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In his practice in the rural mountain community of Wrightwood, CA on the weekends in the 1960s, my Grandfather traded fresh eggs from the family who operated a chicken ranch in Palmdale in return for their medical care.
As the writer says
I'm glad to hear you're getting set up in Annapolis.
My grandparents had a sump pump in the basement of their home on high ground adjacent to Hancock Park in the very dry city of Los Angeles.
Just they and their neighbors watering their yards, with water imported from the far-away Colorado River and the Owens Valley was enough water to create the need for the sump pump. My grandfather had the walls and floor cemented and my Uncle had a chemistry lab there growing up. But they couldn't store boxes there because they'd get damp.
I suspect the craftsman home wasn't initially engineered with the basement. He probably dug out a small crawl-space, so there wasn't proper drainage channels built around the home. I do know he personally added the second floor to a one story home during the Great Depression. A good enough job with the same redwood timbers you couldn't tell.
‘Trickle-down economics’ is a scam that ignores decades of evidence
Like climate change denial, the claimed economic benefits of tax cuts for the rich don’t hold up under scrutiny. When Democrats deride tax cuts for the wealthiest as a budget buster and a vehicle for allowing the rich to get richer, Republicans often reply: “But look at the growth and jobs!” Actually, we have seen a steady stream of evidence debunking this rationale.
The day after his State of the Union address, President Biden crowed about another 275,000 jobs added to the economy in the month of February. “Three years ago, I inherited an economy on the brink. Now, our economy is the envy of the world,” he said in a written statement. “We added 275,000 jobs last month — nearly 15 million since I took office.” He concluded, “Across the country, the American people are writing the greatest comeback story never told. The days of trickle-down are over.”
Last July, NEC Director Lael Brainard laid out the overwhelming evidence that “trickle-down” economics — defined as “cutting taxes for big businesses and those at the top” — has been a bust.
“Economic inequality increased, many communities suffered from sustained disinvestment, and earnings growth for many Americans failed to keep pace with the cost of necessities like health care, housing, and education,” she said. “Investments in infrastructure and vital industries stagnated.”
This isn’t new evidence, either. A 2020 paper by David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London examined “18 developed countries — from Australia to the United States — over a 50-year period from 1965 to 2015,” CBS News reported. “The study compared countries that passed tax cuts in a specific year, such as the U.S. in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan slashed taxes on the wealthy, with those that didn’t, and then examined their economic outcomes.” It turns out that “per capita gross domestic product and unemployment rates were nearly identical after five years in countries that slashed taxes on the rich and in those that didn’t, the study found.”
But there was one significant difference: “The incomes of the rich grew much faster in countries where tax rates were lowered. Instead of trickling down to the middle class, tax cuts for the rich may not accomplish much more than help the rich keep more of their riches and exacerbate income inequality, the research indicates.” Oops.
Well, what about the huge tax cuts passed by MAGA Republicans in 2017? Were those any different? “Mr. Trump’s tax cuts have lifted the fortunes of the ultra-rich,” the report found. “For the first time in a century, the 400 richest American families paid lower taxes in 2018 than people in the middle class, the economists found.”
But economic growth made up for this handout, right?! Not so fast. Wages for average Americans did not keep up with the cost of living. Worse, “Even before the pandemic, income inequality had reached its highest point in 50 years, according to Census data,” as CBS News reported. And, before Biden came into office, income inequality worsened as the pandemic hurt the less-well-off more severely than it did the rich.
A 2022 update by Hope and Limberg reiterated, “Our findings on the effects of growth and unemployment provide evidence against supply side theories that suggest lower taxes on the rich will induce labor supply responses from high-income individuals (more hours of work, more effort, etc.) that boost economic activity.” Instead, they confirmed there is “strong evidence that cutting taxes on the rich increases income inequality but has no effect on growth or unemployment.”
Given that experience, Biden entered office determined to deploy targeted investments (e.g., infrastructure, chip manufacturing), tailored tax increases on rich individuals and corporations that had been paying no taxes, cost controls on items such as prescription drug prices, and expansion of the Affordable Care Act. Robust immigration and energy production further boosted growth. Biden also canceled billions in student loan debt, freeing up consumer spending. The result has been a record recovery from the pandemic and real wage growth adjusted for inflation.
The chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Jared Bernstein, told me after the State of the Union: “There’s a solid, empirical body of research confirming this. Tax cuts for the rich just make them richer, exacerbating both the deficit and economic inequality.”
One type of tax credit has worked spectacularly well. “The 2021 expansion of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) led to a historic reduction in poverty in the United States, particularly for children. Research showed that child poverty fell immediately and substantially,” the Brookings Institution reported last year. “On an annual basis, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, child poverty fell to its lowest level on record in 2021: 5.2%.”
Biden now proposes a tax increase for billionaires. “There are 1,000 billionaires in America,” he told the country during the State of the Union. “You know what the average federal tax rate for these billionaires is? 8.2 percent!” He argued, “No billionaire should pay a lower tax rate than a teacher, a sanitation worker, a nurse! That’s why I’ve proposed a minimum tax of 25 percent for billionaires. Just 25 percent.”
There is no evidence that doing this would impair the economic recovery Biden has presided over. It, however, would help pare down the deficit (something Republicans used to pretend to care about).
Sold as a prosperity booster, trickle-down tax cuts for the very rich do not increase prosperity, growth or employment for the average American. This sop to the rich does increase the deficit and income disparity. By contrast, restoring the child tax credit and enacting a billionaire’s tax would continue to narrow the gulf between the very rich and everyone else.
Trickle-down economics is a scam. Renewing tax cuts for the rich that are due to expire at the end of 2025 would do about as much for you as a degree from Trump University.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/12/supply-side-economics-scam/
Is an aircraft maker that can't be bothered to install all the bolts a real aircraft maker ?
Does the military really have any use for aircraft with missing parts ?
Boeing's long established culture of heavy drinking, especially among executives, is not functional.
Phil Condit, the CEO who set this pattern in 1996 married his first-cousin, followed by Harry Stonecipher in 1997, another alcoholic with with an undergraduate faith-based BS degree from a school in rural Tennessee. These geniuses outsourced Boeing's manufacturing, spinning off parts of Boeing to accomplish this. No company can operate like this.
https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/why-boeings-problems-with-737-max-began-more-than-25-years-ago
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2005-03-20/why-boeings-culture-breeds-turmoil
Consumer prices rose 3.2% in February from a year earlier said the Labor Department on Tuesday.
Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had expected 3.1%.
Prices rose 0.4% from the previous month, in line with economists’ expectations.
Core prices, which exclude food and energy items, rose 0.4% from January—more than the 0.3% economists expected. Core prices were up 3.8% from a year earlier, and while that marked the smallest increase since 2021, the report dashed hopes that stronger-than-expected inflation in January was a mere blip.
Federal Reserve officials are balancing two sometimes-competing goals: trying to ensure that inflation continues to fall, while also trying to keep the job market from buckling under the weight of high interest rates.
The Fed’s 2% inflation target is based on a separate price index from the Commerce Department. That index, known as the personal-consumption expenditures price index, or PCE, tends to run cooler than the Labor Department’s consumer-price index.
But the Commerce Department uses many of the consumer prices collected by the Labor Department in constructing PCE. That measure rose faster in January from December than the Fed would have liked, and was up 2.4% from a year earlier. The Commerce Department’s next inflation reading is set for release on March 29.
A rate cut at the Fed policymakers’ meeting next week still looks to be off the table, with interest-rate futures implying that investors see next to no chance of one. Fed Chair Jerome Powell last week told lawmakers the central bank was “not far” from being able to cut interest rates. But Fed officials will probably want a bit more evidence that their preferred measure of inflation is moving toward their target.
The goldilocks jobs market—employers continue to hire, but wage growth is slowing—also gives Fed officials some leeway for patience.
Trump has big plans to cut to Medicare benefits
Donald Trump’s campaign is furiously denying that the former president plans to cut entitlements if he gets back into office, even though that’s exactly what he said on live TV — and only fool has ever trusted anything he's ever said — but, more to the point, it’s the only way his budget math can possibly add up.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trumps-social-security-problem-isnt-his-words-its-his-math-e44157a2
I’m sure Donald Trump has a plan to make the numbers add up. As he did at, say, the Trump Taj Mahal, the Trump Plaza, the Trump Castle, the Plaza Hotel, Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts and Trump Entertainment Resorts. As the latest Wall Street filings related to Truth Social remind us, Trump ran them all — and they all ended up bankrupt.
Older Americans who support Trump's fraudulent nonsense will richly deserve all of the non-stop kicks in the face they receive if he gets a chance to implement his half-witted stupidity.
Unfortunately they'll be screwing over everyone else in America at the same time. But admittedly, that's what seriously stupid people do best.
As Jimmy Kimmel responded to Donald's snarky post about Kimmel hosting the Oscars last night,
"Thank you president Trump, thank you for watching, I'm surprised you're still, . . . . Isn't this past your jail time ?"
.
As Florida residents have discovered, insurance companies can leave a market almost overnight if they don't like the risk/reward ratios.
Florida is now the nation's most costly auto insurance. We fixed auto insurance in California on July 1, 1997 by becoming a no-fault state where everyone has their own insurance pay for their own claims. This eliminated court and attorney costs. One of Ron DeSantis' largest campaign contributors are liability attorneys. An honest governor would cut the attorneys out of the process.
Florida greatly improved hurricane building codes following the 1992 Hurricane Andrew which greatly reduced claims.
But when DeSantis become governor he allowed contributors to post a bond, set-up an insurance company and cherry pick homeowners they wanted as customers from the State insurance pool - at some hefty rates.
This has depleted the Florida state pool of "good risks" leading to quickly rising homeowner insurances rates. Florida now also has the most costly home owners insurance in the country.
Being the most cost state for home and auto insurance is quite an anomaly for "a low-cost State".
At some point voters in Florida will tire of this abuse and elect someone honest.
Doctors move away from places where people can't pay.
It's not hard to understand.
Personal Bankruptcy due to medical bills, aka Texas-style Socialism, doesn't pay the bills that hospitals or medical workers have. So over time, they're gone.
Super glue and animal antibiotics are in the medicine cabinets of many farmers and ranchers in Texas — tools of the trade they sometimes use on themselves to avoid a trip to the doctor. It’s not that they have anything against physicians. It’s because they either lack health insurance or their coverage is so limited that a doctor visit could saddle them with a hefty bill. - https://www.texasobserver.org/affordable-health-care-eludes-family-farmers-ranchers/
Uninsured Country: Affordable Healthcare Eludes Many Family Farmers and Ranchers
They often cannot get adequate health care or insurance which is affordable.
Pope calls for the 'courage of the white flag,' negotiation, in Ukraine
https://www.usccb.org/news/2024/pope-calls-courage-white-flag-negotiation-ukraine
In a February 2nd interview with Italian-language Swiss broadcaster RSI, Pope Francis was asked whether Ukraine should surrender and if doing so would legitimize the actions of the stronger power.
The pope said "The strongest one is the one who looks at the situation, thinks about the people and has the courage of the white flag, and negotiates."
"When you see that you are defeated, that things don't advance, have the courage to negotiate," the pope said.
"You may be ashamed, but how many will end up dead? It will end up worse still. Negotiate in time, look for some country that may act as a mediator.
Do not be ashamed of negotiating before things gets worse," he said.
I can just picture angry refugee Republicans taking to the streets of New Zealand and Australia carrying signs, chanting their slogans . . .
Jimmy Kimmel recently announced Donald Trump had been crowned Miss Information
Miss Information appeared as a character in a South Park Episode in 2000 selling residents Cherokee Hair Tampons - https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Miss_Information
Senator Katie Britt recently played Miss Information three days ago while claiming a woman forced into prostitution in Mexico when George Bush was President, is in some Republican liars-magic way President Joe Biden's fault 20 years later. Some enjoy hearing lies on national television just as much as Britt likes telling lies.
Ashton Swinford also began appearing as Miss Information in October 2000 on his own news podcast.
But the elected leaders of New Zealand and Australia are little too liberal for some Americans, and these nations have far more immigrants than America does.
Maybe after these Americans arrive there on a tourist visa, they can form a Christian brigade and foment a plot to overthrow the governments of those nations.
These Americans will only vote for a leader that will give them BOTH a whack of a baseball bat in their face AND a kick in the seat of their pants.
Citizens of New Zealand and Australia call these Americans "undesirable aliens".
But Russia is willing to give these Americans the stern treatment they're demanding.
You've got to love clever engineering. —— Angela Chao 50, Foremost shipping industry billionaire, drowned in a sinking Tesla after accidentally reversing into pond in her Texas ranch.
Chao couldn't escape because the Tesla's strengthened glass windows are 'virtually impossible to break or open underwater', like a specialist magician's box of death.
Chao, Mitch McConnell's sister-in-law, had been making a three-point turn before the deadly accident and put the car in reverse instead of drive, sending it backwards down an embankment and into a pond.
As the car dipped below the water line, Chao called a friend in a panic to explain her situation. A friend dove into the pond in an unsuccessful attempt to break the windows.
The fire department crew arrived on the scene 24 minutes after getting a call. One responder described the vehicle as being completely submerged, with some deputies from a sheriff's department able to stand on it as they spent the next several hours attempting to rescue Chao.
Lighting was later set up, and dive teams had to be brought in to aid the rescue mission as well as a tow truck. After the vehicle was eventually pulled from the water, hundreds of gallons rushed out as the doors were opened, with Chao being found unresponsive.
AAA which has tested the vehicle estimates passengers have less than 60 seconds to escape from a Tesla driven into water before escape becomes virtually impossible.
Kremlin Fake News Sites Pop Up in U.S. Pretending to be Local News - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/business/media/russia-us-news-sites.html / copy: https://archive.vn/rV8wH
The fake news organizations, experts say, represent a technological leap in the Kremlin’s efforts to spread false and misleading narratives.
Into the depleted field of journalism in America, a handful of websites have appeared in recent weeks with names suggesting a focus on news close to home: D.C. Weekly, the New York News Daily, the Chicago Chronicle and a newer sister publication, the Miami Chronicle.
In fact, they are not local news organizations at all. They are Russian creations, researchers and government officials say, meant to mimic actual news organizations to push Kremlin propaganda by interspersing it among an at-times odd mix of stories about crime, politics and culture.
While Russia has long sought ways to influence public discourse in the United States, the fake news organizations — at least five, so far — represent a technological leap in its efforts to find new platforms to dupe unsuspecting American readers. The sites, the researchers and officials said, could well be the foundations of an online network primed to surface disinformation ahead of the American presidential election in November.
Patrick Warren, a co-director at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, which has exposed furtive Russian disinformation efforts, said advances in artificial intelligence and other digital tools had “made this even easier to do and to make the content that they do even more targeted.”
The Miami Chronicle’s website first appeared on Feb. 26. Its tagline falsely claims to have delivered “the Florida News since 1937.”
Amid some true reports, the site published a story last week about a “leaked audio recording” of Victoria Nuland, the U.S. under secretary of state for political affairs, discussing a shift in American support for Russia’s beleaguered opposition after the death of the Russian dissident Aleksei A. Navalny. The recording is a crude fake, according to administration officials who would speak only anonymously to discuss intelligence matters.
The campaign, the experts and officials say, appears to involve remnants of the media empire once controlled by Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, a former associate of President Vladimir V. Putin whose troll factory, the Internet Research Agency, interfered in the 2016 presidential election between Donald J. Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Mr. Prigozhin died in a plane crash outside Moscow in August after leading a brief military uprising against Russia’s military, but the continuation of his operations underscores the importance the Kremlin places on its information battles around the world. It is not clear who exactly has taken the helm.
“Putin would be a complete and utter idiot to let the network fall apart,” said Darren Linvill, Mr. Warren’s partner at Clemson. “He needs the Prigozhin network more than ever before.”
The Spread of Misinformation and Falsehoods
The researchers at Clemson disclosed the Russian connections behind the D.C. Weekly website in a report in December. After their disclosure, Russian narratives began appearing on another site that had been created in October, Clear Story News. Since then, new outlets have appeared.
The websites of the Chicago Chronicle and the New York News Daily, whose name clearly is meant to evoke the city’s storied Daily News tabloid, were both created on Jan. 18, according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which monitors domains.
All the outlets use the same WordPress software to build the sites and, as a result, have similar designs.
The outlets have logos and names that evoke a bygone era of American journalism, an effort to create a semblance of authenticity. A Chicago Chronicle did operate from 1895 to 1907 before folding for a reason that would be all too familiar to struggling newspapers today: It was not profitable.
They also update regularly with major breaking news, creating at first glance the impression of topicality. An article about the Supreme Court’s ruling about Mr. Trump’s eligibility to remain on the primary ballot in
Colorado appeared on the Miami Chronicle’s site within hours of the decision.
In other ways, the websites are poorly constructed, even incomplete in parts. The “about” page for the Miami Chronicle, for example, is filled with Lorem ipsum, the Latin-based dummy text. Some of images on the site have file names from the original Russian. (None of the sites post working contact information.)
The purpose is not to fool a discerning reader into diving deeper into the website, let alone subscribing, Mr. Linvill said. The goal instead is to lend an aura of credibility to posts on social media spreading the disinformation.
The effort follows a pattern the Kremlin has used before: laundering claims that first appear online through lesser news organizations. Those reports spread again online and appear in still more news organizations, including Russia’s state news agencies and television networks.
“The page is just there to look realistic enough to fool a casual reader into thinking they’re reading a genuine, U.S.-branded article,” Mr. Linvill said.
The New York News Daily published a story recently about supposed American plans to interfere in Russia’s election this month, whose winner, Mr. Putin, is a foregone conclusion. It was spread on social media by people who have long had links with the Kremlin’s state media apparatus.
D.C. Weekly published a number of Kremlin narratives beginning in August, according to Clemson’s study. One included a false claim that the wife of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, bought more than $1.1 million worth of jewelry at the Cartier store in New York during his visit to the United Nations in September.
D.C. Weekly, another mock news site, published a number of Kremlin narratives beginning in August.
The site claims to have a staff of 17 journalists, but they seem to have been fabricated. The biography of that story’s author, called Jessica Devlin, used as a profile picture a photograph of Judy Batalion, the author of a best-selling book about Jewish women who fought the Nazis. Ms. Batalion said she had never heard of the site or the author until fact checkers reached out to her.
Other articles that appear on the sites appear to have been lifted from real news organizations, including Reuters and Fox News, or from Russian state media’s English-language news agencies, like RT. Some stories have carelessly included instructions or responses from one of OpenAI’s chatbots, Mr. Linvill and Mr. Warren wrote in the study.
Another article last week appeared to come from a fictional character on X. The New York News Daily posted an article about what purported to be a thread announcing a $115 million Hollywood blockbuster about Mr. Zelensky. The user on X was called Brian Wilson and was described as an associate producer at Paramount Pictures.
The account has posted on X only 85 times, the vast majority of them reposts about movies over two days in February. A week later, the user suddenly announced a deal to produce a biopic of Mr. Zelensky — “The Price of Victory” — in a series of posts. Those were followed last week by two more that featured actual videos of the actors Chuck Norris and Dolph Lundgren manipulated to appear to be wishing him success with the film.
The videos appear to have originated with Cameo, the celebrity greeting app, which figured in an earlier Russian campaign that Microsoft disclosed in December.
A spokeswoman for Paramount Pictures said no one named Brian Wilson worked at the studio. A spokesman for Cameo said on Monday that the company was not aware of the videos but added, “As a general rule, when posts misusing Cameo-sourced content are brought to our attention, we request their removal from the platform at issue.” Later that day, the two videos were blocked on the X account for violating intellectual property rights. X later suspended the account.
Posts about the film spread extensively on Telegram. Many users cited the actual New York Daily News as the source and said it underscored an abuse of Western financial assistance in Ukraine’s war against Russia. The narrative was also amplified by outlets previously linked to Russian intelligence agencies, including NewsFront and Politnavigator, said Clint Watts, general manager of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center.
The articles typically get hundreds of posts on a variety of platforms, including X, Facebook and Telegram, as well as Reddit, Gab and Truth Social, though it is difficult to measure the exact reach. Taken together, they could in theory reach thousands of readers, even millions.
“This is absolutely a prelude to the kind of interference we will see in the election cycle,” Mr. Linvill said. “It’s cheap, highly targeted and obviously effective.”
Jeanne Noonan DelMundo contributed reporting.
Marketwatch suggests caution as Amazon CEO Andy Jassy just sold 50,000 of his AMZN shares, leaving him owning only 2 million shares remaining.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazon-ceo-andy-jassys-9-million-stock-sale-this-week-may-be-cause-for-caution-3b2d413b
I'm beginning to think these articles are written by non-human AI-bots.
In the skit is Larry David asks for directions to Wolfsglen restaurant - https://wolfsglen.com/ located in Westwood Village where years ago the Mustache Cafe used to be
The show hired voice actor, Susan Bennet who provided the voice for Siri, to read the script with the inane upbeat responses.
But it's the experience most have come to expect, ending up with the definition for a bundt cake.
At first Siri was a novelty, but now competing with other voice recognition services people have come to expect more which needs AI for voice recognition.
Vladimir Putin is sending Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as his personal envoy to visit Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago Club on Friday for consultations regarding Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Trump has so far successfully blocked the House from approving additional US military aide to Ukraine and Putin is looking for additional assistance from Trump.
Trump regularly praises the right-wing populist in his campaign speeches, recently misidentifying Orbán as the prime minister of Turkey.
The two met in August 2022 at Trump’s Bedminster, N.J., golf club when Orbán traveled to the United States to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference, in Texas.
Trump in early 2022 said he was giving his “complete support and endorsement” to Orbán’s re-election campaign that year.
In an MSNBC interview late Thursday, Carnegie Endowment scholar Rachel Kleinfeld observed that media was far from the only business over which Orbán has exerted control. Throughout his reign, according to Kleinfeld, businesses across every industry have come under pressure to toe the line of Orbán and his Fidesz party.
Post-communist Hungary, she noted, had been on a “normal” capitalist path prior to the rise of Orbán. “After just eight years he had basically moved into so many fields, with him and his cronies forcing companies to be either paying high taxes or [facing] high levels of regulation, or give up their companies, villainizing companies until they gave up, driving people out of town, that he had basically turned what had been an independent sector into something that was [Orbán and Fidesz deciding] who won and who lost in the business arena.”
Even in parts of the economy that previously had been apolitical — Kleinfeld offered soccer leagues as an example — Orbán created made political loyalty a litmus test. “He made everything into politics,” she said.
Republican political leaders and the board of The Heritage Foundation have said they consider Orbán’s style of governance a model for a future Republican presidential administration.
Viktor Orbán will meet with the Heritage Foundation today and Trump tomorrow.
— Ian Bassin 🇺🇦 (@ianbassin) March 7, 2024
The European Parliament calls him an autocrat. Trump and Heritage see him as their model to emulate.@amandacarpenter explains what he’s done that they want to copy here. https://t.co/g0Ayb9pnm5
I sold all of our Apple a month ago, and I sold our Roth GOOGL yesterday - wish I'd sold it the same time as AAPL.
Larry David on "Curb your enthusiasm" had a funny bit on how far Apple's Siri now falls short of expectations without AI - unlike Amazon's Alexa.
Apple's big problem, like Nike, is they used to sell a lot of product in China before their economy lay flat.
Cathy Wood, manager of Ark Invest, is currently most famous for selling her fund's 772,884 NVDA shares around $160 to free up funds to purchase more Tesla shares.
Now she says she's certain Nvidia is dangerously over-priced and Tesla is one of the best bargains available. She also notes that Nvidia faces competition. LOL
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/cathie-wood-sounds-warning-about-nvidia-whose-rally-she-missed-9ee0b26b
Is anyone surprised ?
On the other hand, Qualcomm says they want to become the Nvidia of AI chips on cell phones to replace edge computing. - That means Cathy Wood got some QCOM selling to do.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/there-is-a-battle-looming-in-2024-qualcomm-wants-to-become-the-nvidia-of-ai-on-your-smartphone-8c49a103
Mexico City, South Africa, Bangalore and the Central Valley of California are all places where growth of water usage has far exceeded the existing supply, because they never placed limits on themselves on how much groundwater they could pump from their limited supply. Freed from regulation, the limited amount of ground water is naturally imposing these limits on them without the need for any legal framework to do so.
Another thing common to all of these water short areas is a lack of any investment to increase the supply of water. Because no one likes paying taxes or fees to make investments.
But there are many exceptions to this jungle rule of no-fee-mo-free.
Over the years, the urban areas of most industrialized nations have made massive investments to assure water, electricity and other services. Other places not so much, so they have to resort to nonsensical restrictions like water service only during certain hours. In the long run these restrictions will have the necessary effect of making it less desirable to live there and the population will shrink in those locations.
California finally imposed limits on pumping groundwater in 2014, in spite of huge push-back from farmer corporations running short of water, but they made sure the restrictions in the Central Valley don't come into effect fully until 2040 - which will make their problems far worse just like Mexico City or other Third World no-fee-mo-free ooga-booga jungle society - so there will be some justice in seeing them get exactly what asked for.
As I posted previously, farmers in California's Central Valley have pulling out large acreages of almond trees because they have driven down the market price of almonds more than 50% with their over-planting. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173972082
This will temporarily reduce excess pumping of ground water, but after these farm corporations exit from bankruptcy, they'll likely replace the almonds with cotton or alfalfa crops which will use almost the same amount of water so they'll still run dry.
These farm corporations and investment partnerships would really appreciate it if Southern California gave them water from the California Water Project Southern California paid for. But for free, or nearly so. They "can't afford to pay" the rates we have to pay to pay for the project and the energy costs to pump the water - so they'd appreciate it if this water were subsidized by some Federal welfare program - maybe Trump will come through for them with his big sharpie signature on checks?
Reducing the annual out of pocket expenses on Medicare like Biden has done seemed outrageously communist to John Birchers who want Medicare terminated.
I know many taking benefits from Medicare feel guilty about it and feel they should be punished. Nikki Haley understood so promised Medicare recipients the punishment and restrictions they were looking for and expected. Trump will do worse, completely repealing and replacing Medicare with God know what - Medicaid?
Likewise canceling student debt for people who have served the requisite number of years of public service jobs like teaching, yet these laws already existed - Biden just enforced them - and there are still some loan servicers who are not following the law.
But these are all very small expenses when compared with Donnie's Trump's florid signatures on periodic free money stimulus checks and massive subsidies to businesses and employee subsidies.
There's no realistic possibility of replacing Trump or Biden with alternates unless one of them dies. Voters will get exactly what they deserve. If they hate our country as much as they say, they can vote for Donald Trump and get the punch in the face and corruption they want so badly.
Former prosecutor Kamala Harris, nearly a clone of Nikki Haley, is far more conservative than Joe Biden or Barrack Obama, which is one reason why she's not very popular among Democratic voters.
Billionaire mega-donors Ken Griffin and the Koch Network tried and failed to make Nikki Haley a presidential contender
https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/biden-campaign-reports-42-million-in-january-fundraising-8e477187
Haley brought in more than $15.6 million last month alone, between the Haley's campaign and one of the larger Haley Super-Pacs. All in donations larger than $100k each. Most candidates drop out when donations dry up, but for Haley major cash contributions continued right up to the moment she ended her campaign.
Those dollars primarily paid for more polling, media advertising and travel expenses.
Haley’s other top contributors to her aligned super PAC include a long lost of top hedge fund managers, $500,000 from James Davis, the chairman of New Balance Athletics and $100,000 from “MMSCC 2 LLC,” controlled by Joseph Topper, the CEO of the Allentown, Pa., fuel distributor CrossAmerica Partners.
It's hardly that surprising Nikki Haley supports major cuts to Medicare while also being opposed to any change to the 12.6% maximum ceiling tax on the "carried interest" of Hedge Fund managers.
Now that Mitt Romney's niece, Ronna Romney McDaniels, has stepped down from leadership of the Republican Party, Donald Trump is taking steps to formally take over the Republican Party's fundraising and cash reserves. The RNC will need to worry about paying his mounting legal bills. Last year, Trump’s legal bills ate into about a quarter of his overall fundraising efforts.
It doesn't feel right selling stuff amidst a party, but you've got a good idea.
It sounds more economic and sensible to keep the Earth a nice place to live.
Two days ago United Healthcare (NYSE:UNH) paid a $22 million ransom to recover access to data that had been hack and encrypted in their Change Healthcare pharmacy claims processor which processes more than 50% of all pharmacy claims in the US for most insurers and Medicare providers.
No one thinks they're affected until they need a medication refill or need a new medication.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has urged Medicare Part D and Medicare Advantage providers to change clearinghouses they use for claims processing during these outages and has relaxed timely filing requirements for filing claims during the outage. - https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2024/03/05/hhs-statement-regarding-the-cyberattack-on-change-healthcare.html
Until Change Healthcare is back online or providers switch payment processors, people all across America have discovered that they cannot obtain most medication refills unless they want to pay the full retail price themselves. Prior authorization systems used by Doctors and insurers for new prescriptions are also offline.
Oncologist Barbara McAneny, former president of the American Medical Association treats cancer patients in Albuquerque and Gallup, N.M. Her practice spends about $5 million every month on cancer drugs and also needs the pharmacy reimbursements to pay 270 employees, but right now no cash is coming in. McAneny, also a former president of the American Medical Association.
McAneny said that during normal operations, she’s not allowed to bill insurance companies or Medicare directly. All bills go to Change Healthcare first. “So when the clearinghouse got hacked, all of a sudden, I can’t prescribe anything for my patients. I can’t submit a bill or get any cash back.”
Jesse M. Ehrenfeld, an anesthesiologist and current president of the American Medical Association said the hospital where he practices couldn’t fill prescriptions for five days because of the hack.
United Healthcare (NYSE:UNH) acquired Change Healthcare in October 2022.
https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/payers/unitedhealth-closes-acquisition-change-healthcare
CrowdStrike CRWD shares were 16% higher in Tuesday’s after hours after the cybersecurity company delivered an upbeat forecast and better-than-expected results.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia owning 3.5% of the company worth $70 billion, says if he had to do it over, he would never start a company.
The experience have been a million times harder than I expected it to be. At that time, if we realized the pain and suffering and just how vulnerable you're going to feel, and the challenges that you're going to endure, the embarrassment and the shame, the list of all the things that go wrong, I don't think anybody would start a company. Nobody in their right mind would do it."
"That's kind of the superpower of an entrepreneur. They don't know how hard it is, and they only ask themselves 'How hard can it be?' And to this day, I trick my brain into thinking, 'How hard can it be?' Because you have to," he said. "You have to get yourself to believe that it's not that hard because it's way harder than you think. And so if I go taking all of my knowledge now and I go back, and I said I'm going to endure that whole journey again, I think it's too much. It is just too much."
And then you're dead.
We can afford to return the post-WW-II America when it wasn't required to make all cuts necessary to keep the tax rate on hedge fund managers below 12.6%
The Leon Cooperman's of America predict a tax rate higher than 12.6% cause a collapse of the American economy, better to terminate Medicare benefits.
But that's a fairy tale no one sensible believes. Its a lot easier to start a business in Australia where you don't have to worry about basics like healthcare. The rate of entrepreneurship is higher there. It's tougher to take a risk in America.
If you like air, water or sunlight, Mars doesn't have a lot to offer.
The Moon even less.
Mom just voted in person.
A Republican until shortly after January 6, 2021. Now a 92 year old registered Democrat determined to stop Trump and his cronies.
She's apparently going to need a pin in that recently broken finger.
More of that communist Medicare Republicans want to bring an end to.
She has Kaiser Permanante Medicare Advantage - I don't think that's the best solution, but she's sold on Kaiser- and has been since I was a child. Kaiser Permanente and John Muir Health are almost all of the healthcare in the San Francisco Bay Area. It would be tough to have a private Doctor.
Instead Bezos has been buying his own NASA
His wife donating the proceeds of all of her annual AMZN stock sales to charities
I started a new position in (NYSE:NET) Cloudflare - I'll see how that goes