Lefty sorts are always whining that other countries have high speed rail networks and we don’t. Many point to China’s extensive network of high speed rail as what we should be doing.
Tiny problem: China’s high speed rail network is a giant, unprofitable sinkhole of $1.8 TRILLION worth of debt.
Some take-aways:
The average operating loss for the system is $24 million per day.
The official amount for China National Railway debt for high speed rail is $900 billion, but since roughly half of the debt comes from local governments, the total is probably closer to $1.8 trillion.
For comparison sake, $1.8 trillion is about South Korea’s entire yearly GDP.
“Shanghai, the richest city in China, has a total GDP of $600 billion in 2020, which means that even the whole year of Shanghai’s GDP won’t be able to cover the debt of China National Railway.”
It’s extensive: 37,900km, nearly double the length from 2015.
Return on high speed rail investment is only about 2%, and the bulk of bond payments for loans are coming due over the next few years. “Cash flow from railway transportation revenue isn’t enough to cover the operating costs, let alone the ability to pay the debt and interest.”
Local government debt levels are around 100%.
“More than 85% of the funds raised through urban investment bonds are earmarked for repaying old debts with new ones.”
Even the most profitable high speed rail stretch, Beijing to Shanghai, only earns a return on investment of 5%.
Japan’s successful high speed rail network serves three metropolitan areas (Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka) that have 55% of that nation’s population.
“A professor at the School of Economics and Management of Beijing Jiaotong University concluded that the operating costs are only just covered when the transport density of a high-speed rail line reaches 36 million passenger kilometers per kilometer. In China the average transport density is only about 17 million passenger kilometers per kilometer.”
High speed rail can’t transport heavy freight.
“The Lanzhou Uramuchi HSR in western China can run more than 160 trains per day. In reality, this route only runs four trains per day.”
High speed rail occupancy rate is only 30%, and is still too expensive for most Chinese to use.
High speed rail construction has squeezed out much-needed construction of regular rail. “China’s rail freight capacity can’t meet market demand. China’s market share of road freight turnover has risen rapidly to 49% market share in 2016.” China rail has jacked up freight costs to make up for losses on high speed rail.
China’s freight trucks get overloaded all the time.
China’s containerized shipping accounts for 40% of global trade, but “the proportion of China’s sea rail intermodal transport volume in 2017 was only about 2.5 percent.” 84% of port containers go out by road.
So why all the money poured into high speed rail? Opportunities for corruption.
Officials see the high-speed rail project in which China is involved as a lucrative opportunity. China’s former minister of railways, known as the father of high-speed rail, was sentenced to death for corruption. Emerging industries such as high-speed rail, which offer both substantial commercial value and political achievements for local officials, have enormous room for corruption. In a systemically corrupt environment white elephant projects, that is a large project that falls significantly short of its goals, and the costs of upkeep outweigh its usefulness, are favored by many officials and businessmen looking to make a fortune. The vast majority of high-speed railways around the world can’t make ends meet on passenger revenues alone to cover their construction and operating costs. Most operate at a loss.
In light of all that, why do American leftists keep complaining about America’s lack of high speed rail? Simple: It’s the corruption, stupid. High speed rail construction offers boundless opportunities for graft and corruption, and refusing to build any keeps them from getting their snouts into another giant trough of taxpayer money…
(I didn’t expect this past week to become a string of “China’s economy is smoke and mirrors all the way down” posts, but I keep running into more examples.)
Here’s another entry for the “China’s economy is smoke and mirrors all the way down” file. Remember the previous story on the mountains of unused bikes for failed Chinese bike-sharing startups? Well, evidently the exact same thing happened with “green” cars:
The mechanics of the scam:
First they put together a down payment, order a batch of vehicles, and license them at a vehicle administration office.
Then they contact government officials, present the vehicles in their hands and apply for permission on the grounds that they are operating an online car sharing business.
The third step is to get the government’s permission, then go to the bank to get a loan.
The fourth step is to find a financer and present the vehicles and the government papers to secure some venture capital from the financer.
Last mortgage the vehicles to some smaller financial institutions to squeeze out their final value.
After all these steps are completed, the scammers disappear. The bank, the financer and the small financial institution are left with triangular disputes while the vehicles rot somewhere in the wilderness.
More takeaways:
China offers subsidies for new “green” cars.
Lots of these subsidized cars are bought by ride-sharing startups…
…that just happen to be subsidiaries of the the Chinese car companies manufacturing the cars being subsidized. (Presumably these are different companies than the pure scammers, but who the hell knows?)
Despite not being used, many have new license plates and up-to-date inspections.
Though there are minimum mileage requirements to get the subsidies, the businesses (in best Chinese fashion) just falsify the data.
“Especially the electric cars produced in previous years, the battery has a short range and the performance declines quickly. It’s worthless. At present it costs more to replace a new battery than the value of the old car.”
Most insane of all: China’s communist government required scrapping vehicles after 10 years or 100,000 kilometers. How’s that for “green”?
They later revised this to 15 years with annual inspections, then revised it again to a maximum of 600,000 kilometers.
And, of course, you can bribe inspectors to pass the inspection.
Green subsidy scams and failed startup detritus is hardly unknown in the U.S. (witness all those electric scooter sharing startups that are just now starting to go bankrupt), but China’s corner-cutting, get-rich-quick mentality combined with green government subsidies, interlocking corporate ownership, the usual Chinese scam artists and loose, bribe-able enforcement at various levels of Chinese government all combined for an especially appalling mountain of waste.
Just days after the Chinese Communist Party lifted Shanghai’s last Flu Manchu lockdown, they’re locking Shanghai down again.
China’s commercial hub of Shanghai will lock down millions of people for mass COVID-19 testing this weekend – just 10 days after lifting its gruelling two-month lockdown – unsettling residents and raising concerns about the business impact.
Racing to stop a wider outbreak after discovering a handful of community cases, including a cluster traced to a popular beauty salon, authorities have ordered PCR testing for all residents in 14 of Shanghai’s 16 districts over the weekend.
Five of the districts said residents would not be allowed to leave their homes while the testing was carried out. A notice issued by Changning district described the stay-home requirement as “closed management” of the community being sampled.
The latest scare triggered a rush to grocery stores and online platforms to stock up on food, as users of China’s Twitter-like Weibo expressed fear they could be locked down for longer, having only started going back to work after the last lockdown was lifted on June 1.
Some areas had remained sealed off or quickly returned to lockdown due to infections and their close contacts.
While the rest of the world has moved on from useless lockdown foolishness, China is still Stuck On Stupid, and their “Zero Covid” policy has as much chance to stop spread as tying a live chicken rump to buboes had at stopping bubonic plague.
You’ve got to hand it to Peter Zeihan, who said this was precisely the sort of stupidity China would keep pursuing when talking about Tianjin’s lockdown last month.
I’ve been telling my clients for quite some time that it was only a matter of issue as to how the American/Chinese relationship imploded. It could be Trump, could be Biden, could be energy, could be food, could be security, could be trade, could be ethics, could be genocide. It’s a long list, but it appears that Covid ultimately is the one that is winning out.
The Chinese vaccine does not work against Covid, and the Chinese have spent the last two years lambasting the world and lying in the propaganda that they are the only country that’s even remotely dealt well with Covid. And they’ve specifically parroted a lot of the crazy theories out there about the western vaccines, that they make you magnetic or they make you infertile or whatever else, so they can’t import the western vaccines at all they have to wait until they make their own MRNA formula, and there’s no way that’s going to happen in the next year or two, so lockdowns are the only public health policy they have and now the majority of the parts of china that matter are offline.
If you’re stuck in manufacturing in China this is the beginning of the end, if it’s not the end already, because as soon as you have an opening, Omicron comes back in and then you get a closing again because that is the only tool that the Chinese Communist Party has left.
Democrat tries to murder Brett Kavanaugh and Pelosi shrugs, human traffickers busted in Texas, another Democrat convicted of voting fraud (in Philadelphia, naturally), WaPo finally draws a line it won’t let SJWs cross, and an 8K computer that can be yours if you have somewhere north of a quarter million dollars. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Another month, another four decade high inflation rate. “The Consumer Price Index (CPI) went up by 8.6 percent in May, the highest year-over-year increase since December 1981.”
Nicholas John Roske was charged with attempting or threatening to murder or kidnap a Supreme Court justice Wednesday after traveling to Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home armed with a Glock handgun, intent on killing the justice over his expected rulings in ongoing cases related to abortion and the Second Amendment.
Roske, 26, of Simi Valley, Calif., was identified as the suspect in an affidavit unsealed Wednesday afternoon. Roske told law enforcement that he called 911 to turn himself in because he was having suicidal thoughts, also telling the operator that he intended to kill a “specific” Supreme Court justice, according to the affidavit.
Roske was subsequently arrested, and officers found a Glock 17 pistol with two magazines, as well as a tactical knife, pepper spray, and other items.
Naturally, Democrats stalled a bill to provide additional security for Supreme Court Justices.
A former Democratic congressmen convicted and expelled for taking bribes has now been convicted of committing that voting fraud that Democrats swear up and down doesn’t exist.
A former Democrat congressman, who was expelled from the House of Representatives in 1980 after getting caught taking bribes in what turned out to be an FBI sting, pleaded guilty to multiple election fraud charges this week after the U.S. Department of Justice charged him with bribery, falsifying voting records, stuffing ballot boxes, and more election crimes in Pennsylvania.
According to U.S. Attorney Jennifer Arbittier Williams, 79-year-old Michael “Ozzie” Myers admitted to bribing Philadelphia election judge Domenick J. Demuro, who already pleaded guilty in 2020, during the 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018 state elections for $300 to $5,000 per election and then telling him to lie about falsely inflating votes.
Demuro, who “was responsible for overseeing the entire election process and all voter activities of his Division in accord with federal and state election laws,” then manipulated the voting machines in his respective ward and division in a way that satisfied Myers’ desire to “illegally add votes for certain candidates of their mutual political party in primary elections,” especially those clients who paid him “consulting fees.”
“Some of these candidates were individuals running for judicial office whose campaigns had hired Myers, and others were candidates for various federal, state, and local elective offices that Myers favored for a variety of reasons,” the DOJ noted in a press release.
Myers pulled the same stunt with another South Philadelphia election judge Marie Beren, who also pleaded guilty in 2021 to her role in the fraud.
“Myers acknowledged in court that on almost every Election Day, Myers transported Beren to the polling station to open the polls. During the drive to the polling station, Myers would advise Beren which candidates he was supporting so that Beren knew which candidates should be receiving fraudulent votes. Inside the polling place and while the polls were open, Beren would advise actual in-person voters to support Myers’ candidates and also cast fraudulent votes in support of Myers’ preferred candidates on behalf of voters she knew would not or did not physically appear at the polls,” the DOJ stated.
The pair also used cell phone communication to notate in real-time how many votes they faked versus how many were real.
“If actual voter turnout was high, Beren would add fewer fraudulent votes in support of Myers’ preferred candidates. From time to time, Myers would instruct Beren to shift her efforts from one of his preferred candidates to another. Specifically, Myers would instruct Beren ‘to throw support’ behind another candidate during Election Day if he concluded that his first choice was comfortably ahead,” the press release continued.
Much like Demuro, Beren then falsified poll books “by recording the names, party affiliation, and order of appearances for voters who had not physically appeared at the polling station to cast his or her ballot in the election” and balanced the list with the ballots recorded by voting machines before certifying the tainted results.
In a story that launched a thousand “Bye, Felicia” jokes, Washington Post Social Justice Warrior “reporter” Felicia Sonmez was fired for insubordination and constantly attacking her co-workers for victimhood points.
The workplace drama began on June 2 when Sonmez publicly took colleague Dave Weigel to task after he retweeted a joke from YouTuber Cam Harless that said “every girl is bi. You just have to figure out if it’s polar or sexual.”
Sonmez posted a screenshot of the retweet, captioning it “fantastic to work at a news outlet where retweets like this are allowed!”
Weigel deleted the retweet, and explained that he “did not mean to cause any harm.” Nevertheless, the Post handed down a one-month unpaid suspension to punish Weigel for his retweet.
Post reporter Jose A. Del Real then waded into the controversy to criticize Somnez for continuing to tweet about Weigel and the paper even after it took action against Weigel. He accused her of public bullying and “clout chasing,” leading Sonmez to accuse Del Real of violating the paper’s social-media policy.
With the drama hitting a boiling point, Post executive editor Sally Buzbee sent an internal memo to staff saying, “we do not tolerate colleagues attacking colleagues either face to face or online.”
The memo seemed to spark a flood of pro-Post tweets from its reporters, who used similar language to laud the paper’s “collegial” work environment.
Sonmez evidently took offense to her colleague’s tweets saying they were proud to work at the paper.
“The reporters who issued synchronized tweets this week downplaying the Post’s workplace issues have a few things in common with each other,” Sonmez wrote on Twitter on Thursday morning. “They are all white . . . They are among the highest-paid employees in the newsroom, making double and even triple what some other National desk reporters are making, particularly journalists of color . . . They are among the ‘stars’ who ‘get away with murder’ on social media.”
Will this be a cause for soul-searching among MSM outlets over the wisdom of staffing their newsrooms with social justice warriors? Of course not. Sonmez dared to make the mistake of going after higher ranking members of the Clerisy.
Taylor Lorenz and the Washington Post are attempting a third adpocalypse. They’re attempting to take out rivals to the leftwing legacy media — specifically, YouTubers who sided more with Johnny Depp during the Amber Heard defamation trial. The leftwing media, of course, had uncritically championed Amber Heard, as they’d championed all #MeToo allegations, #BelievingAllWomen without asking for any evidence.
In fact, the defamatory opinion piece Depp sued Heard for appeared in the Washington Post. They just added a stingy “Note” to their defamation.
So Lorenz is now attempting to paint it as dangerous for people to openly question #MeToo allegations on YouTube, and to suggest there’s something wrong with non-legacy-media outlets making money off of a major media story. There’s nothing wrong with the Washington Post making money off it, of course — because they take the proper leftwing view of things.
But people like Rekieta or YellowFlash or That Umbrella Guy, the people who thought that Amber Heard was lying? Which, of course, a jury found to be the case?
They’re dangerous and they shouldn’t be allowed to make money off it. And damnit, YouTube has got to control who is allowed to make money from these news events!
By the way: The entire Depp/Heard story was already heavily censored by YouTube. Videos would be demonetized — denied advertising — if they discussed it all. Because of this, YouTubers were forced to resort to the childish tactic of referring to Depp as “The Pirate Guy” and Heard as “the Aqua Lady” to avoid censorship and demonetization. They had to avoid saying the names of the people they were talking about.
No, I’m serious.
But that’s not enough for Taylor Lorenz and The Washington Post.
Either they have to declare “The Aqua Lady is telling the truth and The Pirate Guy is an abuser,” or they must be deplatformed!
And Lorenz, in making the case that only she, a nobody, barely-educated semiliterate wannabe influencer who pretends to be a tweenager online and gets away with it because she is effectively developmentally delayed, should be allowed to weigh in on the Depp-Heard trial, and that actual trial lawyers like Rikieta and LegalBytes should not be so allowed, is on a scorched earth campaign to make them toxic to advertisers.
And of course she’s also up to her old tricks of claiming she reached out to her subjects — I mean, targets and victims — for comment.
Spoiler alert: She did not reach out to her targets and victims for comment.
Gordon decided to take a strategic approach to make the Virginia GOP a party that could attract serious, intelligent, capable candidates, run them, and win. He founded The Virginia Project (TVP) with the mission to create a 21st-century party infrastructure capable of competing effectively and rolling back Democrat Party influence.
Once Gordon realized that Republicans failed to field candidates in 25% of races with a Democrat incumbent in 2019, he made running a candidate in every race a mission point. Other objectives of TVP included taking a complete accounting of GOP performance in every election district and providing a baseline level of support for every GOP candidate in the state. The group also wanted to share tools and best practices to optimize branding, marketing, messaging, voter outreach, and mobilization throughout the state. The goal was to disrupt the Democrats’ narratives and force them to play defense.
After the 2020 election, Gordon realized that to put Democrats on their heels, TVP would have to go on offense. There was no way to verify the vote in Virginia after nearly 60% of Virginians voted early or by mail. The window for challenging congressional elections closed in 25 days. There was no point in fielding candidates across the state without shoring up election integrity. So with the help of Ned Jones, Gordon and TVP set about securing Virginia’s elections.
The group forced the implementation of voter roll management laws already on the books. TVP ensured the process was logged, transparent, and consistent in every Virginia county and removed a half million bad entries from the voter rolls statewide. Then TVP made sure a system was in place for 2021 that had what Gordon refers to as “Eyes on Every Ballot.”
Challenging elections after the fact proved fruitless at the state and national levels in 2020. The key would be to challenge violations on the spot rather than post facto. TVP prepared and delivered training for election observers. The Virginia GOP went from 33% to 95% observer coverage. Gordon said, “The worse Biden gets, the more people volunteer. A good look in some of the disputed states in 2020 also motivated people to get involved.”
The success in recruitment and training allowed the GOP to challenge every suspected violation on election night 2021. As a Twitter thread from TVP noted, “[DNC lawyer Marc] Elias’ now-legendary losing streak started with us stopping him. We fought for and won every legal stipulation needed to enforce our rights.”
President Biden unveiled new sanctions Thursday targeting influential Russians and President Vladimir Putin’s yachts on the 99th day of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine — but two oligarchs linked to his son Hunter Biden again were spared.
The slow rollout of sanctions comes despite the president threatening “swift and severe” penalties ahead of the invasion, which began Feb. 24.
New US-targeted individuals include the steel and gold-mining oligarch Alexey Mordashov, Putin-linked money manager Sergei Roldugin, billionaire property developer God Nisanov, electronics executive Evgeny Novitsky, banker Sergey Gorkov and Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. The Treasury Department also sanctioned two yachts that Putin allegedly co-owns and the Monaco-based yacht brokerage Imperial Yachts and its Russian CEO, Evgeniy Kochman.
It remains unclear why Hunter Biden’s alleged Russian business associates — the billionaire oligarchs Yelena Baturina and Vladimir Yevtushenko — eluded the latest round of US sanctions against members of Russia’s business elite.
It’s a great mystery.
Baturina, whose wealth derives largely from construction, in 2014 paid a firm associated with Hunter Biden $3.5 million, according to a 2020 report written by Republican-led Senate committees. She is the widow of former Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov, and documents from Hunter Biden’s laptop indicate she may have attended a 2015 dinner in DC with then-Vice President Joe Biden.
Yevtushenkov, who owns a nearly 50% stake in Russian conglomerate Sistema — which has telecom, retail, banking, food and health interests — faces UK sanctions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but hasn’t yet been targeted by the Biden administration. He met with Hunter Biden in 2012 at Moscow’s Ritz-Carlton hotel, but recently claimed they had no subsequent contact.
Before the war, [Sgt. 1st Class Chris] Freymann, a cavalry scout in the Washington state National Guard, had been the lead instructor in the U.S. military’s program that trained soldiers in Ukraine how to use the shoulder-fired tank-killing missiles. He trained about 200 Ukrainian troops during his months with the program.
Russia launched its invasion in February, after U.S. trainers left. But the relationships Freymann made remained. His former students — now troops fighting on the front lines — again reached out for help on operating the Javelins as they encountered technical issues or forgot details.
“When the war started, I had a lot of guys hitting me up on WhatsApp,” Freymann told Military.com. “One of our linguists, her husband was one of the few soldiers who were left. A lot of the students trained by the other [Guard units] died.”
Freymann would relay information on operating the Javelin to the linguist. Her husband, who was in the fight, would then send Freymann photos and videos of destroyed Russian tanks. Freymann says at least four tanks were destroyed after some of his over-the-phone coaching.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Americans are abandoning high tax states (New York, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey) and moving to low tax states (Florida, Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, Tennessee). (Hat tip:Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Catastrophic failure at an aluminum extrusion line. Looks like an overpressure event and the oil itself (over a drop ceiling no less) open a portal to a demon dimension… pic.twitter.com/VQeM0f85Mw
Not news: Real estate owners in New York City jacking up rates. News: Jacking up New York real estate. Namely jacking a landmark Broadway theater up 30 feet to put retail space underneath it.
It’s tough to be a pimp young worker in today’s China. In addition to being repressed by the communist government, they’re unable to afford cars or houses, and many can’t even find jobs. As a result, some have turned to the philosophy of bai lan, or “Let it rot.” They’re just giving up on working or caring anymore and openly embracing loserdom.
Naturally, the CCP is not pleased. Commies have never been tolerant of “parasitism” getting in the way of their political goals.
A few takeaways:
The unemployment rate for those 16-24 is 18.2%. “The highest rate since official figures began.”
Even graduates of prestigious Peking University were competing for entry level bureaucratic jobs.
The repeat Flu Manchu lockdowns were the last straw for many. “What is the point of working hard when you can lose your basic rights as a human being, when your home can be broken into and when your private items can be thrown away at will? Chinese people once thought that if they worked hard and followed the rules they could have a good future but that seems to be an illusion.” Yeah, totalitarian Communist states are funny that way…
Unspoken is just how these young working-age Chinese who have given up manage to afford food and shelter, but I’m just assuming they’re following the time-honored tradition of sponging of their parents. What are they going to do, kick out their only heir?
The problem with reports like this is that it’s hard for those of us outside China to determine just how widespread this phenomena is. Is it “Hey, all the young kids are listening to Mel Torme” or “Hey, all the young kids are listening to Nirvana”? It sucks to be young with dim prospects during a recession, and it sucks a lot worse to be under the heel of a communist dictatorship. Combining those isn’t a recipe for happiness.
Hey Chinese bai lan sufferers: Have you considered launching a revolution against the communist government instead? That would give you lots of excitement and fill your life with purpose! It may shorten it as well, but I suspect it beats lying around waiting to die…
Fed-up San Francisco voters ousted their progressive district attorney on Tuesday in a recall election that rejected his soft-on-crime policies following surges in shameless shoplifting, car break-ins and rampant, open-air drug dealing.
The recall effort against Chesa Boudin, a former public defender and the son of convicted Weather Underground terrorists, was supported by 61% of voters in early returns, according to NBC.
Tuesday’s recall election, Proposition H on the ballot, could prove a bellwether of voter sentiment across the US, including in New York City, where Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has faced widespread criticism since enacting a slew of progressive policies after taking office in January.
“Around the country, we have seen the rise of the so-called progressive DAs,” Richie Greenberg, a former Republican mayoral candidate and spokesman for the recall effort, told The Post before Tuesday’s vote.
“We here in San Francisco have lived it and we don’t want to see the great city of New York fall in the way that San Francisco has.”
Snip.
Viral videos have revealed shoplifters running rampant during smash-and-grab thefts at high-end stores, with city police Lt. Tracy McCray lamenting to Fox News last year that “we can have a greatest hits compilation of people just walking in and cleaning out the store shelves.”
Offenses against Asian-Americans also proliferated amid the pandemic, with lifelong resident Henry Wong, 74, who worked for the late comedian Robing Williams saying that people “spit on me on elevators, on the streets” and calling Boudin “the worst district attorney the city has ever had.”
“These are crimes,” Wong told the Washington Post.
“And he doesn’t care. It’s just so easy to break the law.”
The latest official police statistics show that overall crime in the city is up nearly 8 percent this year, with a 20 percent surge in larcenies, as well as spikes in homicides, rapes and assaults.
Boudin was just one of 75 George Soros-backed prosecutors elected around the country. (Here’s a list to get started on.) Here’s a partial list of Soros fronts:
Open Society Foundation
The Tides Center
The Tides Foundation
Tides Advocacy
Alliance for Safety and Justice
The Brennan Center for Justice (“Brennan also employs the public relations firm Berlin Rosen, which also happens to be the largest expenditure item for nearly all Soros DA campaign spending.”)
Color of Change
Equal Justice Initiative
Fair and Just Prosecution
Justice and Public Safety PAC (and various subsidiary state organizations)
NEO Philanthropy Fund
New Virginia Majority
The New Venture Fund
The Sixteen Thirty Fund
Texas Organizing Project
Vera Institute for Justice
I’m betting there are others.
Bouncing Boudin is an excellent start, but all Soros prosecutors need to be recalled, defeated, or indicted. Crime cannot improve as long as racist Soros-backed prosecutors refuse to indict, try or convict criminals due to the color of their skin.
In The Before-Time, The Long Long Ago, prior to The Great Dot Com Bubble Bust, newspapers (remember those?) were filled with reports of day-traders, ordinary people who quit their day jobs to trade stocks. And what do you know! A whole bunch of them made money doing that! They must have been geniuses!
Few paused to test an alternative theory: They just happened to be riding the tail end of one of the greatest stock bubbles in history. It’s easy to pick stock market winners when there are lots of winners around.
Then the bust hit, and a whole lot of geniuses turned out to not be so smart after all, especially those who had backed such companies as Flooz and WorldCom.
Thanks in large measure to the SUPERgenius economic management of the Biden Administration, the world is now exiting an era of historically cheap money and entering a period of rising interest rates. A whole lot of business models that seemed to make sense during an era of cheap credit are going to look as retroactively foolish as Pets.com.
Vice will be mounting a new round of cost-cutting to try to stretch out its solvency while it searches for some sucker to buy it.
Vice does not make money. It will never make money. It just wants a series of Sugar Daddies willing to pump money into it forever to keep its overpaid, underperforming staff paid.
Snip.
The article says that they can only estimate what Vice is worth. They guess it’s worth, maybe, “at least one billion.” (And they owe $1.1 billion in debt?)
It was valued at $5.7 billion just a few years ago.
Ace of Spades also posted this Ryan Long video that I’m absolutely stealing:
As for the next media outlets to close, well, I’ve got to think any Bulwarkesque outlets whose entire raison d’être is subsidized Trump-hating is going to look like a luxury good during the Biden Recession.
High debt, high inflation and high interest rates are all recipes for disaster. And as those pools of liquidity dry up as cheap capital recedes, all the stranded starfish that so briefly thrived will find that they have no place to hide in the Biden Recession.
78 years ago today, some 175,000 American, British and Canadian troops were either being dropped behind enemy lines or coming ashore under enemy fire at Gold, Juno, Sword, Omaha and Utah beaches.
Here’s some footage of D-Day:
There are still D-Day veterans alive today, but soon the war will pass out of living memory.
Information coming out of the Russo-Ukrainian War can be hard to verify, especially given how untrustworthy the mainstream media have made themselves. But Ukraine seems to have launched a successful counterattack in the key city of Severodonetsk.
Russia is “suffering huge losses” and losing hard-fought ground in the Ukrainian city of Severodonetsk after invading units started retreating from the key industrial center, Ukrainian officials asserted Saturday.
The dramatic turnabout, which could not be independently confirmed, represented a rare successful counter-offensive against Russian forces, which had recently been steadily advancing in Ukraine’s eastern territories.
It was the first time Ukraine claimed to have conducted a large counter-attack in Severodonetsk, a city of 100,000 and the last major municipality in the disputed Luhansk oblast under Ukrainian control, after days of losing ground in the country’s embattled east.
Russia had “previously managed to capture most of the city,” Sergiy Haidai, the governor of the Luhansk region said in a televised address Saturday, The Guardian reported. “But now our military has pushed them back.”
Later Saturday, Oleksandr Stryuk, the head of the city’s military operations, said that Ukrainian forces were able to build a line of defense in Severodonetsk, according to The Kyiv Independent.
Both sides of the war have claimed to have inflicted huge casualties in the fighting for the city — a battlefront that military experts believe could determine which of the two countries has the momentum for a prolonged war of attrition in coming months.
A more detailed annotated map from Random Guy On Twitter (grains of salt apply):
SEVERODONETSK / 2245 UTC 04 JUN/ UKR forces continue to consolidate holdings and advance. Present line of contact reported to be the E side of the park area paralleling Centralny Prospect. With Ukrainian forces in the ascendant, RU morale is now a factor. pic.twitter.com/cBmov2De6z
There’s some talk on Twitter of Ukrainian forces luring Russia into a trap and using the high ground in Luhansk to rain artillery on Russian positions:
Ukrainian positions in Lysychans'k are raining precision artillery fire on Severodonetsk Russian positions. The high ground of Lysychans'k proves to be very helpful for supporting fire.
Here’s Denys Davydov, AKA Ukrainian Map Guy, on the action (usual caveats and grains of salt apply):
When faced with the task of taking large hostile cities, Russian doctrine has been to bomb them flat with artillery first. Historically, urban warfare has not been a source of happiness for the Russian military. They got torn up badly in Grozny, and seem to have forgotten all the painful lessons learned there.
Russia may have a hefty supply of old tanks, but it’s supply of competent ground forces absent a general mobilization (which Putin has thus far refused to authorize) is quite finite. Russia has even resorted to forced mobilization of troops in the area it occupies, a desperation tactic likely to make things worse for an army that already suffers from low morale.
The Ukrainian government and military are furthermore discussing the battle of Severodonetsk in increasingly confident terms and are likely successfully blunting the Russian military’s major commitment of reserves to the grinding battle for the city. While Russian forces may still be able to capture Severodonetsk and Lysychansk and Ukrainian forces are likely more degraded than Haidai’s statements imply, Ukrainian defenses remain strong in this pivotal theater. The Russian military has concentrated all of its available resources on this single battle to make only modest gains. The Ukrainian military contrarily retains the flexibility and confidence to not only conduct localized counterattacks elsewhere in Ukraine (such as north of Kherson) but conduct effective counterattacks into the teeth of Russian assaults in Severodonetsk that reportedly retook 20% of the city in the last 24 hours. The Ukrainian government’s confidence in directly stating its forces can hold Severodonetsk for more than two weeks and willingness to conduct local counterattacks, rather than strictly remaining on the defensive, is a marked shift from Ukrainian statements as recently as May 28 that Ukrainian forces might withdraw from Severodonetsk to avoid encirclement.
The fog of war and the paucity of competent in-theater reporting makes things hard to analyze, but at this point in time, it appears that Ukraine is winning the Battle of Severodonetsk.
According to a growing number of reports, the soaring costs of food, gas, and housing are causing a spike in the number of family pets being abandoned or surrendered to shelters.
In January 2022, the first alarming animal shelter statistics began to emerge. While an average of 6.2 million animals are taken into shelters each year, only about 3.2 million find a home. The other three million are euthanized.
In March 2022, shelters in Cedar City, Utah, noted a dramatic increase in the number of phone messages being left by desperate pet owners who needed to surrender their pets, receiving as many as 30 calls from mid-January through February. Shelter administrators and staff said the number of strays and the number of pets being surrendered voluntarily are on par with the number of phone calls.
In April, shelters across Utah were reporting that millions of pets adopted during the outbreak of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus (commonly known as the novel coronavirus) of 2020 were being surrendered again as the high cost of living and the return to in-person working was making it impossible for pet owners to continue to care for their animals.
In May, Orange County Animal Services in Orlando, Florida, reported a 37 percent increase in the number of surrendered pets compared to the same time in 2021. Officials say the increase in housing costs in the area is the primary reason why people are being forced to surrender their pets. In Hernando County, Florida, shelter administrators are seeing a similar spike in the number of family pets being surrendered or simply abandoned on the streets.
This is not to be confused with people adopting pets to keep them entertained during the Flu Manchu lockdowns, only to abandon them once the lockdowns were lifted, a phenomena that experts refer to as You’re A Horrible Human Being.
I highly recommend getting a dog, as they make great companions.
I’m a dog guy, but feel free to adopt cats as well, if that’s your thing.
Austin-area groups I’ve successfully adopted dogs from:
