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You can buy a house for cheap when a fire is threatening it, and hope to put out the fire before it gets destroyed. That's how you can profit from a fire.
But if it's just buying the ashes, that's not actually a good investment strategy. The price has dropped because the thing truly did become less valuable.
Too many people can't seem to see the difference between the first category and the second.
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His own class is going to betray him because he is the dumbest motherfucker alive.
The billionaires will regret giving him power, because they're subtly giving up their own levers of influence over him.
When you could buy a politician or an election, you held some sway over those politicians in those seats. When you pay lobbyists who will do the work of writing specific regulations that help you, and then have them try to get those regulations actually enacted, you had influence over how the government could wield power over you.
But the Trump movement has been about consolidation of power in one man, who doesn't feel constrained by laws, or by other politicians. The billionaires are down to a single tool: trying to pay off one man, who doesn't keep his word.
The question becomes, at what point does it go from money buying power, versus power buying money? It's a subtle distinction, but an important one for those who currently have money and who want to derive power from that.
Trump and Elon want to make it so that they can singlehandedly destroy any business that doesn't bend the knee. At the same time, they want to be able to shape the rules in an arbitrary way to only help those they like, and hurt those they don't. They're not quite there yet, and I'd say that the rich still have some power independent of the government. But the plan for those in charge is to consolidate power as quickly as they can, to where that's no longer true.
There's a substantial chance that this goes down the same way that scene in The Dark Knight Rises, where the financial backers who enabled Bane's movement insist that they should still have influence over that movement, once it takes power.
Or if you actually want a historical parallel, the oligarchs who funded the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party, only to find themselves in concentration camps themselves.
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You heard the man, fire any employee and expel any student who participated in the January 6 insurrection.
The CEO who implemented it also was the guy who basically created the Apple Store, and thought that the very successful approach for Apple would translate into a more premium experience for a mid level clothing retailer. Important lessons were learned about how consumer behavior may differ between different items, even if the consumers are largely the same people.
Property costs money to maintain. And it can only earn as much as someone is willing to pay for it, so if everyone's poor they won't pay enough rent to make up for the holding cost.
But they might be able to hope for the selling price in the future to be worth a lot, right? Unless it looks like they have to lock up their money in that investment, doing nothing, for a decade or more while other investments (stocks, bonds, etc.) do much better.
Investing in real estate is tricky, especially at scale. A mistake can cost a huge percentage of the investment, if not wiping out the investment on specific properties.
Or the economy crashes to the point where prices drop and the fed lowers interest rates to try to stimulate the economy, but the economy is so bad that you don't have a job to be able to qualify for a loan.
I think you're missing the point of this criticism.
People buy stuff, and then they use it. If they don't use less, they won't buy less, even if there's a specific day where they choose not to buy anything. That day's avoided purchases just get moved to another day, and the seller doesn't feel any effect.
A real boycott takes money that would've been spent on a specific seller and takes it away forever. It's a shift in purchase behavior to a competitor, or a shift in consumption behavior to not need to purchase that thing anymore.
As an extreme example, someone who boycotts Tesla every day for 5 years but still buys a Tesla once every 5 years is not effectively boycotting Tesla, even if that boycott covers 1825 days in a row.
Same with people who normally grocery shop on Friday, who shift their purchases to Saturday.
I would advocate for boycotting specific companies instead, and steering that money you would've spent to someone else (even a charity, so as to reduce one's own consumption). The boycotts need to shift recipients of the money, not dates of when that money changes hands.
This article compiles some information, but I know a lot of lawyers are currently going through the work of citing specific provisions and putting out guides to people's rights.
To clear up some of what you're saying, it sounds like you're applying private sector rules to government jobs.
Government probationary jobs have fewer protections than non-probationary, but they still have way more protections than the private sector. Once they make it past probation, government employees can only be fired after 30 days notice and an opportunity to challenge the firing in writing, so it takes a while to lay the groundwork for firing an employee. And then a fired employee has appeal rights.
While on probation, government employees don't have the right to notice before firing, or an opportunity to challenge the firing before it happens, and their appeal rights are seriously limited. But the law is that they still can't be fired except for poor performance.
Does anyone have the picture of these guys that was shared on X, the one that Elon Musk was proudly replying to?
...starting in a future year, right?
In another thread I was laughing about how U.S. utilities charge for electricity by the kilowatt hour, but charge for piped natural gas by the "therm," which is 100,000 BTUs. BTUs are the energy required to raise 1 pound of water by 1 degree Fahrenheit, like a shitty imperial calorie.
Confusingly, most gas appliances are marketed as being a certain number of BTUs per hour, but people often omit the implied "per hour" when talking about them, and will talk of their 12,000 BTU stove burner or 30,000 BTU water heater.
Talking through residential energy use without having a solid command of what unit means what would be confusing.
In the U.S., they meter gas by the "therm," which is defined as 100,000 BTUs. It's a misconception that it's equal to 100 cubic feet of natural gas at standard temperature and pressure, and is merely a coincidence that those values are very close.
BTUs are like a shitty imperial calorie, the energy it takes to heat up one pound of water by one degree fahrenheit.
Also, don't confuse therms for thermies, a totally different unit that means the amount of energy required to heat up a tonne (1000 kg) (not to be confused with the imperial ton that is 2000 pounds) of water by 1°C.
Energy is so useful in so many different contexts that we can just always expect a million ways to express it.
It's pretty common to use acre inches and acre foot as a unit of volume for measuring water in agriculture, water use, flood mitigation, etc.
So if we can use area height as a volumetric unit, by not volume/area as a height unit?
Unless you're converting seconds to minutes, hours, days, years, etc.
Then you get things like watt hours. Or light years.
Cultural appropriation is a broad enough term to functionally be meaningless, but I've found it helpful to think through 4 distinct interests at play, that I think are legitimate:
Proper attribution/credit. We don't like plagiarism or unattributed copying in most art. Remixes, homages, reinterpretations, and even satire/parody are acceptable but we expect proper treatment of the original author and the original work. Some accusations of cultural appropriation take on this flavor, where there's a perceived unfairness in how the originator of an idea is ignored and some copier is given credit. For a real world example of this, think of the times the fans of a particular musical artist get annoyed when a cover of one of that artist's song becomes bigger than the original.
Proper labeling/consumer disclosure/trademark. Some people don't like taking an established name and applying it outside of that original context. European nations can be pretty aggressive at preserving the names of certain wines (champagne versus sparkling wine) or cheeses (parmigiano reggiano versus parmesan) or other products. American producers are less aggressive about those types of geographic protected labels but have a much more aggressive system of trademarks generally: Coca Cola, Nike, Starbucks. In a sense, there's literal ownership of a name and the owner should be entitled to decide what does or doesn't get the label.
Cheapening of something special or disrespect for something sacred. For certain types of ceremonial clothing, wearing that clothing outside of the context of that ceremony seems disrespectful. Military types sometimes get offended by stolen valor when people wear ranks/ribbons/uniforms they haven't personally earned, and want to gatekeep who gets to wear those things. In Wedding Crashers there's a scene where Will Ferrell puts on a fake purple heart to try to get laid, and it's widely understood by the audience to be a scummy move. Or, one could imagine the backlash if someone were to host some kind of drinking contest styled after some Christian communion rituals, complete with a host wearing stuff that looks like clergy attire.
Mockery of a group. Blackface, fake accents, and things of that nature are often in bad taste when used to mock people. It's hard to pull this off without a lot of people catching strays, so it's best to just avoid these practices. With costumes in general, there are things to look out for, especially if you're going out and getting smashed.
In static electric fields, sure. But the real world has rapidly changing electric fields, and mapping concepts like voltage or resistance to a time dimension starts to require imaginary numbers (and the complex analogue to resistance goes by a different name of impedance). And once you're modeling electricity through those concepts, you can have high current in a particular moment in time where the voltage might not be high. Or where the implied voltage is very high but was actually more of an effect than a cause.
In other words, if you're simply talking about "resistance," you're already in the wrong domain to be analyzing electrical safety properly.
Voltage and current are related, of course, but Ohm's law is just a simplification of circuit theory for static circuits, and the version most are taught early on assume zero inductance and zero capacitance in the circuit. Drop in an alternating current, some capacitors and inductors, and you've got yourself a more complex situation, literally, with the scalar real number representing resistance replaced with the complex number representing impedance.
And when you have time variance that isn't a simple sinusoidal wave of electric potential coming from a source, even the definition of the word "voltage" starts requiring vector calculus to even be a coherent definition.
So when I take a simple battery of DC cells to create a low voltage power source, I can still induce current using some transformers and inductors (which store energy in magnetic field) and abruptly breaking open the circuit so that the current still arcs across high resistance air. That's the basic principle of how a spark plug works. In those cases, you're creating immense voltages for a tiny amount of time, but there's never any real risk of significant current being pushed through any part of a person's body. And as soon as you draw off some of the current, the voltage immediately drops as you deplete the stored energy wherever it is in the system.
And anything designed to deliver an electric shock to a person (or animal) tends to be high voltage, low current. Tasers, electric fences, etc.
So it's current that matters for safety. A high voltage doesn't always induce a high current. And current can cause problems even at relatively low voltages.
The mass exodus from the Facebook platform has already happened. The others are in progress.
This is a misleading stat, because veterans skew heavily male and old (since Boomers were drafted for Vietnam).
In 2023, Pew published a profile of veteran demographics.
Polls that have broken up veterans by generation show a clear generational divide as well. This poll from 2020 showed that veterans under the age of 54, and veterans who joined the military after 2001, backed Biden over Trump.
Among veterans young enough to still be working, we'd need more detailed cross tabs to understand whether a majority of employed veterans, much less government employee veterans, voted Trump.
So for the individuals who did vote Trump, yes, this post fits. But for the group as a whole, of veterans who work in the government, I'm skeptical that they voted Trump over Harris.