Is anyone else in the country seeing their net worth jump 150% since COVID?

In net worth? Sure, -$1000 is technically a 150% jump from -$400.

Yeah, the people bitching about the tax obligation are basically just angry they don’t get to see their stocks grow tax free just because they happen to live somewhere else, and they try to get people on their side by misleading others about the way the US taxes citizens abroad.

A very important point is that the judge can’t just reject the deal and let Alex Jones continue forward. The whole reason why the licensing deal is coming to fruition now (instead of in 2024 when he first lost control, or after all the appeals are exhausted) is because this middle ground became untenable: Alex Jones can’t afford the studio’s rent and the creditors are going to seize all the physical assets if they’re not being actively used to run a profitable business to preserve the status quo.

If the status quo is no longer an option, the court will have to order that SOMEthing happen.

The licensing deal is for more than just the domain. It’s like hundreds of squatter domains, too (including, hilariously, goblinlove dot com), and the trademarks.

And the reason why it’s exactly that amount isn’t about the cost of the domain. It’s that the physical studio’s rent is about $75k/month, and they need to keep that lease active long enough to buy the whole shebang once Alex Jones’ appeals run out.

This is the best article I’ve found, and it’s more recent than the NYT article you’ve posted:

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/bankruptcy-law/the-onions-infowars-takeover-follows-complicated-legal-journey

I still find dedicated legal reporting to be better than general reporting. And this is a complicated history touching on a lot of different areas of the law.

But the key fact here is that Alex Jones was allowed to keep control over the business assets while his appeals are pending, but has run out of money and cannot continue running his own business. At that point, the receiver overseeing things (where Alex Jones can run the business but can’t transfer assets out or pay anything not directly related to running the business) saw that things had changed enough that he needed to keep the business assets valuable, and that Alex Jones himself couldn’t.

So this licensing deal is a way to keep the assets valuable: keep paying rent on the studio itself, keep all the broadcasting and recording equipment under one roof, keep all the unexpired contracts.

If Alex Jones can’t come up with a plan to actually pay the rent and keep all the stuff, the court is basically going to have no choice but to agree that there’s no way to keep things as they are while the appeals wind through the system, and a temporary licensing agreement is the best option until the appeals go through.

Most of the reporting doesn’t seem to appreciate that Jones’ prospects of blocking this in the courts is dependent on a practical hurdle, not just a legal one: he can’t afford to keep it. That’s what’s changed since December 2024 when The Onion’s first attempt to buy this stuff was blocked (by another federal bankruptcy court, with a different judge than this state court judge overseeing the receiver).

the legitimate ones that are fully backed

The other commenter was trying to use that chart to tell us that cryptocurrencies are somehow better than fiat currencies as a store of value, despite their wild swings in value in the most stable one that isn’t backed by fiat currency.

But if I told you your money was going to be worth half tomorrow, then half again the next every day for the next 16 weeks… You would think shit… Maybe there is a better way to do this.

Doesn’t that happen to most cryptocurrencies?

I don’t agree with the implicit assumption that the people who are bullied have to be actual nerds/geeks. People get bullied for being different, whatever that may be, and Elon strikes me as a real weirdo.

And of course that assumes a lack of charisma, which of course describes Elon. Charismatic weirdos can actually set trends to follow, whereas uncharismatic weirdos tend to become social pariahs.

For the most part, you’re probably correct, but Elon Musk would’ve been bullied mercilessly in my high school, and it probably could’ve instilled some sense of self awareness if he had been.

I think the same is probably true of Stephen Miller and J.D. Vance.

This particular scandal was worse than you think. It wasn’t just that she was suspected of sleeping with her bodyguard, but it’s that she was abusing her position to make young female staffers communicate work stuff through her father or through her husband (neither of whom were government employees) so that they could sexually harass them. It’s fucked up.

If it were just shitting where she ate, it wouldn’t even register in this administration. This was worse.

I think Sundays is the day when many of his closest advisers take some or all of the day off, so he’s just wandering without the distractions that normally keep him busy.

It’s cheaper to pay cash than use insurance.

Yes, for most people, in most years. But the cost of health care tends to be very, very unevenly distributed. A person might see medical bills of less than $1000 per year for 20 years and then get a single $1,000,000 year. So at that point, it’s an annualized cost of $50,000 per year, even if most years it’s about $1,000. Some estimates are that 10-30% of all medical spending in the US is in the last year of life.

Many believe that because of this distribution, health insurance should primarily be a catastrophic care model where most people pay a premium that doesn’t cover anything for the first few thousand, then covers a percentage of the cost up to the out of pocket maximum of like $15,000 or so for a family, but does cover everything after that. For a typical household, being able to predict annual healthcare expenses for the entire year is very useful.

And personally, I’m pretty sympathetic to this catastrophic care model as a short term transition to an all payer model that looks like Switzerland’s system (private insurance, private providers, mandatory coverage, strict price controls, and subsidies for anyone who can’t afford the normal premiums).

The thing is, when someone is bad at many different parts of their job, it’s easier to build a coalition of people who each want him removed, for their own reasons.

MBA programs aren’t about the classes or any kind of academic rigor. They’re almost entirely networking plays: go get an MBA from a high ranking program, where you will drink with new friends you’ve made at different events, and then learn socially how to fit in with these MBA types, and then everyone gets their first post-MBA jobs at a big 3 consulting firm where they’ll do a bunch of stuff with executives of Fortune 500 companies, get to know execs who will vouch for them when the next VP position opens up. Then, 20 years after getting their degree, they still have an address book and text message threads with a lot of people who just happen to be the who’s who of senior management in different industries. All made possible by the MBA program, none of it coming from the coursework itself.

To be clear, women’s work before World War II was more than just the dishes. If you look at the guidebooks published for housewives back then, you’ll see that they were expected to have quite a few skills that most households now generally outsourc to external businesses:

• Feeding the family. This was more than just cooking. They were expected to process foods from a much less processed state (much more butchery of meats and cleaning and processing of vegetable products, dairy products, baked goods), and then preserve foods for out-of-season consumption (pickling, preserving in jams/jellies, home canning, drying, and in some cultures smoking). Much of this work is now done by the industrial food processing industry so that we can buy cans or jars or boxes of the stuff that’s already processed or partially processed. Even our fresh foods have been cleaned and sorted and trimmed to mainly just the edible parts.
• Making and maintaining textiles. We see bits of this surviving into knitting and crocheting as hobbies, but back before the rise of cheap apparel it was important to be able to clean and repair clothes that we’d now just take to our local dry cleaner.
• Maintaining the house itself. Home improvement is masculine coded today, but a lot of the stuff that qualifies as home maintenance was traditionally the work of a homemaker. Plus things like heating the house required active involvement of keeping fires burning and fuel on hand.
• Making household consumables. Homemakers were making their own soap, their own candles, and all sorts of little tools.

The economic shifts that come from women leaving the home for the paid workforce are all over, and some of them are pretty pronounced. But it’s important to remember that women worked hard before they ever got paid for it. Life was toil.

It’s not actually a clear inverse relationship on the individual level, even if the data shows a correlation at the national level.

There are a few things happening that complicate the analysis at the individual level, too:

• Wealth/income are correlated with age, and 40 year olds tend to have both higher incomes and lower fertility rates than 25 year olds.
• Wealth also correlates with race, for better or for worse, and there have always been persistent differences in birth rates by race.
• The sample sizes aren’t big enough to show whether the very rich (95th+ percentile) actually reverse the trend, to where being richer is correlated with higher birth rates, where the curve ticks back upward at very high incomes.
• The correlation is actually the other direction when looking at the individual incomes in certain countries (Netherlands, Sweden, Norway), and the effect is stronger when looking at men and their incomes.

Other country level data also suggest that there are big cultural factors in birth rates as well.

All in all, the relationship between income and fertility is complicated, with lots of other factors at play.

I think it’s more accurate to say “You will die for Epstein so that the oil class stays wealthy.”

There have been examples of postponements of elections for emergencies (most notably, the mayoral primaries in New York scheduled on September 11, 2001 had to be postponed for 14 days later), I’m not aware of any instance of an actual changing of swear-in dates being postponed.

Fuckery can still happen, but I’m more worried about threats and governmental terrorism that suppresses votes on the election day that moves forward as scheduled rather than actually moving the election schedule itself.

But lots of things can be pre ordered before they’re actually available.

Services are an obvious example: I can buy tickets to a movie or a live event that will happen at some point in the future. Same with really any tickets or prepaid reservations, like plane tickets or hotel reservations or certain types of restaurant reservations.

But it can happen with all sorts of consumer goods, too. I can put in orders for stuff to be made to order: handmade/custom jewelry or shirts or mugs or commissioned artwork, a pizza that won’t be made until I order it, etc.

For businesses, their supply chains require advance planning and ordering. The people who make peanut butter generally have the peanuts ordered before the start of the growing season, so they’re buying peanuts that might not have been planted yet. The grocery store chain might be buying peanut butter before it’s made.

When pork futures prices drop low enough, McDonald’s will snatch up those contracts and take delivery of a bunch of pork to make McRibs and make them available for a limited time. At the time they buy the contracts (that is, order the pork), the pigs might not even be alive yet, much less slaughtered and processed.

None of this is defending the memory contracts, but the idea of buying things in the future is pretty common in the economy.

Are you talking about battery storage itself being about $126/MWhr? Yeah, that incorporated into the solar+battery LCOE, because solar itself is $31, battery is $126, and the weighted average of how much energy is expected to come directly out of the solar panels onto the grid (at $31) and how much is expected to be stored for later ($31 plus $126) averages out to $53, presumably because most demand matches the daytime solar curve and doesn’t need to be stored for later.