampering with public records or information and fourth-degree falsifying or tampering with records.
LoRA updates are very cheap to produce (~$100) for the most popular model sizes. This means that almost anyone with an idea can generate one and distribute it. Training times under a day are the norm. At that pace, it doesn’t take long before the cumulative effect of all of these fine-tunings overcomes starting off at a size disadvantage. Indeed, in terms of engineer-hours, the pace of improvement from these models vastly outstrips what we can do with our largest variants, and the best are already largely indistinguishable from ChatGPT. Focusing on maintaining some of the largest models on the planet actually puts us at a disadvantage.
Here’s Jordan Peterson on the crimes of communism:
If you want a candidate for the sin against the holy ghost in the 21st century, the statement “communism, real communism, was never tried” with the underlying idea that if you had been the person implementing it, it would have worked, I think that’s a pretty good contender for something for which you should never be forgiven.
More information on the Holodomor can be found in Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Conquest estimated that for the entire Collectivization/”De-Kulakization”/Holodomor period (including the Soviet suppression of the Kazakhs and the Crimean Tartars, etc.) some 14.5 million died due to the actions of the Soviet government.
I know that November 7 is also designated as Victims of Communism Day, but the crimes of communism are so vast that there’s no reason we can’t observe Victims of Communism Day twice a year.
You know that “creating more public roads just creates more traffic” talking point trotted out by people who want to ban your car?
Yeah, not so much.
The first two thirds of the video covers other topics, like how economies of scale don’t necessarily drive down prices uniformly, and as you scale, you incur new costs that might make a product less profitable. (One example is China’s overbuilt high speed rail network.)
The last portion deals with the “roads create traffic” myth, directly delving into the study the anti-road types cite:
“What [building new highways[ doesn’t do is create entirely new demand.”
“New roadways, especially interstates, tend to be more direct, and can take a larger volume of traffic than alternative routes through urban areas.”
“The study itself has also been widely criticized for making assumptions that other economists were not able to replicate in follow-up studies.”
“Its methodology was also questionable. It measured interstate kilometers traveled. Building out more interstates might make people use those roads more, but that doesn’t mean that there are more cars overall, because a lot of that traffic would have been taken away from non-interstate roads, which were not measured in the study.”
“More roads won’t create more congestion unless they are designed very poorly, and reducing the supply of roads won’t ease congestion, either.”
The original study authors didn’t even suggest reducing roads; they were in favor of congestion charges.
If you’re stressing over your taxes, you might be slightly relieved to know that they’re not due until April 18. Thus week: More Blue City violence and decline, lots of Social Justice Warrior backlash, Facebook shows snowflakes the door, and Budweiser commits brand suicide.
“Ex-ABC Senior Producer Who Rolling Stone Covered For Indicted On Child Porn Charges. Former ABC senior producer James Gordon Meek has been indicted on three counts of child pornography nearly one year after the FBI raided his Arlington, Virginia home.”
Something about the apparently random street murder of Silicon Valley tech executive Bob Lee seems to have overturned a crawly rock in San Francisco’s political scene, suggesting a brewing power struggle on the horizon.
On the one hand, we have a very vocally angry Silicon Valley tech community speaking out about the out-of-control crime situation in the city, with the valued and talented Lee’s untimely death from some night creature who crawled out from some sewer or encampment and stabbed him to death, quite possibly in a drug-addled haze. That’s expected if you live in a place full of bums and criminals, but Lee didn’t live in a place full of bums and criminals. He had actually fled the city for Florida based on its engulfing crime and come back only for a brief business trip.
On the other hand, we have a soggy, entrenched political establishment seeking to assure that there’s really no crime problem at all. This is evident enough in the “crime is down” coverage seen in the political establishment’s house organ, the San Francisco Chronicle, and in the surreal statements of the city hall power establishment, which is rooted in special interests, particularly the most powerful one, the homeless industrial complex. I wrote about that here. San Francisco currently spends about as much on homeless “services” as it does on police, and by some studies such as the one cited below, actually more.
Not surprisingly, as per Thomas Sowell’s observation, you can have all the poverty you want to pay for, and San Francisco pays a lot.
The Hoover Institution’s Lee Ohanian has noted:
Spending $1.1 billion on homelessness is just the latest installment in San Francisco’s constant failure to sensibly and humanely deal with an issue that it chronically misdiagnoses and mismanages about as much as is humanly possible. Since fiscal year 2016–17, San Francisco has spent over $2.8 billion on homelessness, and the city’s politicians remain seemingly baffled, year after year, as the number of homeless in the city skyrocket, as opioid overdoses kill more than COVID-19, and as the city has become nearly the most dangerous in the country. https://www.hoover.org/research/why-san-francisco-nearly-most-crime-rid….
Since 2016, the number of homeless in San Francisco has increased from 12,249 to 19,086, which comes out to about $57,000 in spending per homeless person per year. With a total population of about 860,000, roughly 2.2 percent of San Francisco residents are homeless, which is over 12 times the national average. There is little doubt that as San Francisco spends more, homelessness and its impact on the city worsens.
Do the homeless get that $57,000 being spent on them? Of course not. The princelings of the NGO establishments got that money — for themselves. That’s what’s made them politically powerful, enough to call the shots at city hall.
Democrats and Social Justice Warriors view homelessness as a huge profit center, and seek to increase the ranks of the homeless at every opportunity.
Also, an arrest was made in the Lee case and it was a fellow tech guy who knew him. “A tech executive named Nima Momeni was arrested by San Francisco police Thursday morning in the April 4 killing of Cash App founder Bob Lee…Lee and Momeni were portrayed by police as being familiar with one another. In the wee hours of April 4, they were purportedly driving together through downtown San Francisco in a car registered to the suspect.” So not a random gibbering drug-addicted transient.
Speaking of San Francisco street crime, a Whole Food closes one year after opening due to violence and theft.
A St. Louis judge sanctioned St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner’s office last week for allegedly withholding evidence in a double-murder case, while allowing the suspect out on bond, amid rising criticism about left-wing prosecutors allowing crime to flourish in major U.S. cities.
Alex Heflin, 23, was held without bond since January after he was initially charged with two counts of second-degree murder and armed criminal action, local media reported. But those charges were recently reduced to involuntary and voluntary manslaughter before he was released, while his April 17 trial has been postponed until June 12.
Judge Theresa Counts Burke ruled in favor of Heflin’s lawyers after they filed a motion accusing a prosecutor under Gardner of violating discovery rules. They alleged that her office did not turn over evidence, including a 911 call recording and DNA evidence.
“The court finds that there have been repeated delays by the state in obtaining discovery and providing it to the defense,” Burke wrote, according to local reports.
“There has been a lack of diligence on the part of the state in following up and providing discovery to the defendant in a timely fashion. As a result of the state’s actions and lack of diligence, the court grants defendant’s second motion for sanctions.”
Under Burke’s order, Heflin will have to remain on GPS monitoring. She also ordered the circuit attorney’s office to hand over their list of witnesses within 24 hours, provide DNA test results within 24 hours, or ask a crime lab for the DNA results.
“Molotov balloons are a ball filled with sulfuric acid, but white strips are a type of paper treated with potassium chlorate and a sugar mix. When the balloon breaks, the acid reacts with the potassium chlorate and sugar, which causes ignition.”
Another girlboss indicted: “Penn grad Charlie Javice, founder of Frank, charged with fraud over $175M JPMorgan deal.” Seems the heart of the indictment is fake users.
Prosecutors and the SEC allege that Javice orchestrated a scheme to deceive JPMorgan into believing that Frank had access to valuable data on 4.25 million students who used the company’s service when in reality the number was less than 300,000.
Prosecutors said when JPMorgan (NYSE: JPM) sought to verify the number of Frank users and the amount of data collected about them, Javice fabricated a data set. She is alleged to have an unnamed co-conspirator who first asked Frank’s director of engineering to create an artificially generated data set. Prosecutors said the director of engineering declined the request after expressing concerns about its legality.
Javice, according to prosecutors, then approached an outside data scientist and hired him to create the synthetic data set — which was then provided to an agreed-upon third-party vendor in an effort to confirm to JPMorgan that the data set had over 4.25 million rows.
Based on that alleged fraudulent data, prosecutors said JPMorgan agreed to buy Frank for $175 million. As part of the deal, the nation’s largest bank hired Javice and other Frank employees. Prosecutors said Javice received over $21 million for selling her equity stake in Frank and, per the terms of the deal, was to be paid another $20 million as a retention bonus.
Prosecutors said as the fabricated data set was being created, Javice and her co-conspirator sought to purchase real data for over 4.25 million college students to cover up their misrepresentations.
Treading the fine line between “fake it until you make it” and “interstate wire fraud.”
Bud light tranny pander wrecks brand. “I’ve never seen such little sales [as] in this past few days.”
How severe? How about $105 billion drop in loans in just two weeks.
“This credit crunch greatly increases the chances that America is going to have a deflationary recession or depression at some point in 2023. And, in fact, we could already be in it.” Ya think?
“We’re going to see the unemployment rate start to spike in America in the second half of 2023, In fact, we’re already seeing a big increase in unemployment claims data from the Federal Reserve shows that continued unemployment claims has surged since September.”
“We’re seeing a big surge in mortgage defaults right now across America, particularly on what’s called FHA mortgages. FHA mortgages are these first-time home buyer loans that the US government sponsors and allows people to only put three to five percent down. Well, these loans now have a 12% default rate in the most recent month of February 2023.”
Debt-to-income ration is now higher than it was at the pre-subprime meltdown peak in 2008.
“The Biden Administration has been very aggressive in wanting to expand mortgage access to low-income borrowers who can’t afford these mortgages. And they do this under the guise of expanding the benefits of home ownership to everyone, but really what they’re doing is they’re saddling at-risk economic households with a lot of debt near the peak of a housing bubble.”
“When banks tighten the belt and businesses can no longer get loans, businesses have to shut down, or what businesses have to do is, they have to start liquidating their holdings and taking whatever cash they have and use it to pay expenses. This is actually a concern of mine.”
“This bank credit crunch which is occurring right now could cause even more bank runs in the future” as people pull money out of the bank to cover expenses.
Quantitative tightening is back on.
“Mortgage application demand is on par with what we saw basically in the worst of the last housing crash in 2008, 2009, 2010, and so, no, there is no recovery.”
“The regular home buyer is still out of the housing market and is not returning.”
“The money supply in America is contracting…every other time in history it contracted, which was four times, we had a depression, a panic and a banking crisis.”
Cheerful enough. But if you’re a car dealer, things are even worse:
Banks are cutting off backing loans and providing credit to dealerships.
Not just used car dealers, but even national brand, nameplate dealerships.
This all started back in 2020, when banks started lending way too much money on cars that simply aren’t worth it, to consumers that simply couldn’t afford these payments, and shouldn’t have got the car in the first place…Let’s fast forward to 2023. We’re seeing record high repossession rates, and we’re seeing record high portfolio sell-offs, where people are just liquidating their paper because they don’t want to take on the risk of all these really bad auto loans, because they owe too much money. People are not making payments and they see the value of cars going down.
The fewer banks dealers can pit each other against for loan terms, the higher the interest rate consumers have to pay.
Dealers (not the banks) are also the ones who get screwed if a customer misses their first through third car payment.
Texas car dealer: “He was floored because he sells a lot of trucks between $45- and $65,000 trucks. Four of his banks told him that they’re no longer lending over twenty five thousand dollars.” (Previously.)
“I promise you this: it’s only gonna get worse.”
But wait! It gets worse!
“Capital One is going to start pulling their floor plans from dealers.”
“Floor plans” are the lines of credit dealers use to purchase cars to populate their lots, even the big nameplate dealers.
“Dealers are overexposed right now. They have paid way too much for their inventory and now they are having a hard time selling it.”
“It is so much harder now than it has been in the last two years to get people approved for loans to be able to sell these vehicles.”
“[Banks] do not want to get stuck holding the bag on these cars.”
“Dealers have been stupid. They have overpaid and they have too much inventory right now.”
“Some of these dealers, if they’re having cars 60, 90 days and maybe they’re getting a little bit behind on their payments [the] floor plan company will actually go to these dealers lots and they will take these cars that have been sitting too long, they’ll take them to the auction.”
“If they didn’t have the cash, the liquidity, to begin with, then they have to start liquidating cars, and they have to liquidate them fast to be able to pay their flooring lines…if they lose these flooring lines, they might as well not be in business, they don’t have the cash to be able to buy more inventory to be able to sell it to make more money.”
Banks pulling their floor lines could potentially crash the whole car market.
Things are going to get worse for car dealers before it gets better, and six months from now might be a great time to buy a car, assuming you’re not too busy shooting starving looters trying to steal your canned goods…
“How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?” – Charles de Gaulle (attributed)
Ah, France! [Insert lazy paragraph describing France in in terms of classic cliches including food, wine, cheese, sex, cigarettes and surrender.]
Yes, you’ll do nicely, Cliched French Guy Clip Art
In addition to those classic French attributes, another time-honored French tradition is “widespread rioting,” which they’ve been celebrating over the last few weeks. What they’re protesting is French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to force through an unpopular bill to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64.
French President Emmanuel Macron ordered his prime minister to wield a special constitutional power Thursday that skirts parliament to force through a highly unpopular bill raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 without a vote.
His calculated risk set off a clamor among lawmakers, who began singing the national anthem even before Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne arrived in the lower chamber. She spoke forcefully over their shouts, acknowledging that Macron’s unilateral move will trigger quick motions of no-confidence in his government.
The fury of opposition lawmakers echoed the anger of citizens and workers’ unions. Thousands gathered at the Place de la Concorde facing the National Assembly, lighting a bonfire. As night fell, police charged the demonstrators in waves to clear the elegant Place. Small groups of those chased away moved through nearby streets in the chic neighborhood setting street fires. At least 120 were detained, police said.
Similar scenes repeated themselves in numerous other cities, from Rennes and Nantes in the east to Lyon and the southern port city of Marseille, where shop windows and bank fronts were smashed, according to French media. Radical leftist groups were blamed for at least some of the destruction.
The unions that have organized strikes and marches since January, leaving Paris reeking in piles of garbage, announced new rallies and protest marches in the days ahead. “This retirement reform is brutal, unjust, unjustified for the world of workers,” they declared.
Macron has made the proposed pension changes the key priority of his second term, arguing that reform is needed to keep the pension system from diving into deficit as France, like many richer nations, faces lower birth rates and longer life expectancy.
Macron decided to invoke the special power during a Cabinet meeting at the Elysee presidential palace, just a few minutes before the scheduled vote in France’s lower house of parliament, because he had no guarantee of a majority.
French President Emmanuel Macron chose on Thursday to shun parliament and impose his unpopular pension reforms via a special constitutional power, the so-called “Article 49.3.”
The procedure has been regularly used in the past by different governments. But this time it’s drawing a lot of attention and prompting much criticism because of the massive public opposition to the increase in retirement ages.
Here’s a look at how and why the special power is used.
WHAT’S ARTICLE 49.3?
Article 49, paragraph 3 of the French Constitution provides that the government can pass a bill without a vote at the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament, after a deliberation at a Cabinet meeting.
In response, lawmakers can file a no-confidence motion within 24 hours. If the motion gets approval from more than half the seats, the text is rejected and the government must resign.
If not, the bill is considered adopted and passes into law. Since the Constitution was established in 1958, only one no-confidence motion was successful, in 1962.
Charles de Gaulle (him again) rammed through the Constitution of the Fifth Republic because he wanted a stable central government and, compared to some other European states (I’m looking at you, Italy), it’s largely achieved those goals.
The thing is, Macron is probably right in that the French welfare state needs an older retirement age for the entire system to stay solvent (at least for a while longer). But the way his proposal was passed also emblematic of the deficit of democracy in the EU generally and France specifically. That old saw about democracies only lasting until people figuring out they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury is largely right, and in this, as in so many, many things, Eurocratic elites have decided the peasants simply can’t be allowed to derail the plans of their illustrious betters.
As of this writing, Macron just survived a no confidence vote over the issue. So France may well have bought itself a little more time before inevitable national bankruptcy. But every maneuver like increases French anger over the obvious democracy gap, and, as the Grand Tour lads have noted, the French can be exceptionally bloody minded over expressing their disapproval of laws they hate.
