Do any of you have a good source of financial news that isn't too right wing and explains things like the Intel deal? Or even just a really dry but not too technical source. The government bought a tenth of a company with left over CHIPS act money? But also Taiwan is in it too for some reason. I don't understand what they are even doing.
Can the government buy a tenth of my cousin's sticker etsy shop for national security? I'm confused.
Presumably Taiwan is in on this because that's where all the chips are actually made and Intel was at least ten years away from being able to build anything here that could sufficiently reach that scale. (But at this rate I'm wondering if they can even do that if they don't fix their business issues and maybe give up this whole unified design to go with the more effective chiplet design.)
I'm a bit surprised anyone in this administration can remember Taiwan isn't China.
@myrmepropagandist There was an NPR program that fit this description and that was The Motley Fool. I'm gonna go see if I can hunt that up online. =========== Yes, they have their own website but they look like they sure grew up huge since their founding in 1993, providing paid-for advice programs and such. fool.com/
The Motley Fool has been providing investing insights and personal finance to millions of people for over 25 years. Learn how we make the world Smarter, Happier & Richer.
HIGHLY recommend Matt Levineβs Money Stuff newsletter. Heβs super smart, very funny, and doesnβt lose sight of the big picture that the financial system is supposed to make life better for people.
This doesn't answer directly so apologies. I'm finishing reading Chip Wars by Chris Miller. Chips are made primarily in Taiwan & considered a national security interest as most military components contain chips, and the US doesn't have reliable manufacturing. There is a history in the feds getting financially involved in these industries. How the feds currently prove an industry is in the interest of national security is β('ο½`;)β ? Etsy stores should be safe for now.
It was obvious very early (1970s) that there would only be a single chip manufacturer standing. (Everybody talks about Moore's Law, but the cost to create the fab doubles, too, not just the chip performance.)
Intel figured they were the Lord's anointed and made repeated strategic errors: x86/Itanium (could be three), ignoring power efficiency, not making phone chips for Apple, relying on monopoly power/Wintel leverage for market share, and missing graphics processing.
This has a bunch of consequences; the major one (anything not a phone is a niche device) is that Apple put billions upon billions into full vertical integration which funded TSMC for the half what wasn't "not in our strategic interests to deal with those monopolists at Intel" (any value of strategic you want, there); the result is that the one global chip foundry when the music stops for Moore's Law is NOT Intel.
(It is that hard to do; the entire global economy can afford _one_.)
Taiwan (where TSMC's core bits are located) is in the path of a Chinese invasion. Having material control of the one global chip foundry is either a crushing PRC economic advantage or a global economic disaster (nobody has current/modern/cutting edge processor chips, for anything); for the US to get out of this position involves making Intel much more capable from a supply chain inside the US. (This isn't possible, the US economy is too small, but the empire can't admit that.)
So, anyway; China has internal chip-making initiatives, the US public stake in Intel is part of the US internal chip-making initiative, the actual economic capability to do it is mostly Europe and Taiwan (and the rest of insular and peninsular Asia) being held up by the entire global economy, and it's painfully obvious (since about 1990) that chips are up there with oil as a necessary input to an effective military.
Note that tariffs tend to break the necessary global integration.
OK why are some liberals being weird and calling it "communism" I thought the CHIPS act was... fine. Like I wish it said something about mandated unions or something, but for what it's about it's fine. Isn't this trying to do the same thing in a kind of clumsy way?
A lot of people who will say they are liberals are actually mammonites and have market idolatry axioms. Anything even resembling direct public production is a heresy and can't be tolerated. (Which is bad for everything, but never mind that now.)
And yes, it is; the CHIPS Act was a bunch of policy wonks trying to maintain the imperial status quo in a least-aggravating way. This is a combination of incompetence, panic, and different panic recognising the same problem.
it's consistent if you believe in the falsehood that social democrats are communists, and then consider any kind of social democratic "nationalising" to be "communist".
In my mind the talking point of "investing" needs to be countered, because Trump is doing this to skim his cut and get control, not to make Intel stronger. So I like to ask why this is different from "seizing the means of production" such as leftist governments do. It's branding language. But this can also be construed as fascism in the sense that government and business are merging (Γ la 1930s Italy).
@myrmepropagandist @Graydon Okay, looking for a place to jump in on the chips-are-national-security-issue-history-up-to-the-1990s segment because that's when I was making chips for Motorola's Semiconductor Sector before it took The Great Nosedive.
Motorola SPS was the public chip maker but it had another sector: the Government Sector, which nose-dove in parallel with SPS, and during its active years was second-sourcing with Intel to supply the government...ergo the government has always had an interest in Intel as its best customer.
This is what happens when you privatize government ops and supplies--your company is already a security requirement for government operations. The alternative is for the government to run its own factories to supply what it needs for itself, so here we are.
Rewind to the housing crisis of 2008, or you can go back t
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@myrmepropagandist @Graydon Okay, looking for a place to jump in on the chips-are-national-security-issue-history-up-to-the-1990s segment because that's when I was making chips for Motorola's Semiconductor Sector before it took The Great Nosedive.
Motorola SPS was the public chip maker but it had another sector: the Government Sector, which nose-dove in parallel with SPS, and during its active years was second-sourcing with Intel to supply the government...ergo the government has always had an interest in Intel as its best customer.
This is what happens when you privatize government ops and supplies--your company is already a security requirement for government operations. The alternative is for the government to run its own factories to supply what it needs for itself, so here we are.
Rewind to the housing crisis of 2008, or you can go back to the time when Chrysler was about to go bankrupt and AMC pretty much had already. Why not GM or Ford? They were government contractors and the government couldn't have them die...however...in 2008 we saw a GMC bailout when that was a housing crisis. Why the hell was that, hm? GMC has a financial branch that makes loans and interacts with Fannie Mae AND nearly all of America's farmers, part of that crisis.
The government would go belly up in ops and supplies if its private contractors went belly up. That's just how things iz.
It's generally dangerous from a policy perspective to have government for-profit investments, because typically the government takes more downside & less upside than the average investor would. Consider for example the government bail-outs of the big banks in the late 2000s.
It's not that government/industry partnerships are guaranteed to line pockets of the wealthy,it's just that corruption usually takes it that way.
& one rarely knows if you did right until a decade laterβ¦π€·β¦my 2Β’
Mostly because the majority of people in the USA have no idea what words like ‘communism’, ‘capitalism’, ‘democracy’ and ‘republic’ mean.
The USSR was probably a communist state for about a week (being generous), but was held up for decades to the USA as an example of what communism looked like (whether a stable communist state with more than about 500 people in it is possible remains an open question). The biggest difference between the economies in the USSR and the western world was that the USSR was a centrally managed economy, whereas the rest of the world relied on markets.
In a centrally managed economy, a single controller is responsible for creating a plan for economic output and defining what factories should be built, what skills people need to be taught, what supply chains look like, and so on. In a pure market economy, all of these decisions are local and you rely on emergent properties to genera
Mostly because the majority of people in the USA have no idea what words like βcommunismβ, βcapitalismβ, βdemocracyβ and βrepublicβ mean.
The USSR was probably a communist state for about a week (being generous), but was held up for decades to the USA as an example of what communism looked like (whether a stable communist state with more than about 500 people in it is possible remains an open question). The biggest difference between the economies in the USSR and the western world was that the USSR was a centrally managed economy, whereas the rest of the world relied on markets.
In a centrally managed economy, a single controller is responsible for creating a plan for economic output and defining what factories should be built, what skills people need to be taught, what supply chains look like, and so on. In a pure market economy, all of these decisions are local and you rely on emergent properties to generate a globally efficient system.
In theory, a centrally managed economy can be more efficient because it can avoid duplication of effort. In practice, it suffers from incomplete information and is slow to adapt (most attempts to build one have involved famines. It turns out theyβre a really bad idea). Conversely, markets are staggeringly good at optimisation, but will often end up optimising for the wrong thing, and tend towards monopolies.
Both models are pretty bad in their pure forms. In practice, most countries now adopt some hybrid approaches. China is the closest to a centrally planned economy (all companies are partly state owned and the state intervenes in markets a lot), whereas the USA has traditionally been the closest to a pure market economy (though not actually very close). Interventions in markets come in a variety of forms. The most common form in the USA is for the government to act as a guaranteed customer for some product. In the EU, it tends to be weighted more towards regulation or nationalising critical industries. In China it tends to be a lot more direct. All use various forms of direct and indirect subsidies.
It is quite misleading to call any of these βcommunismβ. A communist society could (theoretically) exist at either extreme, with worker-owned cooperatives using markets to distribute resources between them, or by coordinating directly via representatives or direct input to drive a centrally planned system. A capitalist society requires some form of markets, but markets have a number of failure modes and are not self-sustaining (without intervention, markets tend towards monopolies, which are a form of central control without any accountability) and so capitalist societies end up somewhere in the middle (pure capitalist societies decay towards feudalism without regulation).
If you need a label, Mussolini had one: He described the merger of corporations and government as βfascismβ (and thought it was a good idea).
That said, a 10% stake in a company is a long way from the merger of corporations and government. Most countries are realising that almost all modern infrastructure depends on computing and having a supply of processors that a potentially hostile government canβt control is important. The CHIPS act was largely propping up Intel. They have been staggeringly badly managed for 15-20 years, and without them itβs not clear how much chip manufacturing would be done in the USA (the DoD owns a fab for really critical things, but itβs a very old process).
If anything, it was quite surprising that the CHIPS act invested so much in Intel without taking any ownership. Itβs not unusual for a government bailout of an industry to come with that kind of condition. The British government, for example, ended up owning a bank after the 2008 financial crisis. Typically in a mostly capitalist society, the goal is to get the company into a state where you can sell it and recoup the cost of the initial subsidy. In some cases, it will never be profitable but its existence improves the rest of the economy and generates more tax revenue than the companyβs losses (public transport typically falls into this category) and so it makes sense for it to remain in public ownership.
Yes, the government can do that, and it's not necessarily a bad idea. For example, in Trump's first term, there was a proposal to buy Gilead Sciences, give away their outrageously expensive Hepatitis C treatment, then sell off the rest of the company. As a generic drug, the savings to Medicare alone would have made it a good deal for the government. npr.org/transcripts/520430944
This is a perfect example of why I love it here. Great question, then, drumroll, really great helpful on target answers. Yessiree, the people, not AI slop.
If you don't already subscribe to Matt Levine's Money Stuff newsletter, I highly recommend. Very smart, sane person covering finance. He has the background to get technical and understand things, and the writing skills to explain them well. Plus he sees how ridiculous many of the aspects of our financial system are, and so has an honest and amusing writing style. I don't always read his newsletter, but I never regret it when I do.
can't speak to the financial news but "eminent domain" is a sufficiently loosely described power of the federal government, which is presumably how they forced Intel to sell.
In a series of extraordinary deals, President Trump has muscled himself directly into the business of corporate America.The U.S. government has been made the...
Iβm enjoying Paul Krugmanβs Substack, but he writes about what he wants when he wants and isnβt trying to be the source of all info. Good explainers of things like how we perpetuate wealth inequality, though.
Also enjoying The Economist, which is only right-wing if you consider its free market stance right wing (& in my opinion itβs not). They benefit from not being US-based IMHO, too.
As for the US taking a permanent stake in key companies, seems Putinesque to me.
Keep an eye out for useful biz writing/reporting from NPR β esp. some Marketplace features. Minnesota Public Radio economics contributor Chris Farrell is good (but not regularly featured): mprnews.org/people/chris-farreβ¦
Try the GroundNews app. Itβs a news aggregator that generally gives you a range of sources, left, center and right about each targeted subject. In aggregates from a huge number of sites, left, middle, right. I constantly find sources I never knew existed Even though some of them are blatantly biased. Among other things, it shows whether left or right news organizations are not paying correct attention to a story. itβs pretty cool!
I think these are excellent basic questions that any financial reporter should be asking. And they arenβt. Instead we get a blithe normalization of extraordinary executive actions that are probably illegal and certainly aberrant.
Haha if Etsy shops were considered national security, a lot of sticker sellers would be very rich by now π While the government might not invest, there are smart ways to scale and boost visibility. I help Etsy sellers do exactly thatβturning creative shops into consistent sales engines
I definitely think Marketplace is worth following. I'd add Planet Money and Freakenomics to similar types of shows. However Lever News covered the topic today and I highly recommend it over those. I'd add American Prospect and Organized Money as places to keep an eye on for financial news. levernews.com/comrade-trump-seβ¦
How to play: Write something, Use the HashTag, Toot/Post and Repeat!
Tip: Welcome to September, the time when summer ends. Meteorologically, it ended on August 31 in the Northern Hemisphere. Use the medium of your choice: Song, text, movies, shows, poems, etc.
Iβm still on the fence about Corbyn and Sultanaβs #YourParty.
There is so much baggage with Corbyn and Sultana seemed to jump the gun on announcing the party, which got it off to a very bad start in many peopleβs eyes,
But that doesnβt take away from the fact #Labour under #Starmer is a far cry from what people thought they voted for.
The points Corbyn makes here are entirely right and will resonate with many.
As Labour embraces anti-migrant rhetoric, Jeremy Corbyn argues that the government is demonising vulnerable people to distract from its domestic failures.
If #Starmer thinks he can demonise the same minorities that #Reform and the #Tories have been kicking for over a decade and get away with it, heβs deluded.
Those who enjoy bashing minorities will continue to vote for the full fat version of rightwing parties.
There is not a version of this, where it all ends well by a notionally centrist party donning the clothes (flags) and policies (hating on minorities) of the Far Right.
It ends badly not only for that notionally centrist party (Labour) but also for the entire population of this country.
We need strong, ethically grounded leadership to reinvigorate democracy and address inequality and climate change.
@Juggling With Eggs Well, the UK is never going to have that as long as it has a monarchy with its thumb on the House of Lords and the House of Commons via the Tories. I can't say that those who voted for "Workable Brexit" Starmer didn't know what they were getting before they voted for him.
The UK quite possibly has entered the duopoly phase of its concept of "ruling party" and "party opposite" whereby the only way to effectively unseat the ruling party is to vote for the party opposite because voting for any other party would leave the ruling party in place. Welcome to your Americanization, UK.
flags won't save us from the degradation of our climate, the globalists destroying our economic world or from piss poor governments who won't deal with the above.
The Tories and Reform membership donβt rate competence at allβ¦hence the shower you mention. For them itβs all about waging the ongoing election campaign, even when in office.
But that doesnβt by default make Starmer ultra competent.
Starmer occupied high office as DPP, and did it, I think, quite well. That's a demonstration of competence in office.
He also lead a Party to an election success.
Now you may argue that the Tories had disintegrated tot he point they put themselves out of power, or dived for cover as their shit hit their fans, but that is orthogonal.
I'm for bed now, though, so leave it for now please.
Davey was a government minister in the coalition governmentβ¦during which he managed to completely ignore the brewing Post Office scandal which was part of his brief.
Corbyn has been leader of the Opposition and lost two elections.
Ramsay completely untestedβ¦and not the charismatic half of the current Green Party leadership.
(I've been watching the Post Office/Fujitsu thing since Computer Weekly started reporting it. IIRC Thatcher's lot floated it off out of government supervision. All the shareholders appear to have been lied to.)
Apologies I think our posts crossed. I assumed you were talking about Starmerβs competence in comparison to the other political leaders Iβd mentioned.
@Photo55 No, not at all. The unforced errors are his own. The withdrawal of Winter fuel payments was a gift to Reform which circulated its freezing pensioners memes round social media before the first cold snap. Austerity 2.0 is neither necessary nor a winning strategy in a country hobbled by threadbare services and even more threadbare local economies. Cosplaying Theresa May on immigration alienates his own constituency and will never win over a constituency that prefers sincere bigotry to the ersatz copy being cynically played out.
As I've mentioned on other occasions the problem we have is that after the cataclysmic experience of the Brexit years, Johnson's shambolic circus, the lettuce days and the final disintegration of the Conservative Party we've forgotten what ordinary not being very good at politics looks like and mistake not being a howling shit show for being a safe pair of hands.
Corbyn is spot on in his writing hereβ¦but will people see past his baggage to vote for a party co-led by him when he will almost certainly be an octogenarian by the next election?
I guess it depends whether you think the co-leadership model works.
Does it increase the current Green Party appeal across genders or make them seem like part timers, when itβs a full time job?
There is nothing to suggest that Corbyn is physically/mentally frail in the way that Biden isβ¦but will he leave enough oxygen for Sultana to expand her profile in the public eye?
I guess itβs a British version of Bernie Sanders and AOC. Does that work either side of the pond?
"Biden had a bad debate performance and for the next two months, we had 20 front page stories a day calling him a demented danger to America and demanding that he resign immediately.
Trump, for the first time in his life, is hiding from the media and all you hear from the same exact people is crickets."
"If Trump is healthy, the obvious solution is for him to appear before the press to answer questions, as was his daily habit, rather than releasing photos that prove nothing other than the fact that he has a motorcade at his disposal and owns a golf cart."
"The President plans to make a special announcement today at 2pm. So it may well be that Dr. Barbabella is right, that he 'remain[s] in excellent health.' It may well be that this whole thing was a charade, designed to distract us from the Epstein imbroglio; the survivors are coming to Congress when it re-opens tomorrow, after all, and thereβs no way POTUS can put a positive spin on what they are about to say."
Is the President really on death's door? If so, why isn't the White House being honest about it? *Should* they be honest about it? And: what happens if he dies?
"The President is almost 80 years old, heβs morbidly obese, his diet is shit, his ankles are swollen, his hand is bruised, heβs under enormous strain because of the Epstein stuff and the Gavin Newsom trolling and the pressure of the job, he stinks to high heaven because he canβt control his bowels, he almost died of covid, and heβs showing signs of dementia."
"Trump hasnβt answered questions or spoken publicly since last Tuesday. Thereβs clearly something wrong with his gait, his health, his hands, and his heart - and since corporate media refuses to call for his resignation as they called for Bidenβs in 2024, I will. Trump must resign the presidency effective immediately."
"He is clearly and overtly incapable of meeting the demands of the office of the president, putting the American people and the free world at great risk."
"I do not think the president is dead. He is scheduled to make an Oval Office appearance at 2pm today. However, this kind of disappearing act is cause for concern. The president is accountable to the American people. This administration has been among the least transparent in modern history."
"And the press seems to have decided that Trumpβs physical and cognitive health arenβt of significant concern, or perhaps that those are old stories no one cares about anymore.
Itβs a failure all around. And indicative of all the ways in which this president has repeatedly hidden the truth, intimidated journalists, gutted public trust, and created a culture of impunity in the Republican Party."
"If that was Joe Biden, clearing his schedule and posting an old picture, it would be on the front of every page! If it was Hillary Clinton being dead of pneumonia times Parkinsonβs (she got better), thereβd be multiple above-the-fold stories for days. The NYT sent a push alert to notify people that a Parkinsonβs doctor had been to the White House, and could have even passed Joe Biden in a hallway, could be!"
"But no, not even one comment from Jake Tapper, and if there was one word from the Washington Post, LA Times or New York Times, about the Presidentβs disappearance and/or posting of a week-old photo as a proof of life, well, we missed it. The foreign press like BBC and SkyNews noticed, though."
"The profound unhealthiness of the Trump moment is all around us: the MAGA social media grifters making bank on quack supplements; its women injected with plastic and hobbled in stilettos like footbound Chinese peasants, the reverence for pollution and worship of fossil fuel extraction, for 'beautiful coal,' and more cracker plants to produce more tons of nurdles just as the rest of the nations on earth are trying to reduce plastic."
"And most unforgivable β the deliberate destruction of our national medical research and public health systems to own the libs, save a few tax dollars for billionaires, and commence the great eugenics project openly cherished by the right wing fringe. ...
The doddering old manβs body is metaphor for the ghastly corrupting effect he has had on our country:"
"a decade-long descent of our public discourse into profane spectacle, the jettisoning of common decency and empathy in favor of rudeness and cruelty, the daily rituals of public humiliation, open racism and sexism, and the craven terror of the disfigured Republican Party."
β... in America, we were richer, safer, more powerful, better defended, better fed, more entertained than any civilization had ever been in the history of the world.
@ZhiZhu Except that they never were most of that. They were poorer, unsafe (subjecting kids to live fire drills), and fed as if they had free healthcare.
Yes they were more powerful and bettter defended. Were they entertained more? I prefer to call it "distracted."
@William Lindsey This post should have mentioned George Clooney and his money in particular. Gave the old guy the boot so that we could elect the other old guy. There's gotta be a special place in hell for him.
Trumpβs use of National Guard during LA immigration protests is illegal, judge rules https://apnews.com/live/donald-trump-news-updates-9-2-2025 Posted by
A model of the Magura V7 naval drone has been added to the strength exhibition at Ukraineβs Foreign Ministry. This drone, which destroyed a third of Russiaβs Black Sea Fleet and became the first to down a Su-30 fighter from the sea, will now greet foreign visitors at the ministryβs entrance.
COVID Risks Rising Briskly in Half the U.S.: Update for August 29, 2025
The CDC published new wastewater data today, after being unable to do so last week due to technical issues. This weekβs data β¦
@LoganFive With all the turmoil at the CDC, itβs good to see this info still being collected and disseminated. (I do wonder how long this will be the case.)
Today, former key member of The Social Demorats of Denmark, Henrik Sass Larsen, was convicted to 4 months in prison for the possession of child pornographic material of the most extreme kind.
A total of 6200 pictures and 2200 videos of child abuse were found in his possesion, along with a child-sized sex doll.
Spectacularly, Mr. Sass claimed the material was in his possession as part of an βinvestigationβ into his own abuse as a child.
@Sagetisseur I do not have the legal expertise to judge whether that punishment is typical for these kinds of cases.
But Mr. Sass was strongly disliked by many for being a bully, when he was in politics, and I am personally pleased that todayβs conviction means, Denmark now has a 0 percent risk of him returning to politics.
He was second in command when Helle Thorning was Prime Minister of Denmark, and often described as someone who did the dirty work.
I'm not surprised the court didn't believe him. If I'm doing an "investigation" into slavery, I don't grab people off the street and force them to live in my basement and work for me for free!
@darkpaw yes. And let us pretend that it was true for a second: Why would an βinvestigatorβ need material from unrelated cases of abuse? It makes no sense.
Yeah, it's like: "What? This? Oh, I'm just investigating my own childhood sexual abuse." "Then why do you have sexual abuse material of other children, created decades after your own abuse occurred?" "I'm investigating it. I, erm, I'm an investigator in my spare time. I sit alone in a darkened room and investigate it."
I seem to remember that the lead guitarist of The Who, Pete Townsend, used a similar argument when they caught him. He said it was "research". I can't remember what punishment he was given.
There is no way he didn't get a huge discount for being friends with the right people.
Also, I don't believe that he is never going to return to politics. That's what should have happened when he was caught with gang members as "bodyguards". That should have affected his political career more (politicians don't work directly with children, where as gang members having someone to pull strings for them is a huge no-no). As for his trustworthyness, that was already at zero, it can't get lower either.
How long is next years paliamentary vacation? Four months?
Leaked document says bungled aid distribution helped Hamas mount PR campaign during Operation 'Gideon's Chariots' from May to August; IDF feared unprepared for Gaza City takeover
If youβre a cis person you might wonder what sports bans have to do with βriskβ. Surely itβs inconvenient but not an actual threat right? It feels like overreacting. Itβs designed to feel like overreacting.
Sports is a wedge issue. In terms of assessing risk, itβs not really about the sports themselves, itβs about setting a precedent for legal discrimination. In every case that youth sports bans have passed, it has escalated to denying medical care, bathroom bans, etc. Sports are a canary
When you see trans people upset about sports bans, itβs not because as a demographic we are just so passionate about sports. I donβt watch sports. I donβt give a shit about sports. Itβs upsetting because I know what comes next
Sport improves health and wellbeing in a range of ways, physical, mental, social, educational, both for the individual and for the wider community; banning people from participating does very real harm
- He also goes by the name Slick Nakai: In the film A Thief of Time (2004) and Coyote Waits, both adapted from Tony Hillerman novels. A terrific Actor Rest in Peace
The world's leading genocide scholars association has passed a resolution saying the legal criteria has now been met to establish that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
WASHINGTON, DC - AUGUST 26: U.S. President Donald Trump calls on a reporter during a cabinet meeting with members of his administration in the Cabinet Room of
In 1967, the 25th Amendment was added to the Constitution, meant to formalize a process for what happens if a president dies in office or becomes disabled β after more than a century of presidents suffering from life-threatening conditions and even uβ¦
And, subscribe to Law Dork for my current work, where I have been publishing my independent legal journalism for more than three years now: lawdork.com/
(It is currently part of the morning routine for the little horse to wait for the goats in that one spot where it's easy for the goats to climb on him, then he happily accepts back massages)
🤗🐐🐐🐐🐴🐎🐴🐎❤️🤍💜🫂💛💚💙💗🩵🩷🧡🐐🐴🐎🤗*Good Morning!*& Happy Friday!*& I love the picture!*& I adore goats!*I wish you a Wonderful Day!🤗🐐🐴🐎❤️🤍💜💛💚💙🫂💙💗🩵🩷🧡🐐🐴🐎🤗... show more
This morning there was actually a line of teenage goats waiting to climb up on the horse and give him a massage. (One goat just couldn't wait and tried to climb on another goat instead, doesn't work as well.)
@helplessduck The keepers get necklaces (collars). The ones I'm trying to sell don't (though I think I'm actually going to keep the grey one as well. So she needs a necklace too!)
so jealous of your horse. i've tried to train one of my cats to do the walking on my back thing but she's not very interested in it; she's no goat that's for certain.
I am excited to announce that we are one step closer to the Bremen musicians thing (which I only learned about from many members of the European Fediverse sending me the wikipedia link en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_Musβ¦).
This young rooster has decided to move in with the boy goats, and has convinced the buck to let him roost on his back (?!)
The other goats are still happily practicing on the horse.
This might be an ignorant question, but does it "mean" anything when goats climb on top of other animals - or is it just because goats like to climb and don't care what or who they climb onto?
Greetings from state Bremen in Germany π. I love the pictures you share. I can feel the freedom in them. A good friend of me is Canadian, from Ex-Montreal. Canada is a great country.
I shout "don't do business with companies that support Nazis--moral issues aside, the people willing to support the far right honestly believe it's not only okay but ethical to screw you over."
I shout about disintermediation.
People nod and tell me they hear me and pat me on the head and keep on doing business with Nazi-supporting companies.
So damn frustrating.
My only consolation? I've had my books in public for 33 years, and I'm still in business.
@pluralistic has a long advised people to never use anything that we'll stop them from leaving, even if that involves making sacrifices because it's always worth it
What exactly is keeping people on Substack anyway? Is there really anything Substack offers that any other implementation of the same basic model can't? Like, do they do any kind of curation or promotion on members' behalf?
Assuming that's not the case, I feel like a reasonably competent developer could whip up a self-hostable replacement with ease. Idk how popular WordPress is among Substack users, but if a WordPress blog + a substack account is a common pairing, a WordPress plugin implementation could be a compelling alternative.
I'm sure there already are compelling alternatives, but curious how many don't involve just moving all ones eggs to another corporate platform's basket?
Beekeepers across the United States reported record managed honeybee colony losses between April 2024 and April 2025, with over 60% of hives lost in Texasβ¦
From what I understand at this point, the biggest problem is the honeybee sector itself. They simply donβt get enough forage. And then theyβre exposed to all sorts of pesticides, blah blah blah..
Farmers would be better off creating refugees and I think keeping their own bees. That would create a stable population.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell I believe a good deal of this is self-inflicted, due to mixing of a lot of commercial hives (esp. on almonds in California) -- superspreader event. Plus most commercial keepers really don't care about their bees. We see them take hives and leave farms mid-day, which is absolutely the wrong thing to do (half the bees or more are out foraging). You have to wait until night when they are home.
@AI6YR Ben @Union City, CA Weather Fortunately honeybees aren't the only bees out there and I take good care of my local native bees, thank you very much.
Chris Hessert π§ πΊπ¦
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •Radio Free Trumpistan likes this.
Andrew
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •myrmepropagandist
in reply to Andrew • • •@cinebox
Well as a matter of fact.
Nazo
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •Presumably Taiwan is in on this because that's where all the chips are actually made and Intel was at least ten years away from being able to build anything here that could sufficiently reach that scale. (But at this rate I'm wondering if they can even do that if they don't fix their business issues and maybe give up this whole unified design to go with the more effective chiplet design.)
I'm a bit surprised anyone in this administration can remember Taiwan isn't China.
Radio Free Trumpistan
in reply to myrmepropagandist • •There was an NPR program that fit this description and that was The Motley Fool.
I'm gonna go see if I can hunt that up online.
===========
Yes, they have their own website but they look like they sure grew up huge since their founding in 1993, providing paid-for advice programs and such.
fool.com/
Stock Investing & Stock Market Research | The Motley Fool
The Motley Foolmax oakland likes this.
Laukidh
in reply to Radio Free Trumpistan • • •Radio Free Trumpistan likes this.
Radio Free Trumpistan
in reply to Laukidh • •Ya, both of those are NPR-affiliated. Actually was listening to Marketplace on the way home from the store tonight.
like this
Laukidh, max oakland and PrinceOfDenmark like this.
Mike Olson
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •I oppose the deal, but this point of view is smart and interesting:
stratechery.com/2025/u-s-intelβ¦
U.S. Intel
Stratechery by Ben ThompsonRadio Free Trumpistan reshared this.
Tim McG
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •Radio Free Trumpistan likes this.
t60n3
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •Etsy stores should be safe for now.
John Jolley
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •Marketplace - Business News & Economic Stories For Everyone.
www.marketplace.orgRadio Free Trumpistan likes this.
Radio Free Trumpistan reshared this.
Graydon
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •It was obvious very early (1970s) that there would only be a single chip manufacturer standing. (Everybody talks about Moore's Law, but the cost to create the fab doubles, too, not just the chip performance.)
Intel figured they were the Lord's anointed and made repeated strategic errors: x86/Itanium (could be three), ignoring power efficiency, not making phone chips for Apple, relying on monopoly power/Wintel leverage for market share, and missing graphics processing.
Graydon
in reply to Graydon • • •This has a bunch of consequences; the major one (anything not a phone is a niche device) is that Apple put billions upon billions into full vertical integration which funded TSMC for the half what wasn't "not in our strategic interests to deal with those monopolists at Intel" (any value of strategic you want, there); the result is that the one global chip foundry when the music stops for Moore's Law is NOT Intel.
(It is that hard to do; the entire global economy can afford _one_.)
Graydon
in reply to Graydon • • •Graydon
in reply to Graydon • • •So, anyway; China has internal chip-making initiatives, the US public stake in Intel is part of the US internal chip-making initiative, the actual economic capability to do it is mostly Europe and Taiwan (and the rest of insular and peninsular Asia) being held up by the entire global economy, and it's painfully obvious (since about 1990) that chips are up there with oil as a necessary input to an effective military.
Note that tariffs tend to break the necessary global integration.
myrmepropagandist
in reply to Graydon • • •@graydon
OK why are some liberals being weird and calling it "communism" I thought the CHIPS act was... fine. Like I wish it said something about mandated unions or something, but for what it's about it's fine. Isn't this trying to do the same thing in a kind of clumsy way?
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Graydon
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •A lot of people who will say they are liberals are actually mammonites and have market idolatry axioms. Anything even resembling direct public production is a heresy and can't be tolerated. (Which is bad for everything, but never mind that now.)
And yes, it is; the CHIPS Act was a bunch of policy wonks trying to maintain the imperial status quo in a least-aggravating way. This is a combination of incompetence, panic, and different panic recognising the same problem.
A Flock of Beagles
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •@graydon
it's consistent if you believe in the falsehood that social democrats are communists, and then consider any kind of social democratic "nationalising" to be "communist".
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Puppethead
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •Radio Free Trumpistan
in reply to myrmepropagandist • •@myrmepropagandist @Graydon
Okay, looking for a place to jump in on the chips-are-national-security-issue-history-up-to-the-1990s segment because that's when I was making chips for Motorola's Semiconductor Sector before it took The Great Nosedive.
Motorola SPS was the public chip maker but it had another sector: the Government Sector, which nose-dove in parallel with SPS, and during its active years was second-sourcing with Intel to supply the government...ergo the government has always had an interest in Intel as its best customer.
This is what happens when you privatize government ops and supplies--your company is already a security requirement for government operations. The alternative is for the government to run its own factories to supply what it needs for itself, so here we are.
Rewind to the housing crisis of 2008, or you can go back t
... show more@myrmepropagandist @Graydon
Okay, looking for a place to jump in on the chips-are-national-security-issue-history-up-to-the-1990s segment because that's when I was making chips for Motorola's Semiconductor Sector before it took The Great Nosedive.
Motorola SPS was the public chip maker but it had another sector: the Government Sector, which nose-dove in parallel with SPS, and during its active years was second-sourcing with Intel to supply the government...ergo the government has always had an interest in Intel as its best customer.
This is what happens when you privatize government ops and supplies--your company is already a security requirement for government operations. The alternative is for the government to run its own factories to supply what it needs for itself, so here we are.
Rewind to the housing crisis of 2008, or you can go back to the time when Chrysler was about to go bankrupt and AMC pretty much had already. Why not GM or Ford? They were government contractors and the government couldn't have them die...however...in 2008 we saw a GMC bailout when that was a housing crisis. Why the hell was that, hm? GMC has a financial branch that makes loans and interacts with Fannie Mae AND nearly all of America's farmers, part of that crisis.
The government would go belly up in ops and supplies if its private contractors went belly up. That's just how things iz.
Graydon likes this.
Bradley Kuhn
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •It's generally dangerous from a policy perspective to have government for-profit investments, because typically the government takes more downside & less upside than the average investor would. Consider for example the government bail-outs of the big banks in the late 2000s.
It's not that government/industry partnerships are guaranteed to line pockets of the wealthy,it's just that corruption usually takes it that way.
& one rarely knows if you did right until a decade laterβ¦π€·β¦my 2Β’
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •@graydon
Mostly because the majority of people in the USA have no idea what words like ‘communism’, ‘capitalism’, ‘democracy’ and ‘republic’ mean.
The USSR was probably a communist state for about a week (being generous), but was held up for decades to the USA as an example of what communism looked like (whether a stable communist state with more than about 500 people in it is possible remains an open question). The biggest difference between the economies in the USSR and the western world was that the USSR was a centrally managed economy, whereas the rest of the world relied on markets.
In a centrally managed economy, a single controller is responsible for creating a plan for economic output and defining what factories should be built, what skills people need to be taught, what supply chains look like, and so on. In a pure market economy, all of these decisions are local and you rely on emergent properties to genera
... show more@graydon
Mostly because the majority of people in the USA have no idea what words like βcommunismβ, βcapitalismβ, βdemocracyβ and βrepublicβ mean.
The USSR was probably a communist state for about a week (being generous), but was held up for decades to the USA as an example of what communism looked like (whether a stable communist state with more than about 500 people in it is possible remains an open question). The biggest difference between the economies in the USSR and the western world was that the USSR was a centrally managed economy, whereas the rest of the world relied on markets.
In a centrally managed economy, a single controller is responsible for creating a plan for economic output and defining what factories should be built, what skills people need to be taught, what supply chains look like, and so on. In a pure market economy, all of these decisions are local and you rely on emergent properties to generate a globally efficient system.
In theory, a centrally managed economy can be more efficient because it can avoid duplication of effort. In practice, it suffers from incomplete information and is slow to adapt (most attempts to build one have involved famines. It turns out theyβre a really bad idea). Conversely, markets are staggeringly good at optimisation, but will often end up optimising for the wrong thing, and tend towards monopolies.
Both models are pretty bad in their pure forms. In practice, most countries now adopt some hybrid approaches. China is the closest to a centrally planned economy (all companies are partly state owned and the state intervenes in markets a lot), whereas the USA has traditionally been the closest to a pure market economy (though not actually very close). Interventions in markets come in a variety of forms. The most common form in the USA is for the government to act as a guaranteed customer for some product. In the EU, it tends to be weighted more towards regulation or nationalising critical industries. In China it tends to be a lot more direct. All use various forms of direct and indirect subsidies.
It is quite misleading to call any of these βcommunismβ. A communist society could (theoretically) exist at either extreme, with worker-owned cooperatives using markets to distribute resources between them, or by coordinating directly via representatives or direct input to drive a centrally planned system. A capitalist society requires some form of markets, but markets have a number of failure modes and are not self-sustaining (without intervention, markets tend towards monopolies, which are a form of central control without any accountability) and so capitalist societies end up somewhere in the middle (pure capitalist societies decay towards feudalism without regulation).
If you need a label, Mussolini had one: He described the merger of corporations and government as βfascismβ (and thought it was a good idea).
That said, a 10% stake in a company is a long way from the merger of corporations and government. Most countries are realising that almost all modern infrastructure depends on computing and having a supply of processors that a potentially hostile government canβt control is important. The CHIPS act was largely propping up Intel. They have been staggeringly badly managed for 15-20 years, and without them itβs not clear how much chip manufacturing would be done in the USA (the DoD owns a fab for really critical things, but itβs a very old process).
If anything, it was quite surprising that the CHIPS act invested so much in Intel without taking any ownership. Itβs not unusual for a government bailout of an industry to come with that kind of condition. The British government, for example, ended up owning a bank after the 2008 financial crisis. Typically in a mostly capitalist society, the goal is to get the company into a state where you can sell it and recoup the cost of the initial subsidy. In some cases, it will never be profitable but its existence improves the rest of the economy and generates more tax revenue than the companyβs losses (public transport typically falls into this category) and so it makes sense for it to remain in public ownership.
Clayfoot
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •npr.org/transcripts/520430944
@threeforks@Mastodon.Social
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •Luke
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •If you don't already subscribe to Matt Levine's Money Stuff newsletter, I highly recommend. Very smart, sane person covering finance. He has the background to get technical and understand things, and the writing skills to explain them well. Plus he sees how ridiculous many of the aspects of our financial system are, and so has an honest and amusing writing style. I don't always read his newsletter, but I never regret it when I do.
I imagine he will write something on it.
Beachbum
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •lopta
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •marymessall
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •I do have a source of financial news like what you're looking for: the Money Stuff newsletter by Matt Levine.
He is good at explaining things and also has a sense of humor, or at least an appreciation for the absurd, which is critical in his line of work.
mattlevine.co/work
Matt Levine
Matt LevineAlex
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •Paul_IPv6
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •Margaret Sefton
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •You might appreciate this. I listened to it this morning....
youtu.be/cqGPJz8O5TM?si=Cuj5VGβ¦
How Trump Is Changing American Capitalism
YouTubePrinceOfDenmark
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •Iβm enjoying Paul Krugmanβs Substack, but he writes about what he wants when he wants and isnβt trying to be the source of all info. Good explainers of things like how we perpetuate wealth inequality, though.
Also enjoying The Economist, which is only right-wing if you consider its free market stance right wing (& in my opinion itβs not). They benefit from not being US-based IMHO, too.
As for the US taking a permanent stake in key companies, seems Putinesque to me.
Rich Stein (he/him)
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •Keep an eye out for useful biz writing/reporting from NPR β esp. some Marketplace features. Minnesota Public Radio economics contributor Chris Farrell is good (but not regularly featured):
mprnews.org/people/chris-farreβ¦
marketplace.org/
Andrew Ross Sorkin is featured in a lot of places (I read him, but you can also watch or listen):
andrewrosssorkin.com/
Also the Economist.
"Right wing" is in the eye of the beholder, as long as you avoid Fox or worse!
Paywalls everywhere...
Chris Farrell
MPR NewsTricot Feelya
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •James Gleick
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •Buttered Jorts
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •I liked this article on the topic:
arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20β¦
Intel details everything that could go wrong with US taking a 10% stake
Ashley Belanger (Ars Technica)Ben Hammond
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •theregister.com/2025/08/29/intβ¦
Intelβs deal with Trump includes a penalty clause against selling off its fabs
Dan Robinson (The Register)Dr Adrian Simmons
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •standard bailout of a company in trouble, a company that is strategically important, but described in Trumps usual whacko nonsensical terms.
Regurgitated from opinion I heard on the FT economics podcast (I think).
Avi Rappoport (avirr)
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •Marketplace - Business News & Economic Stories For Everyone.
www.marketplace.orgEmmanuel liora
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •andrew773
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •Comrade Trump Seizes The Means Of Production
The Lever