2rafa
15hr ago
Tattoos are degenerate and an affront to God. I always dislike people who have them at least a little. One of the best signs (along with being fat) of poor impulse control and general stupidity in an adult.
2rafa
1d ago
McDonald’s is in part a ‘real estate’ business because of its franchising system, wherein it acts as landlord to franchisees. McDonald’s therefore both makes money the usual way franchised restaurants do and on rent for those same franchise owners.
Red Lobster was not franchised. When it was sold in 2014, every single Red Lobster restaurant was owned and operated by the company itself. From an article from the time:
…Golden Gate, which bought the chain for $2.1 billion in 2014. At that time, virtually all of the real estate under Red Lobster restaurants was owned by the chain, which has no franchisees.
McDonald’s’ model isn’t typically attempted by most modern restaurant chains, even those that do franchise, because shareholders tend to prefer that excess profits are reinvested in growth or returned to them rather than used to buy commercial real estate which the investors could buy exposure to themselves to the extent that they want to.
2rafa
14hr ago
Israel can’t allow Palestinians to rule themselves before being pacified because Israel has no strategic depth. The Iron Dome vs Gaza is one thing, the risk of an October 7 repeat shoots up hugely if they get full control of Area C.
2rafa
1d ago
I mean, technically ‘white people’ are already a ‘protected class’ under the law as a racial group, and states like California make political ideology a protected status too (which is seemingly why Damore was able to negotiate a nice settlement with Google). What is more relevant is practice; since almost all major white collar economic activity occurs in deep blue states and cities, activist progressive judges and district attorneys can always selectively apply these laws to favored groups. It’s very rare for criminals who attack whites to be charged with racially aggravated offenses.
2rafa
1d ago
Yeah, but the whole reason this approach is even viable is because when Red Lobster was both real estate company and restaurant operator, investors valued it at less than the sum of its parts. Since the late 1980s conglomerates have fallen out of fashion because asset managers of all kinds prefer to deal with pure play companies (especially outside big tech) and to handle allocation themselves. The big Japanese conglomerates often trade at very poor multiples compared to Western businesses not only because of the state of the Japanese economy but because when you buy into one you’re buying into like 15 arbitrary and often barely related business areas. By contrast in the American equity market an investor can more easily measure and tailor their exposure to real estate, oil, railroads, video games, b2b SaaS and so on. Those looking for a preset diversified portfolio can buy an index or buy big holding companies like Berkshire or the public PE firms that have exposure to many different kinds of business.
2rafa
6hr ago
Niall Ferguson is a very widely read and famous popular historian who has made a living defending the British Empire. Sure, many leftists don’t like him for it, but they typically don’t like Israel either, and Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg and Newsweek so can hardly be considered cancelled by the mainstream. In general neoconservatives broadly defend the legacy of European (especially British) imperialism while acknowledging some limited atrocities.
2rafa
1d ago
The Saudi Option, whether @4bpp knows it or not, is actually not off the table at all, although not to the level of generosity that he proposes. Kushner strongly implied it was the central option discussed with MBS. It would likely take the form of a colonial Palestinian regime under Saudi control, perhaps as some kind of quasi-independent (in theory) ‘emirate’ ruling much of the West Bank, perhaps almost all of it (but in practice granting Jewish settlements full internal autonomy). In exchange Saudi Arabia could administer large parts of East Jerusalem, would gain official control over Al Aqsa (meaning all three core Islamic holy sites would be under Saudi Arabia) and there would some kind of joint funding deal for peacekeeping. The Muslim world would turn a blind eye to harsh secret police tactics used against the Palestinians by the Saudis, and Israel would officially recognize the “State” of Palestine under Saudi guardianship. This is also the most likely near term solution, though I wouldn’t say it’s likely in an absolute sense.
2rafa
1d ago
Private equity is just the corporate raiding/hostile takeover meme of the 1980s updated for the 21st century. Most medium and large private companies are very poorly run, the same way most major corporations were until the late 1980s. A combination of M&A and MBB consulting (mock them freely, but the sad thing is they were once necessary) dealt with most of the low hanging fruit in public markets, and takeover defense is now much better anyway, but in private companies things are still bad. PE is not typically a bad thing, and makes for more successful businesses that do more business and employ more people more often than not. Purely extractive moves still happen, but they’re disproportionately subjects of reporting and PE is now so well developed that (especially with higher rates) an extract what you can, sell-for-parts approach is less and less of a viable way to invest clients’ capital.
That said, selling corporate owned real-estate is a good thing for most businesses. There’s a reason why almost no major corporations other than super rich tech companies in the suburbs own their own corporate headquarters; when you own your premises, you’re a real estate company in addition to doing whatever else you do. Conglomerates are almost always undervalued by markets, it makes more sense for most companies to sign long leases, to focus on their core business as a pure play, and to leave real estate to asset managers and real estate developers who are valued on that basis and have expertise in that market.
2rafa
14hr ago
The Maronites were patrician intellectuals whose French-educated elite thought they could continue the colonial system indefinitely after colonialism. If they had agreed to let Israel help them build a Christian state in the late 1950s it would have been fine and they’d literally be living in a rich modern country by now. Their hubris destroyed them, a similar situation played out in South Africa with the Boers.
2rafa
3d ago
Men and women are both interested in politics if you ask about the actual issues in my opinion. But I’d concede that women are much more susceptible to “it’s called being a GOOD PERSON, GET IT?” reasoning. Women don’t want to be left out of the tribe, women are more willing to show fealty to high status ideas (a man will become a sycophant, will bow to his betters, but internally he is more likely to chafe at this; he won’t do it unless he is certain it’s absolutely necessary).
That’s not surprising since it tracks with extensive research about men much more frequently engaging in almost all riskier behavior. Heterodox politics are part of that.
2rafa
1d ago
It also involves listening to the Argentinian socialist in Rome, which American Catholics often seem to chafe at.
2rafa
2d ago
Even the most dedicated pro-Israelis concede that Palestinian casualties have always far exceeded Israeli ones, but Israel's war is the "extremely restrained" one?
It’s ridiculous to suggest that developing defensive technology that reduces your civilian casualties means you no longer have the right to respond to attempted acts of war against civilians to the same degree.
2rafa
8hr ago
Rather Sunak than Jeremy Corbyn, surely? I see (and would largely agree with) your position, but for Indians especially their political distribution does not appear substantially different than that of natives, and it’s telling that in recent years (as usual) it was the ethnics in the Tory party who wanted to clamp down on immigration while the native wets were largely reticent.
2rafa
8hr ago
The church is certainly still against both gay marriage and abortion, nevertheless the official position is still more conciliatory on many of these social issues than US tradcaths are happy with.
2rafa
8hr ago
If you bang one guy for 10 years during your twenties, while a loser male has one or two hookups but otherwise remains single and technically sexless for 8/10 of those years he still has an equal or higher body count to the woman. In this way measuring promiscuity by sexual partner count in the last year doesn’t make sense.
2rafa
1d ago
Since diversifying in one direction (racially, LGBTQ) will almost certainly run contrary to diversifying in another (political party registration) the law would appear likely to be inherently contradictory. All smart whites/asians/indians will quickly register as Republicans (whether they vote as such or at all is of course irrelevant).
What does a college do when faced with the direct trade off between hiring Democrat (overrepresented) black (underrepresented) faculty and hiring Republican (underrepresented) white male (overrepresented) faculty, if both types of rejected applicant threaten to sue?
This bill should pass because it will lead to SCOTUS having to bring down disparate impact or literally paralyze the entire American civil legal system.
2rafa
12hr ago
Certainly the Maronites are substantially responsible for the banking crisis, but that’s just what happens in highly fractured low trust countries with major sectarian disputes, every group is out for itself. I don’t think an independent 75% Christian Lebanon would be Switzerland or Denmark (or indeed secular Israel) but it would probably be a moderately corrupt Med country on the level of, say, Greece or Malta. They got away with it in part because every tribe there is corrupt and self-serving in its own way.
2rafa
1d ago
Almost all Palestinian Christians left (many long before Israel’s founding) so there aren’t really many left.
2rafa
1d ago
I think natives have known for centuries now that the idea of settlers leaving is ridiculous and would never happen, so they see the world in that way. And like you say, most modern natives are mixed-race. If you went to parts of Alaska, Hawaii or northern Canada I imagine you could find plenty of people who would happily say they’d like all Europeans to leave.
2rafa
1d ago
I think the raw classical economics argument for prohibiting most forms of takeover defense isn’t completely wrong, but it also isn’t entirely correct. Im based in the UK which bans many of the major tactics used in the US, and I don’t think UK pubcos are run better than American ones on the whole, but I think to me the biggest issue I have with US public companies is super voting shares. These were illegal in London until about 5 years ago; every share had to have the same voting power to be (in practice) eligible for a primary listing in London and for inclusion in indices. They changed it under pressure from the government because British tech companies were IPOing in the US to preserve founder control. I think it’s a hugely negative development in ECM for shareholders, banks and the wider public.
2rafa
1d ago
Few natives are left but in many cases I do think they’d vote emotively for settlers and descendants to leave. See the New Caledonia situation right now; the natives benefit tremendously from French rule but still want France and French people to leave.
2rafa
2d ago
If college admissions were determined by “algorithm” (paper or digital) then that algorithm would be obtainable in lawsuit discovery. If that algorithm involved rectifying disparate impact (to apply this law) by bolstering eg. black and Hispanic scores, it would directly contravene not only last year’s SCOTUS judgment but also the previous judgment that ruled direct quotas explicitly unconstitutional. It would appear, therefore, that using this new law to reimplement affirmative action would not be legal.
2rafa
2d ago
The majority of settled land in the white settler colonies (US, Canada, Australia, NZ, South Africa, Argentina) was not directly purchased from natives. Even prominent supposed historical sales, like the purchase of Manhattan, are not actually confirmed, just rumors written about later by other travellers. In Israel much land was purchased by Jewish settlers, much wasn’t. As in the other settler colonies, much of the territory was also simply claimed, or was purchased from absentee foreign landlords, or allocated by or purchased from other colonial authorities at that time. The Jews did insinuate themselves with ‘various local factions’, not least the legal administrators of the territory (the British) under the legal treaties that ended the First World War and which determined the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.
helped that faction defeat all the others
British Jews played an extremely prominent role in the expansion of the British Empire and ultimately in victory in WW1. Cecil Rhodes and other highly prominent British imperialists were agents of British Jewish families like the Rothschilds. British Jewish financiers funded the expansion of Empire and in part the defeat of the Triple Alliance powers. On the eve of the defeat the British began the process of agreeing to an eventual Jewish state in Palestine. This does not appear too dissimilar from those Spanish American examples.
2rafa
1d ago
Then everything counts as diversifying. You get sued for hiring too many white males? You’re diversifying politically. You get sued for hiring too many liberals? You’re diversifying racially. It effectively abolishes disparate impact anyway. Even progressive corporations will just use whatever excuse their lawyers tell them to.
Assassin’s Creed is more in the ‘Bridgerton’ school of historical fiction than the more realistic style. I don’t think the demographics of Bridgerton are propaganda to trick people into thinking the British aristocracy in 1820 or whatever was half black because so many other aspects of the show, from the music to the hair to the gender relations and sex are completely anachronistic. The casting is because it’s a show created by a black woman legendarily famous for self-insert characters. It’s “historical fiction” in the way that Disney’s Cinderella is.
In any case, the rage well has surely been mined with Assassin’s Creed to the point of utter depletion. A woman in 1868 London facing no instances of sexism was standard for the series back in 2015, so I find it hard to work up any performative outrage about a black samurai in 2024.
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