2rafa
4hr ago
He would challenge it as a targeted tax under bill of attainder rules since the population of trillionaires is just him and an arbitrary wealth threshold doesn’t cleanly constitute a class (the way a president does), and the courts (again, right-leaning circuit and then SCOTUS) would stay the tax as unconstitutional.
Any regulatory action will be stayed by a friendly Texas circuit judge and then blocked by SCOTUS as it would be (a) trivially obviously politically motivated and (b) a 5-4 or 6-3 vote along ideological lines. They’re also federal agencies so Trump’s inevitable pardon will be more effective. The big risk would be state level enforcement but Musk moves the corporate registration to Texas so even California and NY are pretty limited and it’s likely things would go the way the anti-Trump cases did under Biden except Musk will be able to hole up in Texas while Trump wanted to be able to campaign everywhere and had a lot more assets under (ultimately) his name in NY.
I don’t think you actually need to do any of this for Musk. Flatter him and call him a genius and say you’re in favor of UBI and other stuff he supports and he’ll be fine with you. His politics have flipped before and they can again when convenient.
2rafa
4hr ago
The route to stopping Musk for a Democratic president and majority is getting harder. Unlike Tesla where it’s possible they could lean on institutional shareholders to pressure him out (although they’d be very loathe to do so given it would tank the price), Musk has a supermajority of SpaceX voting rights. They could try to use the SEC to force him out of management, defense production acts to take control of operations etc but they would be stayed by a conservative fifth circuit judge, then blocked by SCOTUS, especially this SCOTUS. So they’d have to pack the court first, which requires abolishing the filibuster, which would make some on the center squeamish, etc etc. There’s also no real competition in a lot of places eg Starlink, NASA contracts are so long term they’re hard to change quickly. I assume they’d try to fund competitors, maybe offer generous tax breaks or state funding or exploratory contracts, but they couldn’t actually replace them, not quickly. They can investigate him for DOGE actions, securities law violations etc but I expect Trump will give him a blanket pardon for everything that he ever did in his entire life up until January 20th 2029 when he leaves office.
2rafa
5hr ago
Medium maturity diversified first world treasuries, money market funds, and a smaller proportion in developed world ex-US low PE, value equities with very little debt and what I judge to be very limited exposure to financials or tech. Some in IG credit funds that are again have limited or no exposure to finance, tech or media (the latter because I think it’s one of the first things to fall to AI disruption). If my work didn’t restrict me I’d probably keep a few high conviction emerging markets bets, but that’s only because I know what I’m looking for.
Last Thursday I finalized an almost total de-risking of the money I received / inherited when I was 18 from my parents. I had done similarly with my own modest investments / savings a few months ago (shortly before the Iran War) but resisted moving this, by far the actual majority of my wealth, out of US equities due to having to deal with a bunch of legal and other admin stuff I resisted doing for a decade because it seemed boring, tiresome and I’m low agency when I don’t immediately fear extreme loss.
Taking stock, in 12 years, more or less in diversified primarily-US and some global equities, with reinvestment, I made 400%. This is average for the last decade but an extremely outsized return compared to most periods in the history of capital markets. Few run-ups in mature, developed markets (and I am obviously counting from five years into the 2010-present cycle) have yielded better returns, ever.
I have my doubts about the memory melt up. Semiconductors are cyclical, investment is flooding in, prices will fall, and a full KOSPI and Micron collapse, which the current extreme yo-yoing portends, can cascade quickly into rapid deflation in parts of the component market for the data center bubble as the market re-assesses the real impact of extreme capacity increases coming online to produce chips (where the majority of the hundreds of billions raised has been pledged to hardware bought at bubble prices and tied to absurdly optimistic depreciation schedules), which is in turn tied into a huge amount of private equity and debt that was itself provided extensive back-leverage by banks and insurers (including those owned by some of the same PE firms).
The thing about really big bubbles, and I’m not in any sense calling the top, is that the final run-up is the true test of the investor - the last few months or years can see another doubling or more of asset prices because earnings boom (as they are now) and so markets boom, and so earnings boom etc in a very rapid quarterly feedback loop. Extreme pricing power is sustainable in some sectors, some of the time. Not in every sector, indefinitely. The S&P 500 might hit ten thousand points before a big crash. But I’m happy with my 400%, I’m a neurotic, and it seems to me that greed for / FOMO on money I don’t really need is needless risk at this stage. Still, it felt nice to write the above out.
I will re-assess early next year, I think.
2rafa
16hr ago
It’s a ticket clipping operation but in certain cases with insane leverage which in a real crisis where crazy things happen for short periods in the repo market (like they did in 2008) could blow up in an interesting way.
2rafa
1d ago
Most Jane Street traders aren’t cheating or doing anything interesting. They’re exploiting tiny quirks in foreign derivatives markets or the repo market / basis trade or creating ever more complex ways to eke out margin when ETFs rebalance all with huge leverage so that 1bp becomes a moderately large figure.
There are definitely still hedge fund types who engage in the traditional shadier kind of business, but they’re not quants, they’re big global/regional macro or sector/theme funds run by guys in their sixties whose claim to fame was correctly calling one big crash in the last 35 years.
2rafa
1d ago
In any market, consistent excess returns are the product of superior information, superior analysis, or both. So whatever you’re betting on, do you earnestly believe you have either?
2rafa
2d ago
There are plenty of nice suburbs like Beaconsfield, Gerrard’s Cross etc where you can live in a big suburban house and take the train in direct or nearly direct to the City for work.
2rafa
4d ago
Is there another 90% of the video that everyone else is watching to understand what happened here?
2rafa
4d ago
There is no Jewish equivalent to the Catholic Church. This is actually relevant to this topic. Take something you and I have discussed many times, which is the that Jews support an ethnostate that is politically designed to preserve their demographic majority in Israel but promote mass immigration to the West. We can both agree that some do and some don’t, although we disagree on the proportion in each group.
The Catholic Church, though, is a legal and hierarchical entity to which its adherents must maintain a degree of underlying institutional loyalty, as the timely drama discussed above about the SSPX helpfully shows. If the Pope wants you out, you’re out. Leading rabbis in various Jewish sects can arbitrarily decide Jews are or aren’t devout, following the rules, or even Jewish at all (in the case of rules around patrilineal descent, conversion etc), but there is no universal standard; even in Israel where there is a semi-formal structure for religious courts some rabbis are far more lenient than others and scholars in the same niche chareidi sects overrule each other on interpreting the Talmud and indeed Torah all the time.
The Catholic Church has a leader who hands out judgments its members have to follow. You can be a Catholic who doubts or disagrees with some of them to an extent (which I noted when mentioning lay Catholics in my comment), but it is also correct to say that the Catholic Church, as an organization, believes or supports something. The Catholic Church supports mass immigration to Western lands. Those who oppose it have views that run directly contrary to the objective governing structure of the Church in America and globally. This is more like saying “Russia wants to permanently occupy Crimea”. It is not reasonable to ascribe this motivation to every Russian, but it is reasonable to ascribe it to the Russian state.
You may reply that Jews are a nation, or consider themselves one, but if this is taken literally it is an anarchist nation rather than a coherent or governed polity - unlike both Russia and the Catholic Church.
2rafa
5d ago
In which countries would you say the Catholic Church has actual political power?
This is quite the broad banded statement, though, or woolly as somebody else said below. If ‘taking in the needy’ includes opinions as diverse as ‘protect a white demographic supermajority, deport millions and ban all nonwhite immigration’ (the way Groyper Catholics like Nick Fuentes want) and ‘take in the entire world, legalize all illegal migrants, create legal routes for the global south’ (the way those on the radical left of the Church want) then it’s an essentially meaningless statement.
What we can actually observe from:
- The central role the institution of the Catholic Church has played in resettling migrants into America and Western Europe under both liberals like Leo and conservatives like Benedict
- The public messaging of church leaders including almost all senior Western European and American bishops and various Popes themselves
- The significant lobbying the Church has engaged in to water down naturalization law, legalize illegal migrants and so on in countries like Spain, the US and elsewhere
…is that the Church’s policy here is actually very clear. And the Catholic Church is actually an organization. It’s not an ideological grouping. It’s an actual club, with a members list and an initiation ritual and regular meetings and a management structure and a leader and if you are a member of it, then to some extent it is reasonable to expect that you broadly agree with the organization. This is different from Lutheranism or Judaism or Islam, which have religious organizations but none that can lay claim to the institutional support of anywhere close to a majority of adherents.
I’m afraid that according to Boris’ own article on that 2006 incident, helpfully scanned here he was asked if he had previously held a US passport (and he answered yes). In fact, this was explicitly the question the agent asked him. He had also written many times about being a US citizen in articles one presume could be easily found on Google even back then.
A very different situation from the Italian in Count’s comment.
2rafa
6d ago
I probably phrased that poorly. There are plenty of attempts, but I think a true success is rare. Usually one parent will surrender at some point.
2rafa
6d ago
In the event of a truly accidental American the IRS never finds out. You’re an Italian businessman, you’ve never applied for a US passport, your parents travel insurance paid for your birth (or they skipped town and never paid), you travel to the US solely on your Italian passport if you ever do so and are welcomed as a foreigner. If Customs sees your ‘place of birth’ as the US, they won’t care, and in the very unlikely event they do, the businessman tells them his parents were diplomats or soldiers or UN. They will not ask for proof. The IRS isn’t going to track down hospital records in Philadelphia from 50 years ago to deduce that there might be an American somewhere in the world who didn’t pay taxes.
Most ‘accidental Americans’ are not accidental at all. There’s a huge growth industry of third world PMCs flying to the US to give birth so their kids get citizenship.
2rafa
6d ago
In families where both parents speak eg English and another (but different language), the child usually adopts the host country language and the mother’s language. I’ve almost never encountered a true 3-language polyglot OPOL situation outside of like Switzerland, Luxembourg, or those African countries (and to some extent India) where speaking 3-4+ languages is semi-common.
In the more normal situation you discuss, I think it’s fine. Mom speaks Mandarin when she’s alone with the kids, you speak English together at dinner, you ship the kids off to their grandparents in China for a month every summer. Problem solved.
2rafa
6d ago
I certainly didn’t move to London to get away from immigration (besides being an immigrant here myself, the demographics of London are pretty similar to NYC). I moved for work, stayed for the vibe (and eventually love).
2rafa
7d ago
An original American would say it's a papist conspiracy to flood the United States with papist hispanics so the Pope can rule over the US.
They might, and that would be closer to an accurate interpretation of today’s decision than that of many a modern American political commentator.
2rafa
7d ago
Jews are of course overrepresented in leftism, but today wasn’t about Jews. The only Jewish person on the Supreme Court, appointed as a liberal justice, voted with the liberals, as would be obvious. In the same way, the black justice appointed as a liberal voted with the liberals, and the black justice appointed as a conservative voted with the conservatives.
The travesty is that three conservative Catholics - including two (ie enough to invert the majority ruling) appointed by the current President - voted to oppose his reasonable agenda, made clear more than a decade ago, to deter illegal immigration, which they conveniently didn’t mention opposing until now, long after their appointment by said president.
SCOTUS: Catholics for Mass Immigration
As a gambit, Trump and Miller’s was always an extremely long shot, but it acts as an illustration of the seriousness of the national issue, and of the pernicious role of intellectual catholicism on the American right. This has less to do with lay Catholics, who are sometimes reactionary and sometimes liberal, or with very online rightist Catholics, whose devotion is questionable but who largely find the maximalist aesthetic interesting or more defensible than megachurch Christianity, which I sympathize with, or who find inspiration in its (arguable, the reality is rather mixed) historical antisemitism for their own LARPing.
One thing Roberts, Kavanaugh and ACB have in common is that they are all the court’s Catholic Intellectuals as an ideological grouping. This separates them from the other Catholics on the Supreme Court - Thomas left Catholicism and then came back to it but his conservatism is not distinctly Catholic (we can argue about this but it isn’t the thrust of my argument) and largely appears to view himself a jurist in both a conservative and a black conservative tradition that is not Catholic; his mentor and inspiration Sowell is (surprised to be writing is here - he’s 96 and still kicking) an atheist by all accounts. Alito is more devout but invented his own complex rationale for abandoning any form of integralism and essentially adopting WASPlite Conservatism With Ellis Islander Characteristics. Gorsuch rejected Catholicism. Sotomayor is nominally Catholic but openly lapsed as per her writings, so there is no need to even get into ideology with her.
Roberts, ACB and Kavanaugh are all much more products of the institutional Catholic Church. They continue to have senior roles in ‘official’ or semi official church organizations from which it would be extremely humiliating to be removed and where they ultimately, beyond many abstract layers of theological management, answer to the Pope, who is basically Zohran Mamdani if he was a little uncomfortable around abortion. If Thomas was denied communion on account of his politics I imagine he would laugh or ignore it; if ACB was I think she’d be very, very upset indeed, and it is laughable to think this isn’t the kind of motivator these people (who have spent most of their lives in this Catholic intellectual bubble surrounded by other Catholics) care about.
Catholicism is essentially a third-worldist institution - the largest, best funded, and most successful on earth - and has been for many decades. Third worldism as envisioned by its proponents was always more about the ‘south’ versus the ‘north’ (meaning countries with demographically european majorities, plus maybe japan) than it was about achieving socialism, which was really a second-tier target. Third worldism’s central organizing objective is ameliorating this supposed imbalance, this terrible and - in the eyes of the Church and its intellectual adherents - un-Christian state of affairs. Mass immigration is the central tool in this toolkit, since with enough of it (due to the vast majority of the world’s population being in the “global south”) the global north simply ceases to exist and one has won by Largely Peaceful™️ (and therefore very Christian) default. Catholicism is a global, transnational, extremely well functioning institution able to deploy tens of billions of (often tax) dollars towards this ideological aim; even more importantly, it has an entire ecosystem of forums, think tanks, colleges (including those on whose board the Roberts’ sit and with whom ACB has her central academic affiliation) and lobbying groups that exist to convince other ‘conservative’ Catholics (in the sense that they support some semblance of traditional marriages restriction of abortion etc) that mass immigration is actually lindy, wholesome chungus, and holy and you will go to hell if you fight it just as if you were a rapist, a murderer, or got ten abortions.
The US Conference of Catholic Bishops (the closest the US Church has to a governing body) is staunchly pro-life but staunchly pro-immigration. So is the (American) Pope. Conservatism for me and my issues, but not for thee and yours, you might say. By some estimates, USCCB affiliates have settled more than 30% of all refugees to the United States since 1980, almost all from the third world. Expecting this to have no impact on the court’s conservative justices, 5/6 of whom are somewhat Catholic and 3/6 (the aforementioned) are closely tied to the modern Catholic intellectual tradition was delusional. The Catholic Church is almost definitionally, as a transnational organization, less concerned with national borders. Far more of its adherents are would-be migrants and refugees than the people who would suffer in rich countries by their presence. Over the last two progressive papacies, by far the majority of the Catholic Church’s opprobrium for the United States has been about mass, and especially illegal, immigration. Of course, statistically, most Central and South American and Haitian illegal migrants - who are the migrants actually affected by the birthright citizenship debate since they can’t naturalize themselves - are literally Catholic.
This is part of the problem of talking about ‘social conservatism’ versus ‘economic conservatism’ or liberalism. If you hate abortion and have a kind of condescending pity for homosexuals but support the third-worldification of America, you are still a tradcon and the right will cheer as you’re appointed to the Supreme Court. Amy Coney Barrett has Haitian children. There are hundreds of thousands of Haitians illegally resident in the US, who have kids who look just like her kids but who weren’t lucky enough to be adopted by a rich American family. She was never going to vote to repeal birthright citizenship which, for all the legalistic arguments, is an inherently nativist-sympathetic move (just as it was when England repealed it in 1981, and when Australia did 5 years later), even if its proponents profess to and indeed do support mass immigration in general. Is your country for the world or is it, at least, for you and the people you choose to let in?
In America, our Catholic rulers have decided it is for the world.
2rafa
7d ago
Believing that it’s actually 5-4 requires believing that either Kavanaugh will fold or that Congress (to satisfy him) passes the requisite law with a 60 seat senate majority which the GOP is not going to have, and even if it did have it you’d need in the region of 65-70 GOP senators because the liberals will vote against it just like Roberts and ACB did.
I don’t think there’s anything on his death that could be said that hasn’t been. It is almost the least interesting of the famous celebrity suicides of that decade.
But I do think he wanted a grand exit. He wanted to show that bitch that broke his heart. This is what narcissists are wont to do. It’s why your piece of shit ex threatens to kill themselves when you break up with them. They won’t do it, probably, but it adds a grandiose element to their wallowing, to their pitiable state.
Some were always going to follow through. He wanted to show her, he wanted to make a woman he thought was uncaring (about him) suffer. You can’t do that in life. Complaining about an ex lover leaving you for a younger man isn’t really socially acceptable, even for women it makes you look pathetic and for men it’s worse. He obviously didn’t want to move on. The ego was bruised. Death seemed a final victory over her.
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