I think https://progressquest.com/ is still going

The US spent a lot of money on soft power, essentially bribing countries to go along with their agenda. Much of that money did actually improve people’s lives, whether it was food aid, vaccinations, or AIDS care. Sure, it was to further their own objectives. Sure, it’s mostly because it’s cheaper to buy compliance than to bomb people into compliance. Humanitarian aid with strings attached is still humanitarian aid, though, or the collapse of USAID wouldn’t be such a problem.

The very broad funds definitely will - VTI/VTSAX - but at lower weights and under less time pressure than the rigid index funds (VOO/VFIAX). That takes off a lot of the liquidity squeeze and (presumably) reduces their loss.

But you have to remember that people who use these funds intentionally invest in obvious losers and willingly overpay for hyped stocks because they believe, in the long run, that buying obvious losers is more than balanced by also buying the unexpected winners.

SpaceX is just the first time an oligarch tried so obviously to rig the passive investor structure to his favor, and I’m glad the S&P people didn’t cave.

What I’ve seen indicates SpaceX will become something like 0.1% of S&P and 0.5% of Nasdaq. If a retirement fund is one of those indexes, and they get ‘forced’ to buy at 2x SpaceX’s eventual value, then that’s a loss of 0.05-0.2%. $50-200 on $100,000 principal.

Most normal people won’t notice that among the usual stock market noise. Over a hundred million account, though, it’s a huge amount of money getting funneled into the thousands accounts able to front-run the index inclusion, which means, in turn, a huge amount of money getting funneled into the dozens of VCs who got into SpaceX pre-IPO.

It’s like the scam from Office Space where they collect the rounding errors on interest.

According to the IPO docs, something like 90% of SpaceX’s future earnings are from its AI business, which it projects to have trillions of annual revenue. It’s a mystery to me why so many apparently serious investors are treating it like anything other than a scam.

Had a friend training for Iron Man. He’d do like 15 mile bike in to work (and back), 5 mile run at lunch, and swim in the evening. Dude would eat sticks of butter straight out of the refrigerator for lunch. I couldn’t watch.

Basically the same reason the US hasn’t switched to metric.

If you want the real answer…

Yeah, Orwell had the clarity of fighting against a literal right wing coup. A clear, decisive event to separate the non-violent time from the violent time, and violence instigated by people without even nominal consent of The People.

The slow rise of militancy, matched with spreading desperation, at least so far lacks a trigger. And in the particular case of the US, we have, like, 30 shootings a day just being us. That makes it a lot less shocking when a couple of those are government shootings. We let the right wingers take over the government (arguably, 250 years ago), and they’re just slowly boiling the frog.

I believe Orwell was speaking of the Spanish Revolution (1936), in which he fought on the side of the socialists.

Pacifism is a great ideal, and (I believe) a lot of conflicts can be solved by honest negotiation. Once the shooting starts, though, the time for pacifism has ended. In the US, right now, it’s not clear whether the shooting has started. I mean: ICE is definitely shooting people; people are definitely being injured and dying as result of the administration’s actions, but it’s not Shooting-shooting, and it still seems like avoidable, poor-policy harms. The question is: will it escalate to civil war level violence? And if it does, will strict pacifists already have blocked any hope of resistance?

You might think that ordering cases of canned tomatoes, or a 10-year supply of rubber gloves are poor management decisions, but that’s because this AI is playing seven dimensional chess against your tic-tac-toe. Just wait until it’s cornered the tomato market, and then you’ll see.

Maybe they do commercial customers different, but I’m about 30 miles north of the site in question, and my water use is reported in real time. I can even get a daily report from their web site. It’s hard to believe they’d be less interested in the usage of their 1e6-gallon-per-year commercial customers than their 1e4-gallon-per-year residential customers.

Water company can measure the water that leaves their pumping station(s) - just put a flow meter on the one big pipe. If that doesn’t match the sum of all their customer meters, then water is going somewhere else - broken pipe, illegal connection, meter fraud, whatever.

I would guess that most jurisdictions already have that one big flow meter, because they have to comply with water rights agreements, have to know how much chlorine & fluoride to inject, etc.

Kind of fascinating that they don’t do any kind of reconciliation of water delivered against water billed. You’d think that would be an easy thing to do and a good way to discover leaks (or theft). I mean, there would definitely be ‘missing’ water due to leaks, fire department, etc, but one imagines that would have some kind of normal/tolerable range, and that 30 million missing gallons would trigger some kind of investigation prior to customer complaints.