Private Equity and the US Housing Market, Khodorkovsky Urges Armed Rebellion in Moscow, Rust Belt on the Rhine, Rogue Nerds, Asian Sailors in 1587 California
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I know, I know....I haven't been around. I apologize, but sometimes real life interferes with the online one.
I haven’t been able to stomach fiction in over a decade, longer.
Now I can.
Pasfeuro could be your fantasy alter ego, instead of Soldo lol.
French ROGUE Journalist afoot in Algerian War, loving and hating the Paratroopers at the same time, with a bloodline any Balkan Smuggler would kill for;
“At the end of the war Pasfeuro had been authorized by a court decision to assume the strange name he had thought out for himself, while serving with the maquis in Savoy, to the exclusion of all his others: Herbert de Mortfault de Puysaignac de Cortelier, Marquis of This and Count of That, all perfectly authentic titles earned in a succession of royal beds.
>When the daughter of the family wouldn’t do, the son was sent in her place. No inhibitions or complexes in that clan—if they failed by the front entrance, they succeeded by the rear! <
And their success had been brilliant, as all the history books showed. They had played the same game with the Empire and the Republic, with the Jewish bankers and American big business. During the occupation they had carried on in the same way with the Germans. But they did not sleep with any old German, never anyone below the rank of general; so no one had worried about it. Pasfeuro sometimes wondered who on earth his father might be. Certainly not the old marquis, whose tastes were exclusively unnatural. Perhaps the plumber who happened to call that day. Ever since the Crusades his family had been easy-going in that respect. But what the hell did he care? He was now plain Pasfeuro, a reporter on the Quotidien, who earned 150,000 francs a month, plus the fiddles on his expense account.”
When you get banned by the GPDR, consider a new name du plume... Pasfeuro -
Jul 23, 2023·edited Jul 23, 2023Liked by Niccolo Soldo
'When the daughter of the family wouldn’t do, the son was sent in her place. No inhibitions or complexes in that clan—if they failed by the front entrance, they succeeded by the rear!'
I will take exception to the assertion that large REITS are the cause of high real estate prices. I would say rents started surging in the 80s when women began to move into job competition with men. Not only did this stall wage growth but because they would not marry as early they began to compete with men for living space too. This dynamic has only increased in the following decades. Also, much higher divorce rates even when they do marry meaning more individuals competing for property.
Next, whites are being corralled into smaller areas with the browning of the overall population. As I've said here before, in super liberal Washington DC a similar house in vibrant SE quadrant is half the price as the same style and size in Upper Causcasia, NW quadrant. Same distance to the Federal Triangle. So, affirmative action blacks are getting a big discount.
The citing of Americans for Financial Reform is a tell. If you go to their website this greets you:
STATEMENT
We affirm that Black Lives Matter and that anti-Black racism is unacceptable and must be eliminated,
In Wash DC, the differentials of the SE versus NW quadrants of the city have been that way for over a half century. There is a not so hidden cost to living in SE though; a very good friend, a former Peace Corps worker and her spouse whom she met in the PC, experienced a horrific home invasion in her SE townhouse. She was brutally raped by three black men and her husband tied down and made to watch....perhaps the premium of living in the NW quadrant is an insurance policy of sorts?
That's a curious but revealing description. When I, being a white guy, think of insurance I equate it with protection against natural disasters like floods or hurricanes. Applied to blacks, it's breaking and entering and raping a woman in front of her husband. It could be that your friend didn't provide the perps with enough resistance via locks, dogs, fire power, neighborhood watch, etc. Like how guns just go off all on their own around black people so we've got to ban guns for everybody. This kind of thinking reminds me of the vast chasm between blacks and normal sane people
In his case he just wants some Chinese volunteers to "take out" Xi. It seems as if the recent tendency of society to view things in absolute terms, just black and white is making these kinds of proposals look normal.
True, but he has written some very good books. THE ENDANGERED AMERICAN DREAM back in the early 90s was truly prophetic. The people who disregarded Luttwak then are scrambling for answers now.
Globalisation involves a race to the bottom and the formerly privileged position of Deutchestan was tolerated for the sake of the Cold War. There is no more need for sentiment.
Home ownership provides stability to society. If people don't have skin in the game then they (as in San Francisco) they vote for crazy policies. Where I live now, someone making $15/hr (going rate for entry level retail jobs) could afford a median home. This was before inflation hit.
Some do, but I've looked at studies of precinct maps showing ownership percentages. Those with higher ownership percentages vote for more sensible policies. Of course, in San Francisco, London Breed, the current mayor, is considered by many to be moderate to conservative! In truth, she's just another machine politician pushing progressive policies that have ruined the City.
Jul 22, 2023·edited Jul 22, 2023Liked by Niccolo Soldo
I can't resist calling out "By halting deliveries of natural gas to Germany, the Kremlin etc": the Kremlin did no such thing. Europe did it to itself. Most readers of this blog probably know that and furthermore it is a citation but it is still annoying.
Europe is a cuckold, America is unfaithful to her in pursuit of the destruction of Russia. America forces her into self harm with piffle about justice and the international order. What stupidity by Europe’s leaders, the last 30 years have demonstrated the bipartisan lawlessness of America: the Middle East for instance.
Professor Deneen of the Post Liberal Order substack calls it the “political Gnosticism of the liberal imperium”, I call it delusional. How did deindustrialization work in America: societal collapse, nothing less.
Jul 22, 2023·edited Jul 22, 2023Liked by Niccolo Soldo
Boldness is fundamental to any progress or anything good ever happening, from founding a state to speaking to a particular young woman for the first time. Typically entrepreneurs risk money, not life and limb, but even that is beyond the comprehension of the average man and of almost all women. Some do go even farther, and put their lives on the roulette wheel. A wealthy man who gambles his life on a dangerous venture will not wait until every possible safety measure is in place, and the project is entirely de-risked. He is cut from different cloth. Time and life are short, and some risk is inevitable. Often these people have personality quirks and defects, and their benefactions to humanity are overlooked in moralistic indignation at the comparatively trivial detail, their disregard for courteous norms. What irks many people is that the person willing to take risks to do big, new, frontier-challenging things is a standing affront to their own lives of safety-seeking and timidity. The middling, nameless mass of risk-averse normals feel, with justice, condemned for their mediocrity by the mere existence of such people. But their safe existence is built on a foundation laid by bold and rule-breaking men, mostly men, in the past. A society that jeers at the death of a risk-taker is not healthy. One of countess such signs.
That doesn’t even make any sense. The reason you try to make something with different materials that cost less and so that you can expand the use of the innovation. Exploring the seabed, developing it, mining in the deep oceans is one of the major undertakings for the decades ahead. 90 dives, 13 to great depths. I don’t know how many of those were with the submersible with the novel materials. But people do not risk their lives to save money. They risk their lives because they believe that the materials would work, or that the odds favored them working. As to finding engineers who were naysayers, that’s inevitable. You can always find someone with credentials who will give reasons not to take a risk, or criticize somebody after the fact. In every major lawsuit there are experts on either side with lovely credentials, who fly in from out of town with their briefcases, and their PhD‘s, and they say the opposite things from each other. No one here is hero worshiping someone because he’s a billionaire. There’s no hero worship involved. The man made a bet and he lost and he died. But fetishizing so-called “expertise” fails to understand how insubstantial most purported expertise really is. Don’t just trust it because someone has a doctorate or a platform to speak from, you have to look deeper than that. In the general principle remains, all major advances in life require going beyond what ordinary people consider safe, or normal, or acceptable. Significant risk is required to expand the envelope of human knowledge and human capabilities. That’s the historical record, there are sound reasons why it’s always that way, and it’s always going to be that way.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
Re housing: Skin the the game. We should all want that, if we care about maintaining our society as we currently know it. I’ll be caught dead before being considered a social engineer, but, without going full Supreme Soviet, I wholly support getting housing ownership to as many people who want it as possible. Just as I believe employee-owned companies are, on balance, better run.
I suspect no one has a good answer to the increasing unaffordability of real estate, but you do not make your system more stable by placing more people on the “other” team. I’ve been on both sides of the wealth divide, and was a good team player in each circumstance, so while I have no appetite for social upheaval now, on this issue I completely understand younger people’s anger.
I feel like there is an added element of social engineering at play here. Due to the fact that we now have generations of people who have been fully removed from rural areas and cannot possibly comprehend returning there or even to the smaller towns and cities (lure of jobs and other urban crap), you also have a an impossible job to balance out availability of space with the number of people. I live in Amsterdam and the average 3-bed house is well over half a million, which means you’re in for a million EUR mortgage if you even can afford to kick it off.
I like the notion that you can’t be a conservative without something to conserve and yes, young people have been utterly fucked by the generation of their parents who, through some karma at least, now have a bunch of 30-somethings still living with them.
I have the suspicion that things reached a tipping point when, for the first time, more of the earth's population lived in cities than the country. Happened about 9 years ago.
Individual home ownership is precisely the problem, since people use their democratic rights to vote for NIMBY laws that restrict supply and inflate theie non-diversified real estate holding. If most housing was instead owned by corporations, people would vote for increased supply so that their rent stabilizes and increases only at the rate of inflation.
People should be incentived to own diversified index funds and build wealth that way.
In USSR people didn't own their houses and the absence of market created tremendous problem. The only solution to housing is to deregulate and allow more houses to be built. This immediately will crush companies like Blackrock. If you start limiting rent growth you will get into problems like in Germany now where people can't find houses to rent and literally stay in lines for any available offering.
Bullshit. NIMBY laws are the essence of civilization in action and a crucial vestige of sanity and decency in an otherwise depraved and unstable polity.
Real estate values in the US are set by monetary policy and global capital flows. These forces are supplemented by local and or regional factors such as the ethnic cleansing of whites from key zones, the chronic mismanagement of public schools and endless games over the supply of available land.
Gangsters like Blackrock cannot be controlled through democratic means. Voting decides nothing...as we can see from the fraudulent election of 2020.
As for wealth...forget it. You need sustainable growth, sound currency and courts that uphold the rights of politically insignificant parties (in contrast with SCOTUS in Kelo v. the City of New London).
🗨 hundreds of thousands of people appeared to be… celebrating the disaster. *Why*, I wondered.[...] Two of the adventurers were very rich, it turns out, and therefore not quite human. Other. “Part of the problem.” *They deserved to die*.
🗨 The quality that drives so small a subset of the global population to extreme risk is the quality responsible for many, if not most, of the most important things we have ever built or discovered. That’s what makes us great. We are nothing without risk.
🗨 Anyone sufficiently committed to misery can find some element of the Titan voyage to condemn, or to mock.[...] But these men also lived. How many of us can say the same?
And wrt Harry Houdini:
🗨 Why did he do it? Because it could be done, and now here was his gift to the world: proof. We are capable of anything. *You are capable of anything*. You’re welcome.
Re: Housing and Private Equity/Institutional Investors.
This might be "news", but it's nothing new. Even before the 2008 sub-prime mortgage bubble burst, PE/II had targeted, and was actively buying-up, single- and multi-family dwellings here in South Florida. Not long after, once bank-owned foreclosures became widespread, PE/II began snapping-them-up in a feeding frenzy reminiscent of the sharks that flocked to the survivors of the sinking WWII battleship USS Indianapolis. It didn't take long for the banks to see those foreclosures as assets, rather than liabilities. Our condo association [mine, a bank-owned repo, bought in early-2012] had to amend the Bylaws to forbid a PE/II from owning more than three units. Since then, it's only gotten worse... a week doesn't go by, that I don't find a slickly-printed postcard in my mailbox from an equally-slick PE/II, offering to buy my unit. A related phenomenon [once rare] is that of "home title fraud", in which an owner's property title is usurped via identity theft, then sold [through a multi-step, "arms-length" process] to a PE/II and the "real" owner dispossessed.
How do the fraudulent sales cases get resolved? The courts would surely uphold the rights of the true owners, but I expect that the PE/II use the legal processes to stuff everyone around.
I've always had a soft spot in my heart for the Morgenthau Plan, and I'm glad to see it finally being put into place, 75 years after its inception. Better late than never!
Germany has strapped itself into a euthanasia machine and will die softly and slowly, as an example to the rest of the West as to how best to atone for the sins of our ancestors. All the wisest and most moral Europeans know that the path to redemption ends with you eagerly laying your head down on the chopping block.
Germans have always been on the cutting edge of self-destruction.
I suspect that FDR may possibly have intended to use the Morgenthau Plan for payback against the German friends/partners of the US industrialists behind the Business Plot of 1933. Instead, after FDR's death the US pardoned all the IG Farben crowd in the dock at Nuremberg. Much remains to be revealed.
Philip part of Morgenthau plan is pacifying an enraged Morgenthau who’d bought him evidence of the Holocaust and FDR didn’t make the mistake of making this a war to save or avenge the Jews. Instead he adopted unconditional surrender (which he might have anyway) and the Morgenthau plan.
FDR hated Germany himself for the fate of his idol Wilson. Not to mention any deal with Hitler was reliably going to be broken, and FDRs policy from the Fall of France in 1940 is “This time we’re not leaving.”
As you know, gov't planning is always like an iceberg: you only get to see the tip. I expect that the archives would contain draft material on Morgenthau, Bretton Woods, the UN etc that would blow our minds no matter how cynical we are. To put in context, during WW1 French diplomats were in favour of breaking up Germany into its principal constituent monarchies...kind of reminiscent of Iraq.
Whatever else it was, the war was certainly not fought on behalf of Jews. Have always found it odd that the accusations of Dr Goebbels about Roosevelt have been taken at face value and repeated endlessly by people who should know better. The entry of the US into the war was about ensuring that the US replaced the UK and secure the chance of restructuring the global economy. Still, the mythmakers have their interests to camouflage and sentimental and uplifting narratives do as well in academia as they do in Hollywood. Any deal with Hitler would have exploded the political system in the UK and would have caused mayhem within the US itself (the USSR was much more widely admired in the West then than anyone today cares to acknowledge).
The internal politics of the Roosevelt Administration appear to be to have been supremely complex. Cold-blooded as he was FDR was truly impressive in his ability to get what he wanted.
There would be plenty in Europe who do, just as there were plenty of people in the UK who did well enough under Thatcher and Blair. You'll spot them by the fashionable and performative politics of their kids.
Interesting picks as always! The first I heard about the malaise of private equity was all the way back in early 2020 when Jazzhands McFeels and James Allsup would talk about it on Fash the Nation. Names like BlackRock, Blackstone, Vanguard, and Cerberus and their heads like Larry Fink and Paul Singer were all but unknown back then, but now it is to the point where it’s impossible to ignore, and it’s great that more people are talking about the damage these firms are doing not just to real estate but to the whole economy. A bit gratifying when the stuff you were hearing on a relatively obscure white nationalist podcast years ago is now being talked about in national publications, books, and the news.
- "With the possible exception of Sao (who may have been Chinese)," => I think this guy doesn't even know who a Sangley is. He has no idea how to put what he read in the Seville archive in the context of Philippine history.
- "evading Spanish bounty hunters" => What's the name for that occupation in Spanish? "el bounty huntero" ? If you're going to make up an occupation that makes no sense in the context of Latin American history, please back it up.
And those are just two of the several wtf moments I had while reading that piece.
Jul 23, 2023·edited Jul 23, 2023Liked by Niccolo Soldo
Hah. The good news is that these midwits should become increasingly irrelevant as the archives get digitized and they lose the privilege of being the only ones who can consult them and "interpret" them. Here's a good example, from the General Archive of the Indies:
That's an order reaffirming the decree prohibiting trade between Peru and the Philippines/China, and so keeping the monopoly in the hands of Acapulco, Mexico.
It was for a decade.
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I know, I know....I haven't been around. I apologize, but sometimes real life interferes with the online one.
You gotta read Jean Larteguy “The Centurions” .
I haven’t been able to stomach fiction in over a decade, longer.
Now I can.
Pasfeuro could be your fantasy alter ego, instead of Soldo lol.
French ROGUE Journalist afoot in Algerian War, loving and hating the Paratroopers at the same time, with a bloodline any Balkan Smuggler would kill for;
“At the end of the war Pasfeuro had been authorized by a court decision to assume the strange name he had thought out for himself, while serving with the maquis in Savoy, to the exclusion of all his others: Herbert de Mortfault de Puysaignac de Cortelier, Marquis of This and Count of That, all perfectly authentic titles earned in a succession of royal beds.
>When the daughter of the family wouldn’t do, the son was sent in her place. No inhibitions or complexes in that clan—if they failed by the front entrance, they succeeded by the rear! <
And their success had been brilliant, as all the history books showed. They had played the same game with the Empire and the Republic, with the Jewish bankers and American big business. During the occupation they had carried on in the same way with the Germans. But they did not sleep with any old German, never anyone below the rank of general; so no one had worried about it. Pasfeuro sometimes wondered who on earth his father might be. Certainly not the old marquis, whose tastes were exclusively unnatural. Perhaps the plumber who happened to call that day. Ever since the Crusades his family had been easy-going in that respect. But what the hell did he care? He was now plain Pasfeuro, a reporter on the Quotidien, who earned 150,000 francs a month, plus the fiddles on his expense account.”
When you get banned by the GPDR, consider a new name du plume... Pasfeuro -
'When the daughter of the family wouldn’t do, the son was sent in her place. No inhibitions or complexes in that clan—if they failed by the front entrance, they succeeded by the rear!'
He certainly knew exactly how the world works.
Rulers and people of influence and authority have no real ideology other than their own power, increasing their power and consolidating it.
This is by its nature a zero-sum no-holds-barred winner-takes-all game.
As always very interesting topics.
I will take exception to the assertion that large REITS are the cause of high real estate prices. I would say rents started surging in the 80s when women began to move into job competition with men. Not only did this stall wage growth but because they would not marry as early they began to compete with men for living space too. This dynamic has only increased in the following decades. Also, much higher divorce rates even when they do marry meaning more individuals competing for property.
Next, whites are being corralled into smaller areas with the browning of the overall population. As I've said here before, in super liberal Washington DC a similar house in vibrant SE quadrant is half the price as the same style and size in Upper Causcasia, NW quadrant. Same distance to the Federal Triangle. So, affirmative action blacks are getting a big discount.
The citing of Americans for Financial Reform is a tell. If you go to their website this greets you:
STATEMENT
We affirm that Black Lives Matter and that anti-Black racism is unacceptable and must be eliminated,
https://ourfinancialsecurity.org/
I hate to say it guys but, desirable real estate is like a beautiful woman, she doesn't sleep with poor, ugly men.
In Wash DC, the differentials of the SE versus NW quadrants of the city have been that way for over a half century. There is a not so hidden cost to living in SE though; a very good friend, a former Peace Corps worker and her spouse whom she met in the PC, experienced a horrific home invasion in her SE townhouse. She was brutally raped by three black men and her husband tied down and made to watch....perhaps the premium of living in the NW quadrant is an insurance policy of sorts?
That's a curious but revealing description. When I, being a white guy, think of insurance I equate it with protection against natural disasters like floods or hurricanes. Applied to blacks, it's breaking and entering and raping a woman in front of her husband. It could be that your friend didn't provide the perps with enough resistance via locks, dogs, fire power, neighborhood watch, etc. Like how guns just go off all on their own around black people so we've got to ban guns for everybody. This kind of thinking reminds me of the vast chasm between blacks and normal sane people
The Khodorkovsky interview reminded me of a recent podcast Freddie Sayers did with Edward Luttwak:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bIdcu0o9Pc&t=2675s
In his case he just wants some Chinese volunteers to "take out" Xi. It seems as if the recent tendency of society to view things in absolute terms, just black and white is making these kinds of proposals look normal.
Edward Luttwak is a war profiteer.
True, but he has written some very good books. THE ENDANGERED AMERICAN DREAM back in the early 90s was truly prophetic. The people who disregarded Luttwak then are scrambling for answers now.
This is very true, and his strategy books. He’s been a great disappointment on Ukraine and now China. I’ve read him extensively.
Did I not say Germany welcome to the real America?
The Rust Belt.
Globalisation involves a race to the bottom and the formerly privileged position of Deutchestan was tolerated for the sake of the Cold War. There is no more need for sentiment.
As Israelis discover as they redo South Africa’s fall via their Supreme Court, the Left defending “democracy” from the Voters.
Foreign Affairs supports the One State (Pals voting) solution.
Poor Arafat. Victory was so close.
All that is necessary to defeat an American ally is to defect to the American State Department.
Nothing more.
Home ownership provides stability to society. If people don't have skin in the game then they (as in San Francisco) they vote for crazy policies. Where I live now, someone making $15/hr (going rate for entry level retail jobs) could afford a median home. This was before inflation hit.
My understanding is the people who own in SFO vote for crazy policies. Just not infill development near their homes.
Some do, but I've looked at studies of precinct maps showing ownership percentages. Those with higher ownership percentages vote for more sensible policies. Of course, in San Francisco, London Breed, the current mayor, is considered by many to be moderate to conservative! In truth, she's just another machine politician pushing progressive policies that have ruined the City.
I can't resist calling out "By halting deliveries of natural gas to Germany, the Kremlin etc": the Kremlin did no such thing. Europe did it to itself. Most readers of this blog probably know that and furthermore it is a citation but it is still annoying.
Europe is a cuckold, America is unfaithful to her in pursuit of the destruction of Russia. America forces her into self harm with piffle about justice and the international order. What stupidity by Europe’s leaders, the last 30 years have demonstrated the bipartisan lawlessness of America: the Middle East for instance.
Professor Deneen of the Post Liberal Order substack calls it the “political Gnosticism of the liberal imperium”, I call it delusional. How did deindustrialization work in America: societal collapse, nothing less.
Deindustrialisation worked fine for some. The US pioneered a new model of dystopia and has marketed this to the colonies in Europe.
Colonies: Aussie go!
Europeans like being slaves.
And now we reindustrialize in 🇺🇸 via COVID and war.
Boldness is fundamental to any progress or anything good ever happening, from founding a state to speaking to a particular young woman for the first time. Typically entrepreneurs risk money, not life and limb, but even that is beyond the comprehension of the average man and of almost all women. Some do go even farther, and put their lives on the roulette wheel. A wealthy man who gambles his life on a dangerous venture will not wait until every possible safety measure is in place, and the project is entirely de-risked. He is cut from different cloth. Time and life are short, and some risk is inevitable. Often these people have personality quirks and defects, and their benefactions to humanity are overlooked in moralistic indignation at the comparatively trivial detail, their disregard for courteous norms. What irks many people is that the person willing to take risks to do big, new, frontier-challenging things is a standing affront to their own lives of safety-seeking and timidity. The middling, nameless mass of risk-averse normals feel, with justice, condemned for their mediocrity by the mere existence of such people. But their safe existence is built on a foundation laid by bold and rule-breaking men, mostly men, in the past. A society that jeers at the death of a risk-taker is not healthy. One of countess such signs.
All immaculate picture capably told 👌
🗨 Every society honours its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.
Marshall McLuhan would sure shake his head in disbelief at those jerks jeering over deaths. Not healthy indeed.
Lack of talent is what doomed the submarine and the tourists who funded it.
Btw, if debtors prisons were brought back, how much entrepreneurial spirit would remain?
Was lack of talent responsible for all of the previous successful trips?
Lack of talent never builds any submersible vessel at all.
Building stuff that is unproven and losing lives over it is a failure.
Everything is unproven until it is tested and used.
Building only things that are already proven and safe is stasis.
Failure is never doing anything new, innovative, never pushing the envelope.
Everyone on the submersible voluntarily assumed the risks, including its owner and builder.
Yes, they assumed the risks - for the sake of saving money on the construction materials. This is what is being termed "innovation".
💩
That doesn’t even make any sense. The reason you try to make something with different materials that cost less and so that you can expand the use of the innovation. Exploring the seabed, developing it, mining in the deep oceans is one of the major undertakings for the decades ahead. 90 dives, 13 to great depths. I don’t know how many of those were with the submersible with the novel materials. But people do not risk their lives to save money. They risk their lives because they believe that the materials would work, or that the odds favored them working. As to finding engineers who were naysayers, that’s inevitable. You can always find someone with credentials who will give reasons not to take a risk, or criticize somebody after the fact. In every major lawsuit there are experts on either side with lovely credentials, who fly in from out of town with their briefcases, and their PhD‘s, and they say the opposite things from each other. No one here is hero worshiping someone because he’s a billionaire. There’s no hero worship involved. The man made a bet and he lost and he died. But fetishizing so-called “expertise” fails to understand how insubstantial most purported expertise really is. Don’t just trust it because someone has a doctorate or a platform to speak from, you have to look deeper than that. In the general principle remains, all major advances in life require going beyond what ordinary people consider safe, or normal, or acceptable. Significant risk is required to expand the envelope of human knowledge and human capabilities. That’s the historical record, there are sound reasons why it’s always that way, and it’s always going to be that way.
FAIL BOB.
💩
As for losing lives being failure; that’s contemptible.
We’d have never built houses or huts.
Envy is the most useless sin.
Did it? Lack of talent? No.
They made 14 successful trips. Do we even know what caused the failure?
It was the use of carbon fiber, joined to titanium with glue. I'm not making this up.
Naturally, he was criticized by engineers.
Why did he use carbon fiber? To save money.
Stop putting billionaires on pedestals. Most of these people are no more intelligent than the average person.
Here's one article:
https://apnews.com/article/titan-titanic-submersible-design-49b8c2a713f316ce5987a394a27d23e8
Clearly you need to go build own submersible
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt
It's the critic who points out that billionaires have no clothes, that vaccine schedules cause autism, or if there were no borders, we'd all be poor.
It's the cheerleaders who are useless.
Re housing: Skin the the game. We should all want that, if we care about maintaining our society as we currently know it. I’ll be caught dead before being considered a social engineer, but, without going full Supreme Soviet, I wholly support getting housing ownership to as many people who want it as possible. Just as I believe employee-owned companies are, on balance, better run.
I suspect no one has a good answer to the increasing unaffordability of real estate, but you do not make your system more stable by placing more people on the “other” team. I’ve been on both sides of the wealth divide, and was a good team player in each circumstance, so while I have no appetite for social upheaval now, on this issue I completely understand younger people’s anger.
Anzurd writes very well.
...while Jewel Boy manages to misspell that man's very name 🤭
I feel like there is an added element of social engineering at play here. Due to the fact that we now have generations of people who have been fully removed from rural areas and cannot possibly comprehend returning there or even to the smaller towns and cities (lure of jobs and other urban crap), you also have a an impossible job to balance out availability of space with the number of people. I live in Amsterdam and the average 3-bed house is well over half a million, which means you’re in for a million EUR mortgage if you even can afford to kick it off.
I like the notion that you can’t be a conservative without something to conserve and yes, young people have been utterly fucked by the generation of their parents who, through some karma at least, now have a bunch of 30-somethings still living with them.
I have the suspicion that things reached a tipping point when, for the first time, more of the earth's population lived in cities than the country. Happened about 9 years ago.
Individual home ownership is precisely the problem, since people use their democratic rights to vote for NIMBY laws that restrict supply and inflate theie non-diversified real estate holding. If most housing was instead owned by corporations, people would vote for increased supply so that their rent stabilizes and increases only at the rate of inflation.
People should be incentived to own diversified index funds and build wealth that way.
JES are you the Blackstone input Nico was looking for?
In USSR people didn't own their houses and the absence of market created tremendous problem. The only solution to housing is to deregulate and allow more houses to be built. This immediately will crush companies like Blackrock. If you start limiting rent growth you will get into problems like in Germany now where people can't find houses to rent and literally stay in lines for any available offering.
Shock Therapy he says!
LMAO
Bullshit. NIMBY laws are the essence of civilization in action and a crucial vestige of sanity and decency in an otherwise depraved and unstable polity.
Real estate values in the US are set by monetary policy and global capital flows. These forces are supplemented by local and or regional factors such as the ethnic cleansing of whites from key zones, the chronic mismanagement of public schools and endless games over the supply of available land.
Gangsters like Blackrock cannot be controlled through democratic means. Voting decides nothing...as we can see from the fraudulent election of 2020.
As for wealth...forget it. You need sustainable growth, sound currency and courts that uphold the rights of politically insignificant parties (in contrast with SCOTUS in Kelo v. the City of New London).
Anyone else noticing the concerted media and intellectual push on NIMBYs?
Uh
About that social upheaval
This is how you get social upheaval -
In fact on the to do list of getting social upheaval it’s probably #3 or #4 behind:
1. Defeat in war ✔️
2. Breakdown in order ✔️
3. High or hyper inflation ✔️
4. No prospects for young men✔️
5. Loss of loyalty of Security Forces✔️
6. Sowing Sectarian ✔️ Ethnic✔️ Class ✔️ division&Hate
7. Runaway corruption ✔️
8. Rigged Elections ✔️
9. Loss of Legitimacy ✔️
10. Mass migrations ✔️
Maybe your stomach needs some stocking up on a decade or more of antacid and Pepto.
Incredibly its the elites doing this themselves. Malice Oblige and a nihilistic death wish.
Appetite got nothing to do with it.
Another measured take from multiple angles, in case the story #4 whetted a few appetites 😊 --> www.piratewires.com/p/pirate-wires-subhuman 👌
🗨 hundreds of thousands of people appeared to be… celebrating the disaster. *Why*, I wondered.[...] Two of the adventurers were very rich, it turns out, and therefore not quite human. Other. “Part of the problem.” *They deserved to die*.
🗨 The quality that drives so small a subset of the global population to extreme risk is the quality responsible for many, if not most, of the most important things we have ever built or discovered. That’s what makes us great. We are nothing without risk.
🗨 Anyone sufficiently committed to misery can find some element of the Titan voyage to condemn, or to mock.[...] But these men also lived. How many of us can say the same?
And wrt Harry Houdini:
🗨 Why did he do it? Because it could be done, and now here was his gift to the world: proof. We are capable of anything. *You are capable of anything*. You’re welcome.
Re: Housing and Private Equity/Institutional Investors.
This might be "news", but it's nothing new. Even before the 2008 sub-prime mortgage bubble burst, PE/II had targeted, and was actively buying-up, single- and multi-family dwellings here in South Florida. Not long after, once bank-owned foreclosures became widespread, PE/II began snapping-them-up in a feeding frenzy reminiscent of the sharks that flocked to the survivors of the sinking WWII battleship USS Indianapolis. It didn't take long for the banks to see those foreclosures as assets, rather than liabilities. Our condo association [mine, a bank-owned repo, bought in early-2012] had to amend the Bylaws to forbid a PE/II from owning more than three units. Since then, it's only gotten worse... a week doesn't go by, that I don't find a slickly-printed postcard in my mailbox from an equally-slick PE/II, offering to buy my unit. A related phenomenon [once rare] is that of "home title fraud", in which an owner's property title is usurped via identity theft, then sold [through a multi-step, "arms-length" process] to a PE/II and the "real" owner dispossessed.
How do the fraudulent sales cases get resolved? The courts would surely uphold the rights of the true owners, but I expect that the PE/II use the legal processes to stuff everyone around.
Fascinating. Thank you. I should have immediately thought of Florida and Nevada post-2008.
I've always had a soft spot in my heart for the Morgenthau Plan, and I'm glad to see it finally being put into place, 75 years after its inception. Better late than never!
Germany has strapped itself into a euthanasia machine and will die softly and slowly, as an example to the rest of the West as to how best to atone for the sins of our ancestors. All the wisest and most moral Europeans know that the path to redemption ends with you eagerly laying your head down on the chopping block.
Germans have always been on the cutting edge of self-destruction.
I suspect that FDR may possibly have intended to use the Morgenthau Plan for payback against the German friends/partners of the US industrialists behind the Business Plot of 1933. Instead, after FDR's death the US pardoned all the IG Farben crowd in the dock at Nuremberg. Much remains to be revealed.
He had Morgenthau write it in a fit of anger, then backed off it.
Had this not happened in America first..
Philip part of Morgenthau plan is pacifying an enraged Morgenthau who’d bought him evidence of the Holocaust and FDR didn’t make the mistake of making this a war to save or avenge the Jews. Instead he adopted unconditional surrender (which he might have anyway) and the Morgenthau plan.
FDR hated Germany himself for the fate of his idol Wilson. Not to mention any deal with Hitler was reliably going to be broken, and FDRs policy from the Fall of France in 1940 is “This time we’re not leaving.”
As you know, gov't planning is always like an iceberg: you only get to see the tip. I expect that the archives would contain draft material on Morgenthau, Bretton Woods, the UN etc that would blow our minds no matter how cynical we are. To put in context, during WW1 French diplomats were in favour of breaking up Germany into its principal constituent monarchies...kind of reminiscent of Iraq.
Whatever else it was, the war was certainly not fought on behalf of Jews. Have always found it odd that the accusations of Dr Goebbels about Roosevelt have been taken at face value and repeated endlessly by people who should know better. The entry of the US into the war was about ensuring that the US replaced the UK and secure the chance of restructuring the global economy. Still, the mythmakers have their interests to camouflage and sentimental and uplifting narratives do as well in academia as they do in Hollywood. Any deal with Hitler would have exploded the political system in the UK and would have caused mayhem within the US itself (the USSR was much more widely admired in the West then than anyone today cares to acknowledge).
The internal politics of the Roosevelt Administration appear to be to have been supremely complex. Cold-blooded as he was FDR was truly impressive in his ability to get what he wanted.
I don’t think FDR was being entirely cynical. In 1940 when France collapsed this was a shock to the entire West.
Moreover England barely made it through the (Air) Battle of Britain. A few more fighters for Germany... a few less for England...
The beauty is, it allows the GAE to be in a position to steer the EU with even less friction. Naturally, we're all thrilled.
the best colonies are the ones that colonize themselves...
And like it!
GAE is the dom, Europe is the sub...they did give us the word "masochist" after all...
While contested regions of the planet are made up of non-binary states. The furries are the countries in peak delusion.
Uh are we still talking about real estate?
There would be plenty in Europe who do, just as there were plenty of people in the UK who did well enough under Thatcher and Blair. You'll spot them by the fashionable and performative politics of their kids.
Interesting picks as always! The first I heard about the malaise of private equity was all the way back in early 2020 when Jazzhands McFeels and James Allsup would talk about it on Fash the Nation. Names like BlackRock, Blackstone, Vanguard, and Cerberus and their heads like Larry Fink and Paul Singer were all but unknown back then, but now it is to the point where it’s impossible to ignore, and it’s great that more people are talking about the damage these firms are doing not just to real estate but to the whole economy. A bit gratifying when the stuff you were hearing on a relatively obscure white nationalist podcast years ago is now being talked about in national publications, books, and the news.
Engineering isn't cheap, but try explaining that to billionaires.
About First Asians in the Americas.
- "With the possible exception of Sao (who may have been Chinese)," => I think this guy doesn't even know who a Sangley is. He has no idea how to put what he read in the Seville archive in the context of Philippine history.
- "evading Spanish bounty hunters" => What's the name for that occupation in Spanish? "el bounty huntero" ? If you're going to make up an occupation that makes no sense in the context of Latin American history, please back it up.
And those are just two of the several wtf moments I had while reading that piece.
So you liked it?
Hah. The good news is that these midwits should become increasingly irrelevant as the archives get digitized and they lose the privilege of being the only ones who can consult them and "interpret" them. Here's a good example, from the General Archive of the Indies:
http://www.mcu.es/archivos/lhe/servlets/VisorServlet.jsp?cod=035410
That's an order reaffirming the decree prohibiting trade between Peru and the Philippines/China, and so keeping the monopoly in the hands of Acapulco, Mexico.
You realize this is a scramble for Affirmative action and quota money right?
Yes I do.
As a White male American taxpayer I appreciate your principled stand and refusal of Affirmative action and all immoral and dishonest advantage.
Right?