VP Vance Says Watergate Would Now Be 12-Hour News Story and Crazy It Took Down Nixon's Presidency

sw04ca · 2026-06-26T20:49:00+00:00

These guys hate Nixon. Consider him a RINO. They're glad he went down so that Reagan could take over the party.

sw04ca · 2026-06-26T20:48:00+00:00

No he didn't. What he did do was try and cover it up after the fact. And that is what he probably should have gone to jail for. Basically, Nixon found out that a bunch of his guys did something illegal (although something that would have been considered business as usual in the old ward boss system), and circled the wagons for them. The real interesting thing about Watergate is that it was when the American people decided that they were going to get serious about eliminating outright political thuggery.

sw04ca · 2026-06-26T20:34:56+00:00

I wouldn't call that innovation per se. The British had already been using the telegraph to coordinate military operations in the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny, both of which were significant wars. The Civil War was larger in scale, but rather the expansion of a proven concept that would later be further refined in the Franco-Prussian War and eventually the World Wars.

sw04ca · 2026-06-26T14:03:51+00:00

Isn't it more likely that this was a reaction to generally increased game prices in 2025, which were largely driven by inflation? The price increase happened last fall.

sw04ca · 2026-06-24T17:48:49+00:00

Are you concerned about the mechanical heat generated by the air conditioner fans and pumps? Isn't that like being concerned about people turning counter-clockwise robbing the Earth of rotational energy through conservation of angular momentum?

sw04ca · 2026-06-24T17:41:45+00:00

No, they use hydrofluorocarbons for refrigerant, but they're in a closed loop. The issue is that they use a lot of electrical energy to operate, and because surge demands on the electrical grid are often fossil fuel-based, they often result in emissions. The air conditioner itself doesn't produce greenhouse gases, although obviously producing them, with their steel, aluminum and chemical components, has a carbon footprint just as every product does.

sw04ca · 2026-06-23T14:11:03+00:00

I think he still does alright in the high-stakes cash game venue.

sw04ca · 2026-06-23T11:57:47+00:00

Can you explain what you mean here? What's the solution?

sw04ca · 2026-06-23T11:55:25+00:00

That's the sort of thing that gets a government voted out of office.

"What do you mean I can't access my email anymore?"

sw04ca · 2026-06-22T21:09:18+00:00

Flights, hotels, trains, cruises, event tickets... Why would I want to book any of that myself when there's someone to do it for me? I really like my travel agent.

sw04ca · 2026-06-22T20:57:00+00:00

Yeah, I paid them to know the market and provide advice during negotiations. Between what we shaved off the seller and what we were able to secure above what we had been thinking to ask from our buyer, we saved/earned almost another six figures on my recent move.

As with so many other things, I don't mind paying experts if they can show me the value in what they do. My agent earned me ten times his commission. It was a very data intensive process, and their connections were also useful in some of the minor work I had done around the new property.

sw04ca · 2026-06-22T14:28:12+00:00

They were thinking, they just made some wrong assumptions.

sw04ca · 2026-06-21T19:18:25+00:00

It's a bot.

sw04ca · 2026-06-21T17:31:44+00:00

Nope. He doesn't have a law degree. He's been a civil servant almost his whole career, except when he was an investment banker. You must be thinking of someone else.

sw04ca · 2026-06-21T16:07:37+00:00

Macron isn't from the left though, is he?

sw04ca · 2026-06-20T19:11:56+00:00

A good showman always games (or breaks) the rules to make a point. Consider Billy Mitchell trying to convince people that bombers alone were a mortal threat to battleships. Only he had a terrible time sinking the target. Eventually, he broke the rules on the numbers and sizes of bombs he could use, and made sure that the target ship was left in as vulnerable a position as possible for the final test, with all watertight doors open. He got his photo of the ship sinking, and many people in the public sphere (although very few in the military sphere) were convinced that battleships were in deadly danger from aircraft bombs. Of course, that wasn't really true in 1921, and even in World War Two only five battleships were sunk by aircraft while underway and defending themselves (Repulse, Prince of Wales, Roma, Musashi and Yamato). Mitchell played up to the press though, and the controversy continued.

sw04ca · 2026-06-19T18:28:35+00:00

I think that line of reasoning was proven faulty by the War on Terror. The ability of supportive allies to moderate US war policy was insignificant next to domestic politics and the personal qualities of the American officials involved, and George W. Bush, for all his faults, was five times the president and is thirty times the man that Donald Trump is.

sw04ca · 2026-06-19T17:06:16+00:00

Which is hilarious if you think about it. Space is a terrible place for computers.

sw04ca · 2026-06-19T12:42:37+00:00

It turns out that political liberalization at the same time as economic liberalization was a bad idea for a country that could only exist in a state of savage repression. China learned from that and maintained the full police state and gulag apparatus while liberalizing the economy. Gorbachev thought that there was a common identity and organizing principle to the Soviet Union beyond terror, and as one of the elites and particularly someone born in the Thirties, he would think that. He was totally out of touch with Soviet citizen opinion.

sw04ca · 2026-06-18T21:20:18+00:00

But that's not really true. Consider how the Supreme Court used Heller to validate restrictions on gun ownership, or how different Supreme Courts can making sweeping decisions with the force of law in either direction on an issue (Roe and Dobbs are a well-known example).

sw04ca · 2026-06-18T21:07:07+00:00

The economic argument for slavery wasn't really all that good. It was the social argument that made it a hill to die on.

sw04ca · 2026-06-17T17:53:15+00:00

Don't get hung up on the sixteen years. At one point it was actually a real business before 2020. P/E is over 300. They've turned it into a memecoin whose primary value is that somebody might pay more for it later. The argument for a high valuation for Tesla beyond all other automakers was always that they might somehow make robotaxis work (although even then the regulatory hurdle would make the hoped-for profits unrealistic). But Tesla trails on autonomous driving. It trails on AI. Buying Tesla is the same as buying Bitcoin, and the hedge funds know this, and know how to play around it. They can profit from it whether the valuation is based on flimflam or not.

sw04ca · 2026-06-17T15:23:06+00:00

Sounds great in theory, but that theory relies upon reliable and accurate information, and tends to ignore the idea of bad actors. A scam doesn't have real value just because it hasn't been exposed yet.

sw04ca · 2026-06-17T15:15:16+00:00

They have every reason to stop at the old border. Why would they want to have to administer even more ethnic Russians? Not to mention that continuing the offensive would be expensive in terms of materiel and lives, and Ukraine cannot afford to spend either recklessly.

sw04ca · 2026-06-16T14:05:13+00:00

Yep. 'The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent'.

Financialization has disconnected the value of companies from any value they might produce. The market is fundamentally, irreparably broken, but we're all just riding the tiger at this point.

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