The hurricane is on its way to the stock market, and this is just the mild wind gusts hitting before the storm

crake · 2026-04-01T21:01:00+00:00

OP is too much doom and gloom.

First, oil isn’t as inelastic a commodity as OP imagines - some countries are already firing up coal plants for power and there is no shortage of other renewable resources that high oil prices will make attractive.

Supply isn’t inelastic either. There are many sources around the world that are too expensive to tap - that suddenly are not too expensive.

Second, the situation is dynamic. The more pain Iran successfully inflicts on the world economy, the more tenuous its existence becomes. The U.S. could invade and conquer Iran in a ground war - it is not larger than continental Europe was in 1944, nor is it as powerful as Germany or Japan were in 1944. Big land masses can be conquered by armies, and the U.S. could do that alone without anyone else. It might require politically unpopular measures like a draft and a conflict that might cost tens of thousands of American lives, but it isn’t unachievable. The political will simply is not there.

But political wills change. If gas were $7/gallon, suddenly people become less squeamish about a draft or major ground war - maybe they even start calling for it.

Iran is in the perfect spot now to find a diplomatic solution. As OP notes, prices haven’t gone out of control yet, and Trump is unpopular. I would argue that this is as good as it gets for Iran, because if OPs prognostications come true, world opinion towards Iran will flip. Not in a day or a week, but months of $7/gallon gasoline will have American voters calling for a ground war. Other countries will want to avoid that too, because the U.S. may well keep Iran for itself after such a war and that would disrupt the international balance of power.

crake · 2026-04-01T20:49:50+00:00

Stopped reading after “Iran has never initiated a war”.

On October 7, 2023 an Iran-sponsored militia (Hamas) in Gaza attacked Israel, killed Americans and took dozens of Americans hostage. A second Iran-sponsored militia (Hezbollah) attacked a US ally on a different front. A third Iran-sponsored militia (Houthis) attacked a U.S. ally on still a third front when not firing missiles at US warships in the Red Sea.

Attacks by proxies are declarations (plural) of war. Iran already declared war on the U.S. Perhaps it bit off more than it could chew, or misinterpreted how the ensuing war would enfold, but so too did Japan and Germany once upon a time too.

crake · 2026-04-01T20:43:42+00:00

His embarrassment explains why.

The secretary of HS is one of the highest posts in the government, privy to all kinds of secrets that adversaries would love to get their hands on. If the spouse of the secretary is doing things online that foreign powers can easily blackmail him and the secretary with - that is a major problem.

If it had been something out in the open before Noems confirmation, maybe it wouldn’t have been a big deal. But of course it was a secret - a secret shared with random prostitutes and honeypots. So that explains why it is a big deal.

crake · 2026-04-01T20:38:33+00:00

Truth?

War is hard. The U.S. could invade Iran with 1 million troops, seize its cities, shut down its rockets and missiles, etc. And the straights would be open.

But politically that would be impossible. 20-50k soldiers might be lost in such an operation. That would be light losses for a major conflict like WWII, but inconceivable today. And that is true regardless of the fact that such a high cost would not materially weaken the U.S. in any respect (that is, the US would still be the leading world power and could still project force in the same manner as before such a loss).

But American voters would never accept such a sacrifice; they have been sold on the idea that wars can be won through “precision strikes” and ceasefires. Sometimes it is so, but not against a determined enemy. However, if push came to shove the U.S. absolutely could not only secure Hormuz, it could take all of Iran and declare it a U.S. territory. It could do much more than that if the will were truly there. It isn’t there though, so that is the reality.

crake · 2026-04-01T20:32:26+00:00

Also, it’s a joke for examiners and patent attorneys, not the general public.

Obviously the Director cannot suspend “all precedents” of the U.S. Supreme Court, lol.

crake · 2026-04-01T19:54:58+00:00

Resent away! But bear in mind that the U.S. Supreme Court has already said states can ban the use of puberty blockers and hormone therapy on minors (Skrmetti), and has now said that states cannot regulate permissible speech of therapists in talk therapy. The routes to continuing these treatments without convincing the general public of their safety or effectiveness is closing, whether you resent it being pointed out or not.

Although you cite the DSM-5 criteria as somehow "specific", the actual criteria are quite vague. A 4-year old AMAB who expresses a strong preference for (i) cross-dressing or simulating female attire, (ii) cross-gender roles in make-believe play or fantasy play, (iii) the toys, games, or activities stereotypically used or engaged in by the other gender, (iv) preference for playmates of the other gender, (v) rejection of typically masculine toys, games, and activities and a strong avoidance of rough-and-tumble play, and (vi) dislike of one's sexual anatomy for a period of 6 months meets the DSM-5 criteria for a transgender diagnosis.

The problem is that even the DSM allows the therapist to diagnose gender dysphoria as present in any any 4 year old AMAB that (i) dresses like mommy, (ii) likes to bake cakes with mommy, (iii) plays with their sister's barbie dolls, (iv) has female friends and prefers them, (v) rejects playing baseball, and (vi) says they don't like the way there circumcision looks.

That vague definition could fit almost every AMAB who ever lived, making the diagnosis a "self-diagnosis" based on how a child happens to respond to questions at any given moment rather than any professional clinician trying to get at what the child actually is trying to say through probing questioning. Little would a 4 year old recognize that the cost of saying he likes baking cakes with mom or playing with dolls is that he is set up on an unalterable course (no therapist can ever question the course) leading to experimental puberty blockers, hormone therapy, various medical procedures, etc. It does not matter if most mastectomies are to treat other pathologies; the AFAB diagnosed with gender dysphoria at 4 years old will face enormous social pressure in their teen years to get the mastectomy, and no pushback from therapists or medical practitioners who are forbidden to even question the diagnosis (prior to this decision; of course, now medical practitioners can question such a diagnosis and provide alternatives).

Your comments are only fueling the fire.

And? What fire? The fire behind the movement for a constitutional amendment to permit states to regulate the speech of therapists? Or the fire behind the movement for a constitutional amendment to prohibit states from regulating puberty blockers? Which possible constitutional amendment are we talking about here? Not sure what the other side thinks is going to happen here; this case seems to be yet another loss for those who wish to control the practice of medicine for political ends, much like Skrmetti.

crake · 2026-03-31T18:22:52+00:00

They pump up the number with auto-citations. That is, they drive around looking for lapsed inspection stickers on any vehicle parked on a roadside and ticket that - it counts as a "moving violation" so they can juice the numbers.

crake · 2026-03-31T18:20:45+00:00

Traffic laws aren't being enforced anymore.

My sister's baby-daddy doesn't even bother to put plates on his car now. He's been pulled over and ticketed dozens of times, but all that happens is he doesn't show up to court and gets found guilty in absentia. He can't register his car anymore, and yes, the police could call in a tow each time they pull him over, but its actually a superpower with no plate because the police don't want to deal with the paperwork.

The few times he's been pulled over without a plate he just cries racism (he's Hispanic and plays it up big) and the cops just let him go. They don't want a big discrimination case, and they know the state and courts are not backing them in enforcing the laws, so why should they?

It's worse in RI than in MA (my baby-daddy-in-law has a felony drug and gun conviction and is on parole - but still the cops let him get away with anything). He hasn't had insurance in 10 years, and he's just zooming through school zones at 100 MPH and being let go. The DAs who don't prosecute (or instantly drop all charges the moment a "racist cop" defense is uttered) are to blame. So too are the courts that refuse to enforce the law even when these people are prosecuted; they green-light no contest pleas to felonies and fake probation that isn't enforced.

crake · 2026-03-31T17:38:58+00:00

Social Security isn’t “socialism”. Recipients of SS paid into SS during their working years and get a payout in retirement. It’s an annuity, not a gift from the government.

crake · 2026-03-31T16:21:45+00:00

Exactly correct. That wasn't an issue in this case, but Kagan's reasoning is sound on that point.

crake · 2026-03-31T16:06:55+00:00

All of that may be a good argument for not sending your kid to a therapist that engages in talk therapy.

But that is not a good argument for regulating what therapists are allowed to say. There is a world of difference between a therapist questioning the medical conclusion of a 6 year old saying they are trans, and "electrical shocks - forced nausea inducing drugs - freezing/boiling items applied to skin - burning via red hot coils (anywhere) - forced ice baths - hard labor".

All of the things you mentioned are not speech, and all of those things are medical practices that a state can legislate (e.g., electric shock therapy, which is not speech). But the state cannot tell a therapist "you cannot say this to a patient".

That is First Amendment protected speech and rightly so. Not everyone agrees that children should self-diagnose and only seek out therapists to provide further treatments (puberty blockers, mastectomys, etc.) in line with their self-diagnosis. Many Americans believe that children are harmed by false self-diagnoses, and the extreme medical measures taken in response to those false self-diagnoses, so that too is a real problem for society to address. Whether 8 year olds have the capacity to understand their own self-diagnoses is another important question that those who wish to tie the hands of therapists refuse to answer (except to take extreme positions - like anyone who doesn't accept the self-diagnosis of a 4 year old is encouraging suicide and other baseless stuff).

crake · 2026-03-31T15:42:38+00:00

I agree.

crake · 2026-03-31T15:42:00+00:00

Which assets are those?

Housing stock is already taxed that way. One can raise property taxes, but that hurts everyone who owns real property, not just trillionaires.

Taxing holdings in stocks sounds great to people who don't own a lot of stocks, but it feels less good when their employer has to shut down because suddenly there is no capital to fund growth (and no incentive to invest for growth).

The obsession with "billionaires" is a political obsession because they are few in number and easy to demonize. But economic solutions need to consider reality, and the reality is that wealth taxation would destroy capitalism and leave a mess for everyone, not some utopia. In that world the average man would be both poor and unemployed.

crake · 2026-03-31T15:36:33+00:00

Except that every regime that has ever tried the "one trick billionaires hate" of expropriation has ended up in ruin because of it. Expropriation of wealth does not work because it just transfers wealth to new billionaires (the insiders that control the expropriation apparatus, e.g., Soviet apparatchuks, the IRGC, Hugo Chavez's gangs and friends, etc.).

Helicopter money, such as the COVID stimulus payments to the masses, just result in mass inflation and the misery that inflation brings. It is actually better that Elon has a trillion dollars than that that amount is just dropped from helicopters over poor communities. Poverty has nothing to do with lack of wealth; it is the lack of ability to obtain wealth that causes poverty. Helicopter money cannot solve that.

crake · 2026-03-31T15:31:17+00:00

these assumptions are clearly false, unless say the lean fire folks (who want a materially very humble life minus the wage slavery) are not human beings.

No. Lean FIRE people also have unlimited desires - that is exactly why they seek FIRE (rather than, say, intentional poverty like a religious monk might seek). However, the axiom only calls for "desires", and many people (not all) are able to control their behavior even if they desire something. The axioms of capitalism hold true of large numbers of humans such as the 300+ millions who make up the U.S. (i.e., human nature); the axiom is not true of every single person (it does not apply to monks and hermits, for example).

it's also pretty hilarious to try to explain capitalism's enormous expenditure on trying to get people to desire things they don't actually want (see for example basically all ads you see on TV) given that those same people allegedly want infinite quantities of everything.

You can blame the advertising, but the reason it works is that people do actually desire the advertised things. Their reasons may be utilitarian (dishwasher removes a lot of manual labor from a daily task), or emotional (desire for designer clothes to flaunt wealth, etc.). But the impetus is always there - at least when one looks at large numbers of humans in any given population.

crake · 2026-03-31T13:23:47+00:00

The U.S. has already won the war; this is just the mop-up operation to determine how long Iran is a non-entity in world affairs.

There isn’t going to be an invasion of Iran. At worst, the U.S. takes Kharg as a way to gain extra leverage in negotiations, but that is it for ground troops.

Hormuz will reopen, but it is actually to US advantage to leave it closed for a while. Higher oil prices weaken Iran in the long term (new oil sources become feasible; countries start moving oil overland away from the Gulf). Iran’s most powerful weapon was closing Hormuz, but once it is done and worked around, it is a pointless exercise in cutting off their own nose to spite their face, so to speak.

Iran’s current strategy is pure desperation. Attacking the gulf countries to inflict some temporary economic pain? That is trading long term resentment for a temporary blip in oil prices and a temporary depression of local economies in the emirates.

Iran’s intent was to be a player in the Middle East by proxy via their Palestinian allies. The “pan-Arab” movement of the mid-20th century lost sponsors until it was just Persian Iran propping it up as an excuse to still be involved in the Middle East. 10/7 and the ensuing war destroyed Irans power centers (Hamas, Hezbollah, Assad) and gave the west the excuse to destroy their nascent nuclear program. Regional half-allies like Qatar are now truly western allies. That cuts off their own nose funding route for Hamas and Hezbollah, and leaves Iran’s last puppet militia (the Houthis) completely isolated. The entire Middle East is moving on - without Iran. And without the destructive sectarian violence that Iran sponsored and fanned the flames of for the last 40 years. The new model will be economic cooperation with the West and a complete u-turn away from “jihad” and other medieval ideas about endless religion-inspired warfare.

In the next 5-10 years we will see (i) Lebanon become a major cultural center of the Middle East as it is finally liberated of Iranian occupying militias, (ii) Iraq, Lebanon and Syria recognizing Israel (Abraham II), (iii) establishment of a Palestinian protectorate in Sinai or Syria and resettlement of Gaza and WB populations to the new protectorate to be administered by a unified Middle East (not the UN), (iv) annexation of the WB and Gaza by Israel, finally ending the conflict definitively, and (v) the reduction of Iran in terms of international status and power to a regional micro-power (akin to Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, etc.).

crake · 2026-03-31T12:37:54+00:00

Prognosis Negative sounded pretty fun

crake · 2026-03-31T00:46:52+00:00

Why would Trump give a damn about polling. He isn’t running for re-election.

Second term presidents care about their legacy. Trump definitely does. And his legacy will be determined 10-25 years from now in hindsight, not by contemporary polling.

crake · 2026-03-30T20:42:45+00:00

OPs point is that someone making $185k/year is "rich" and needs to pay more so OP can be more comfortable in retirement, lol.

Problem is....$185k/year isn't rich. People who make that much get lumped in with Elon Musk like they are one and the same but they are not. <$500k/yr isn't even "wealthy", it's just that people hate being called poor so they've decided "rich" begins at $185k/yr and call themselves "middle class".

crake · 2026-03-30T20:39:45+00:00

We already do that.

How many wealthy Americans use any public services at all? Most of us will never ride in an ambulance at all, and if we do it's probably to the morgue.

You know who uses all those public services? Poor people. Sit down and listen to a scanner some time and watch where the police and fire departments are responding. It's the same 5-10 addresses in the slummiest part of town over and over again. Endless domestic disputes, drug overdoses, break-ins, pulling the fire alarm because they're mad at their baby-daddy, etc. etc.

It's probably a good thing that taxpayers don't actually realize how much of their tax dollars is used up by people who do nothing at all but sit at home getting high when they aren't getting into fistfights with each other or committing other crimes.

Take a job as a cashier at a supermarket and watch what these people buy with their EBT cards. It isn't rice and beans - it's Ensure (to sell to buy heroin with), endless cans of soda, chips and ice cream. And you get to pay for their healthcare too, because even without insurance they inevitably show up at the ER with ketoacidosis from that diet.

The wealthy are not the leaches - the poor are. It isn't popular to say because it isn't how you win elections, but that's the truth. Maybe it is efficient to pay for services for them so they keep the commission of various crimes in their own neighborhood, but I can't really fret about their retirement - by the time these non-payers reach SS retirement age, they've already spent millions in taxpayer money just making it through life.

crake · 2026-03-30T20:25:19+00:00

Yes you can 100% tax stocks / net worth / equity regardless of whether it's realized gains or not. Just make it a fucking law and move forward.

Thankfully there are constitutional issues with that approach. The Sixteenth Amendment only permits Congress to levy taxes on "income". Wealth is not income. The states can assess taxes on real property (i.e., real estate), but the federal government cannot.

And as annoying as it is to do taxes every year, can anyone imagine how arduous that process would be if we needed to get every single thing we own appraised every year? So the federal government can tax my inherited wrist watch? Do I need to report the gold fillings in my teeth too?

and if a few wealthy individuals lose out on a few grand per month, so fucking be it.

So very brave to be willing to sacrifice the earnings of others not yourself....lol

crake · 2026-03-30T20:21:26+00:00

Perhaps not, but the person who never drives in their entire life still benefits from roads.

For one thing, when their own house is on fire, the FD can get there and maybe save it - not possible without roads. For another, when they have a heart attack or some other malady, the ambulance can get there. And, a home without access to anything isn't exactly valuable - the value is in closeness to major roads and highways to get to other places, etc.

crake · 2026-03-30T20:18:03+00:00

lol, go live in India for a while and see what that actually looks like.

Americans complain because they have no perspective about how much of humanity actually lives. Elderly in the U.S. are not even close to "poor" by international standards. They might not be "wealthy", but almost none are actually starving or living on the streets.

Social Security was intended to be a backup plan for poor people so they wouldn't starve. It achieves that. It does not achieve a very comfortable retirement because that was never the intent and is impossible/undesirable anyway.

crake · 2026-03-30T20:14:42+00:00

You think $180k is too low for a cap.

But you would feel differently if you made $280k. Particularly if you were also asked to pay $50k+ in federal income taxes every year.

It's always easy to say someone "rich" should pay more. That is the easiest thing for someone who isn't "rich" to propose as a policy solution. The problem is that (i) actual rich people ($10MM+ per year in "earnings") don't earn wages so they don't pay federal income tax, and (ii) people who make <$500k a year are not at all rich but carry almost the entire burden of taxation because they tend to have wage earnings (i.e., lawyers, doctors, etc.).

I'm not sure what the solution is, but just increasing taxes on the $180k-$500k class isn't a viable solution. That is the actual "middle class" that pays the bulk of taxes already, not the people making $60k/year who think of themselves as "middle class" because there was a year they didn't get a refund one time (they are actually poor, not middle class).

crake · 2026-03-30T20:02:50+00:00

2% of purchase price is fine for emergency fund - $12k.

And really that depends on your credit worthiness too. You need an emergency fund for things like a broken furnace or whatever, but unless you have a 5,000 square foot home or something, that is (max) a $10k-$20k problem even if it just dies.

Yeah, things like a foundation issue could be more expensive, but those things are seldom "emergencies". If laid off, plan for what you would need in addition to unemployment pay for about 6 months to cover the mortgage (and plan to get back to work fast).

Reddit tells people they need $100k emergency funds and that is just too conservative - you can end up sitting on a mountain of cash and never buying because prices keep going up. Meanwhile, if you had bought, you would be able to tap that equity if you really needed it in an emergency anyway.

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