coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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7hr ago
ChatGPT has gotten a lot better at finding me studies about topics. It is giving me actual, relevant studies, whereas it used to literally provide fictitious study names. This is going to be so fun to play around with.
coffee_enjoyer
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7hr ago
A lot has been said about QAnon, but it is definitely religious in nature: parables, eschatology, cryptic sacred text, prophecy involving Trump triumphing in the last days… indeed that it is called “Q” anon always made me think this was conscious: academic scholars believe that the gospel was preceded by a “Q” document of sayings, which were then disseminated and interpreted by the anon posters apostles
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
When you read your culture’s “sacred texts” you might find metaphorical language involving lords, sowing, shepherds, servants. But these metaphors were not sacred or otherworldly when they were written. They were everyday things common to everyone, the building blocks of a person’s cognition. Everyone dealt with lords and knew how shepherds worked etc. Were these religions penned today, the metaphors they would use would involve phones, recharging, guns, internet access, and homework, as these are the new cognitive blocks common to mankind. “The Lord comes with a sword of justice” is fantastical to us, but the modern equivalent would be “the President and his congress of angels comes with an assault rifle of justice”.
Looks like the private equity is the “real estate company” and Red Lobster is the leaser*
In 2014, amid flagging sales and pressure from investors, Darden sold Red Lobster for $2.1 billion to Golden Gate Capital, a San Francisco private-equity firm. To raise enough cash to make the deal happen, Golden Gate sold off Red Lobster's real estate to another entity — in this case, a company called American Realty Capital Properties — and then immediately leased the restaurants back
"The thing that private equity does is just unload assets and monetize assets. And so they effectively paid for the purchase of Red Lobster by selling the real estate," he said. "It'll probably be fine, generally, but there's going to come a time in which your sales fall, your profitability is challenged, and your debt looks too bad, and then suddenly those leases are going to look awfully ugly."
"Once they sell the real estate, then the private-equity company is golden, and they've made their money back and probably more than what they paid," she said, noting that this was a common theme in other restaurants and retailers and adding: "The retail apocalypse is all about having your real estate sold out from under you so that you have to pay the rent in good times and in bad."
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
People are dying to understand their life through symbols and condensed wisdom. Tattoos are the primitive form of this, the detailing of one’s ideals / status / life progress onto the body, as you always have the body with you and your body is always on display to others (tattoos in Europe are at least 6000 years old). This is probably why tattoos and astrology have much in common. Then there are other motives. It is a “gauntlet” experience, where the pain must be experienced to obtain the end reward, which is its own primitive ritual of costly signal. It is a costly signal of one’s own commitment to an identity, it is saying to oneself, “this is important and I commit to me”; human identity is fluid and capricious without identity-forming rituals, and tattooing takes the fluid and inscribes it permanently to the flesh. Lastly it allows one to imitate and conjoin to a celebrity or social scene, but that has more to do with instantiating the reasons above.
Fast food chains like McDonald’s make most of their money by picking really good real estate locations. Red Lobster may have been doing the same, and once their mediocre business stopped being profitable they decided to simply transition to real estate. The “losses” may be beneficial in terms of tax deductions for the parent company, the business being maintained for that reason while they are in it for the real estate. From some googling,
Red Lobster's customer base tends to be older, with a significant portion of their customers falling into the 50s and 60s age range
Okay, so the writing was on the wall. That was 10 years ago. They made their business decision to maximize how much money enters their pockets. The idea that the chain’s demise was caused by unsavory bottom feeding prawns proles is a silly WSJ (the opposite of SJW) fiction that allows the corporation leaders behind the scenes to shift blame to, I don’t know, poor people who like sea food deals. Gah, if only there were a way to prevent them from sharing shrimp! That didn’t smell fishy to anyone? Hook line and sinker people fell for it.
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
nothing in the article makes likely a FARA violation
Seeking guidance from Israel in the context of a chat whose express purpose is actively changing politics in favor of Israel is more probably a FARA violation than not, because the very act of seeking guidance implies acting under the direction of a foreign principal. So, theoretically, we would just need to confirm that more than intending a FARA violation, they actually received the guidance and acted on it in some capacity.
There’s also
Members of the group also worked with the Israeli government to screen a roughly 40-minute film
Sitt wrote on Nov. 10 that the Israeli government “arranged for us” to screen the film in Gotham Hall
This is a semi-private chat. What are they doing privately when we know they at least aspired to commit FARA crimes?
unless action is taken on order or request [or direction] of said foreign government or an agent thereof.
As I contextualized in my OP, the billionaires have agents attending private meetings with government heads, and in all likelihood have connections with Mossad, and it seems are specifically asking them how to conduct pro-Israel advocacy. If the heads, of if the Mossad agents, have given them a direction or a request as it relates to their advocacy efforts, then they would be violating FARA. This is regardless of their original desire. Otherwise, no one would ever have to register for FARA (“I want to help Paraguay. Now I will go to Paraguay and they will tell me exactly what to do, but it’s okay because the original impetus was my own.”). A person’s original impetus is immaterial to whether their actions are being directed by a foreign principal. At its broadest,
any person who acts as a representative or in any other capacity under the direction of a foreign principal (or [under the direction] of a person any of whose activities are directly or indirectly supervised in major part by a foreign principal),
and who directly or through any other person:
engages within the United States in political activities for or in the interests of such foreign principal;
or acts within the United States as a public relations counsel, publicit agent, information-service employee or political consultant for or in the interests of such foreign principal;
or within the United States represents the interests of such foreign principal before any agency or official of the Government of the United States
Now back to the WaPo article:
From the start of the chat, members sought guidance and information from officials in the Israeli government.
This is blatantly illegal per FARA. They are acting (1) in a capacity (2) under the direction of a foreign principle (3a) in the interest of the foreign principal (3b) and engaging in political activity.
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The article mentions shutting things down and changing the narrative and applying leverage as the intentions of the group. This involves molding public opinion and politicians. Are you implying that Americans shouldn’t find it newsworthy when billionaires get together to scheme about changing the narrative about an important event? This is reported in the news when it occurs, eg oil billionaires have spent such and such to change their public image, the military spent this and that, Wendy’s spent so and so… I would imagine gentile Americans widely find it significant if the narrative is being molded by individuals who identify with a foreign nation. [edited grammar]
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Act and it is described in my post
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I don’t know what Hamas protest you are referring to. If it should have been immediately dispersed, why did it take a dozen billionaires to effect that? Is NYC antisemitic now?
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
Big media outlets have low public trust, so they shouldn’t be used as a litmus test for whether a story is true or important. And there are a lot of legal things which nevertheless demand our attention. IMO notable takeaways from this are —
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The public narrative about an important foreign policy issue is molded by ethnic identitarian billionaires who have maximal “skin in the game”, or motive to be biased. “Jewish” is an implementation detail here, the crux of the problem is that a group of hyper-biased billionaires are changing the narrative on a highly sensitive issue which demands impartial objectivity. This influence is not counterbalanced by another force because Palestinians simply aren’t as numerous, wealthy, powerful, or tribal in America. Given that their influence is secretive, we can’t know whether a mayor or police chief is doing something because it is right or because of influence. We similarly can’t know whether a big media outlet is biased or not. IMO this means that the American public must be ultra-careful about scrutinizing information about both Israel and the protests. As another user mentioned ITT, the story of former IDF soldiers(?) clobbered the skulls of students with planks got less coverage than it would were a group of a former Iranian soldiers clobbering Jewish students. And that the police turned a blind eye on this makes one wonder whether it was a Jewish billionaire’s influence behind the scenes that encouraged it through proxies (“I will fund your campaign / give your daughter an internship / withdraw my donation / …”). That is unevidenced, but that doesn’t mean it is improbable. All we know is what they are doing in a semi-private group chat, so what they do behind the scenes could be less wholesome.
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There is potentially something illegal occurring, because these activists are being briefed by the Israeli government officially, and likely by Mossad operatives unofficially.
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Although the law states that protests need the proper certificates, Moral Law unequivocally states that all laws must be impartially applied. Moral law states that once you have biasedly applied a law, there no longer is a law anymore, just tyranny with a side of lying. I think that the norm during BLM was that protests on campuses did not need all the proper certificates. I would rather not have authorities selectively deciding “who gets to protest the most” based on secretive political interests by tribalistic billionaires.
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
The article doesn’t mention a single gentile Zionist among the group, which is statistically improbable. We don’t know if all of these billionaires are Zionists definitionally (“Israel is the divine homeland of Jews”), but we at least know they are all Jewish. They may believe that Israel is not a divinely-decreed homeland while still being driven to lobby for the Jews that are in Israel and for the Jews on college campuses.
But maybe a word like “institutional Judaism” or “structural Judaism” would be better terminology to use? “Mainstream Judaism” even? It’s good to recognize that not every Jewish person supports Israel, but it’s also blindness to ignore that the vast majority of Jewish institutional power and influence is behind Israel. On a resource-level basis, how many Jewish billionaires are openly against Israel? Maybe 1 or 2? Could it be that 96% of Jewish capital throws its support behind Israel, or something like that?
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
Jewish billionaires conspire to change the narrative on the protests. From WaPo. (Archive link)
A group of billionaires and business titans working to shape U.S. public opinion of the war in Gaza privately pressed New York City’s mayor last month to send police to disperse pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, according to communications obtained by The Washington Post.
Business executives including Kind snack company founder Daniel Lubetzky, hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, billionaire Len Blavatnik and real estate investor Joseph Sitt held a Zoom video call on April 26 with Mayor Eric Adams (D), about a week after the mayor first sent New York police to Columbia’s campus, a log of chat messages shows. During the call, some attendees discussed making political donations to Adams, as well as how the chat group’s members could pressure Columbia’s president and trustees to permit the mayor to send police to the campus to handle protesters, according to chat messages summarizing the conversation.
Some members also offered to pay for private investigators to assist New York police in handling the protests, the chat log shows — an offer a member of the group reported in the chat that Adams accepted
The messages describing the call with Adams were among thousands logged in a WhatsApp chat among some of the nation’s most prominent business leaders and financiers, including former CEO of Starbucks Howard Schultz, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and Joshua Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital [..] The chat was initiated by a staffer for billionaire and real estate magnate Barry Sternlicht[…] In an Oct. 12 message, one of the first sent in the group, the staffer posting on behalf of Sternlicht told the others the goal of the group was to “change the narrative”
The chat group formed shortly after the Oct. 7 attack, and its activism has stretched beyond New York, touching the highest levels of the Israeli government, the U.S. business world and elite universities. Titled “Israel Current Events,” the chat eventually expanded to about 100 members, the chat log shows. More than a dozen members of the group appear on Forbes’s annual list of billionaires; others work in real estate, finance and communications
“He’s open to any ideas we have,” chat member Sitt, founder of retail chain Ashley Stewart and the global real estate company Thor Equities, wrote April 27, the day after the group’s Zoom call with Adams. “As you saw he’s ok if we hire private investigators to then have his police force intel team work with them.”
The mayor’s office did not address it directly, instead sharing a statement from deputy mayor Fabien Levy noting that […] “The insinuation that Jewish donors secretly plotted to influence government operations is an all too familiar antisemitic trope that the Washington Post should be ashamed to ask about, let alone normalize in print.”
One member asked if the group could do anything to pressure Columbia trustees to cooperate with the mayor. In reply, former congressman Ted Deutch (D-Fla.), CEO of the American Jewish Committee, shared a PDF of a letter his organization had sent that day to Columbia President Minouche Shafik calling on her to “shut these protests down.”
Usually I wouldn’t post so much from the body of an article, but there’s a lot of information to unpack here. It appears that Jewish donors secretly plotted to influence government operations, as well as the highest levels of media and academia. This comes after Mitt Romney admitted the tik tok ban was influenced by the extent of pro-Palestine content. IMO this is going to be used in American discourse about Jewish power for many years to come. You have Jewish billionaires across industries banding together to manipulate the narrative, influence politicians, and “shut it down” — literally a trope of Jewish power. The influence here is, frankly, incredible: a dozen billionaires alone, conspiring with journalists and academics and advocacy group leaders, talking about using black celebrities to push their narrative and applying “leverage” to university presidents. As Cenk Uygur tweeted (no friend of the alt right), “You can't complain about the trope, if you do the trope”.
I kind of wonder if some of this is even illegal. Not that I am naive enough to believe a charge would occur if it were. They are sitting down in briefings with the Israeli government and discussing how to best push their influence machine. Isn’t this lobbying on behalf of a foreign power?
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
If we are trying to see how work culture affects Israel versus Japan we have to look at more than one narrow factor. “Part time” is one example of a larger “occupational breakdown” which I specifically mentioned —
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labor force participation: Japan’s is 74% it seems, Israel’s is at 59% for women. This 15% difference is enormous
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We have to add potentially 22 hours at the end of the month to Japanese overtime work https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h01577/#::text=Japanese%20worked%20on%20average%2022.2,overtime%20on%20average%20per%20month.
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The average Israeli part time worker works 22 hours, but it appears they the average Japanese part time worker (<40) works more than that just inferencing from graph break down
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I can’t find an actual apple’s to apple’s “average hours worked”; israel’s tells me among full time workers it’s 43hrs, Japan just tells me the top ~38% work at least 40
I have no idea why you hate complexity
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
An exercise to the reader: 65% of men in Britain walk more the 3 miles a day, but only 40% of men in Ethiopia do the same. The top 20% of Ethiopian walkers walk on average 20 miles a day (and over grueling terrain), whereas the top 20% of walkers in Britain average only 4 miles (over sidewalks). Which population is more likely to be negatively affected from the problems of long walks? Clearly you are very smart, or at least you wish to indicate that, so I do not need to explain further. Whether the above distinction also applies to Japan versus Israel is an empirical question which you lack the intellectual humility to even consider, whereas my take is “let’s try to find the data”.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
If you were to write your ideal daily/morning mindset into a prayer, what would it be? (ie, putting to words the important unconscious cognition.) Were you to devise one daily prayer for all of humanity, what would it be?
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
That is awesome.
There are other factors than just “checks off working full time”: difference in what full time hours mean and difference in reported/worked because of Japanese culture
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
Even among those with full-time jobs, women work fewer hours than men: averaging 43 hours a week, compared to 47 hours on average for men (2015). Among full-time employees in Israel, the difference in work hours between men and women is among the highest in the OECD.
Now we just need a number on real (not necessarily reported) Japanese work hours
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
I am not sure if a 40-day ice storm can be compared with years of chronic stress occurring pre-pregnancy, during pregnancy, and in the post-pregnancy years crucial for childhood development. Table 2 in your study shows a .24 effect size for cognitive development due to ice storms however. What I do is plug in “maternal stress [serious problem]” into google scholar and consider those results. I have never come across a study that attempted to unify all of the different provlems caused by stressed mothers. We have:
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autism: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/aur.1830 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00127-019-01745-3
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obesity: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/obr.12951
The above are for prenatal stress, and so don’t factor for stress during motherhood, breastfeeding technique, extent of breastfeeding (huge differences in yr+ exclusive feeding and gradual weening)
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
As I neurotically must bring up in every topic on fertility, the “Abraham Orthodox” (Amish, Haredi) have retained very high birth rates despite the latter living in the densest and most expensive part of the country and having very little money. What they do differently, and what others don’t do, is (1) make motherhood the only real female social value, and (2) train women at a young age to be mothers adept at homemaking tasks. My hobby horse comes out of this battle unscathed.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
generates more economic value
Actually we can’t say this. At least not what it really denotes. Stressed working women raise less healthy, less intelligent children who are more likely to have behavioral problems. Stressed and older women and women who do not breastfeed correctly or nurture correctly are more likely to have children with autism. Intelligent working women give up on producing more offspring who are also intelligent, and the productivity gains from the very intelligent are outsized. Although there is not a study on this next one, it’s likely that stressed working women lead to unhappier, less healthy husbands, which cuts the productivity of all men, while also sapping their political participation due to household multitasking.
It would be far more economically valuable in toto and longterm if women focused on their biological role of mothers, wives, and homemakers. For the best of both worlds, restrict the lowest stress occupations to young women. And then if we really cared about wealth (what economic productivity ought to denote) we can ban makeup and so on. It’s truly dystopian to think that there are double doctor households where the male doctor is more stressed because he doesn’t have a homemaker to rely on, the female doctor (an intelligent woman who you want having lots of children) is delaying childbirth and then having only 1-2 less healthy and less intelligent children with a high rate of autism, and at the end of the day they are both unhappy despite being “economically productive”, and the naive economists think this is somehow a net gain for the country because their profession is narrow minded.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
Numbers are only useful if we know occupational breakdown of women. Obvious a part time service work position is not going to impinge on birth rates.
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
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Considerations to divest from Israel are becoming mainstream: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/05/13/metro/campus-protests-divestment-harvard-antisemitism/ [2].
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Youth shift against Israel: “Views of the Israeli people have soured among younger Americans in recent years. The share of adults under 30 with a favorable view of the Israeli people has fallen 17 percentage points since 2019”.
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Many formerly agnostic social influencers have come out against Israel specifically thanks to the protests, eg Jack Dorsey, Dan Bilzerian. Presumably many other wealthy and influential players are revising their opinions privately, not wanting to upset the clannish and powerful Israel machine.
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
I can work on a post about new compelling evidence implicating Israel in the anthrax attacks of 2001 if that interests anyone
One of the more interesting “conspiracy theories” I’ve read was a comment about how athletic / athleisure brands no longer use scenes of competitive dominance in their marketing. Instead of scenes of glorious victory, you find scenes of drills and weightroom practice, occasionally alone or on an empty court. This was a decision to market to those who only occasionally exercise or who purchase the consumer goods as a signal (to themselves or others) that they are athlete-coded. The aspirational messaging can't depict competitive victory because the person who just goes to the gym after work doesn’t compete at all, so the marketing valorizes the act of “progress”, “improvement” alone. They want to feel like they are a “great athlete to be”, in training, rather than a competitor pursuing competitive dominance.
And this relates to that marathon jersey. By producing a cutoff jersey you are delegitimizing the whole attraction to running gear. If a norm of showing off your competitive times through trademarked clothing developed, then putting on Nike running shoes now signals to everyone that you are not athlete coded, but a poser (the skateboarding culture equivalent of wearing vans but unable to kickflip). The consumer is no longer dressing like the high status royal but a Don Quixote. It’s stolen valor.
So I wonder, did the journalistic criticism of this company originate with a brand like Nike? Maybe. But it could have also been a marketing ploy by the company; “people are mad about this” is a way to say “look at this”. I’m more tempted to think the cause is the former, because running magazines likely have major deals with the big giants.
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