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Cake day: August 20th, 2023

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  • While opening a business is closer to the situation than personal debt the analogy still breaks down here. The state controls the size of the money supply itself as well. It creates money through issuance of debt/bonds, and can get rid of it it via taxes and interest payments on the debt. Through the federal reserve it controls that as well. And the job of government isn’t to generate a profit. There’s just no good perfect analogy. A country should be carrying a debt load to some degree, it’s the ratio of debt to the size of the economy that’s important and could indicate when it’s getting to an unhealthy level. The national debt will never be paid off, and you’d never want it to be. Andrew Jackson found this out the hard way, very ironic he got put on money eventually given his hatred of central banks.

    https://www.npr.org/2021/08/03/1024401554/the-time-the-us-paid-off-all-its-debt

    US debt to gdp ratio is likely starting to get too high though and probably needs to be reined back some. Not a problem unique to the US after a lot of spending to prop things up during the pandemic. Best way to bring it under control is unwinding the Trump tax cuts for the wealthy and increasing taxes on corporations, capital gains, and billionaires.

    https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/debt-to-gdp-ratio-by-country






  • Creditors aren’t dumb, no way they’re going to accept this as a collateral. Even if they did have the ability to sell if needed (they don’t, it’s illiquid at the moment), unwinding $450 million in shares is going to take some time, and the sale itself is large enough it would affect the stock price itself. There’d be no good way of knowing how much stock you’d have to hold in the account to ensure that $450 million in cash could be extracted from it if needed.

    This isn’t just some small personal account with a line of credit that the creditor can make a maintenance/margin call on to ensure a certain collateral balance is maintained. This is a substantial percentage of the market cap of one single company with an extremely volatile stock based on near zero fundamentals, in a position that likely can’t be unwound without tanking its own value.

    Most likely thing Trump does in reality is work with a bank (who will accept real estate as collateral, unlike the bond companies) to get a letter of credit from a bank, and then bring the letter of credit to the bond company. This whole dog and pony show of “I can’t pay” is probably fake to try and see if he can convince the courts to delay his payment. Unless he truly does have no real equity in his properties like some people say. Or banks really are done with him. Will be interesting to hear what the independent court appointed monitor thinks about all of this. I wouldn’t be surprised though if Monday just before seizures could start Trump’s lawyers are like, jk we put these properties up as collateral like we could have done at any time in actuality, for a letter of credit, and used that to secure a bond. Rather than let NY state take control of them. I hope they do get seized by New York though.


  • What’s actually being traded right now is a small portion of the actual shares that will make up the new merged company. This dollar amount assumes that trump would be able to sell 60% of all stock in the company (which is much more than is available to trading right now), without sending the stock price right into the ground. That’s just not going to happen.

    This lockup period prevents him from selling for 6 months to prevent the share price from tanking just after the merger from insider selling, but the board could decide to remove that restriction so he could start offloading shares. Even if they don’t, when we get closer to lockup expiration I’m guessing the shares will likely begin tanking in anticipation of Trump doing this. He’d be dumb not to try and offload shares, the company is insanely overvalued.








  • You’re right to point out this is an observational, retrospective study showing only a correlation. So there are a lot of caveats there. I think this raises some potential concerns though that should be looked into further. Ideally in a prospective and more controlled way to better isolate the effects of intermittent fasting.

    There’s been many times in medical history where something that seems to make sense doesn’t pan out in the end or even causes harm. Studies like this are just step one, even the authors state they were expecting to show benefits and that this result was a complete surprise to them. We definitely need to be looking into this further to better quantify potential risks and benefits of intermittent fasting, especially with its popularity. It would be a shame if intermittent fasting did turn out to carry this risk though, there’s many people like you who have had success with it. It may be in the end that there are some populations it’s appropriate for and others it’s not. Needs more study for sure.



  • It would delay things further unfortunately, but this is so egregiously wrong and in such a long list of mistakes and/or illegitimate moves meant to provide cover for Trump, I don’t think there’s any recourse but for Jack Smith to move to have her taken off the case. Even more when you consider her involvement prior to these charges when she got improperly involved with the search warrant bussiness before a higher court told her off and dismissed the whole thing. Shame she’s the one assigned to the strongest and least legally controversial criminal case against him.


  • I heard some states have proposed laws pre emptively banning over the counter birth control, but I don’t think any of them actually passed yet.

    But to answer your question it likely depend on two things if a state were to ban it, supreme court rulings in these two cases currently being heard: Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine and Danco Laboratories v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, and who is elected president next year.

    Currently FDA officials are using interstate commerce powers to protect the shipping of abortion drugs across state lines, and theoretically they could continue to do that for birth control drugs (if the Supreme Court doesn’t rule against them and Trump doesn’t get elected and appoint new fda leadership hostile to women’s health).


  • “Coerce” is I think is what at issue in the case. I still think saying this ruling would give the US government “the power to define misinformation” is misleading. No one, even those arguing it was “coercion,” is arguing the government was using any legal powers to enforce their recommendations. The evidence shows in most cases they were being ignored if anything. And the appeals court was relying on some very faulty factual findings at the trial court level, much of which was pointed out in the supreme court hearing today. The previous rulings used many out of context quotes or even just portions of sentences to create something that wasn’t there. They also overstepped by insituting a very broad gag order across all government communications that has been very damaging. I’ll be surprised if the Supreme Court doesn’t rule in favor of the government here, especially based on their comments today, and don’t worry, the government still won’t have any legal powers to enforce their definitions of misinformation if the Supreme Court rules in their favor.

    I think the much greater threat to free speech comes in the form of the other Supreme Court cases heard last month (net choice v Paxton and moody v net choice), that would use the force of law to prevent social media companies from having any editorial discretion in what is posted on their sites. Despite what the Republicans pushing those laws claim, they are not in favor of free speech. The effext of those laws is, to quote the ACLU, “Under the guise of “prohibiting censorship,” these laws seek to replace the private entities’ editorial voice with preferences dictated by the government.” That’s the one that’s not only clearly coercive but comes with the force of law, and I would be very worried from a free speech perspective if the supreme court upheld those laws.

    https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-urges-supreme-court-to-uphold-preliminary-injunctions-against-laws-that-would-allow-the-government-to-regulate-editorial-discretion-on-social-media