Month: January 2020

Linkage

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Starwars Down Under (Fan Film)

This is an Interesting Life Hack

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It turns out that you can reduce an emergency room bill by thousands of dollars by demanding an itemized bill:

Having a medical emergency is hard enough as it is, and anyone would be scared in that position. However, most Americans have a lot more to worry about during a visit to the ER than many other people from developed countries. According to the nonprofit Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI), the cost of ER visits are on the rise. The organization has examined a decade’s worth of insurance claims for hospital emergency room bills, and determined that from 2008 to 2017 the prices have substantially increased. HCCI discovered that the average ER visit now costs $1,389 and has reached a 176% increase over the decade.

Recently, a woman shared an important tip that helped her reduce her ER bill

Broooooo I went to the ER a while ago and got a huge bill over 1,000. I saw a tiktok stating that if you ask for an itemized bill they reduce it and so I called and asked for 1 and just got it and bitch I don’t owe shit now 😭

— ehvuh (@the_heva) December 28, 2019



While those who have insurance are not always made to pay full price, the uninsured people suffer the most. This prompts people to look for a way to reduce their bills. After TikTok user shaunnaburns3 told people to ask hospitals for itemized bills once they are faced with a hefty charge for a trip to the ER, people decided to put that to the test. Luckily, for some people, this tip actually worked and helped save them hundreds of dollars.

I’m not sure if this actually works, but it certainly is worth a try.

Macron Caves

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Emmanuel Macron was elected in France because he was seen as a change from a system that delivered nothing for the the ordinary Frenchman while serving the transnational banks and corporations.

To the horror of the voters, Macron is even more the minion of a bloated and corrupt financial sector than were his predecessors.

So he has proposed increases in taxes on ordinary people, more austerity, tax cuts for the wealthy, and, finally, a roll-back of pension rights.

Now, following massive protests,  Macron has abandoned his plans to change pensions:

With tens of thousands of anti-government demonstrators once again coursing through the streets of Paris and other cities and clouds of tear gas and smashed store windows punctuating the urban landscape, the French government made a major concession on Saturday to unions protesting its pension reform plan.

It agreed to scrap, for now at least, a proposal to raise the full-benefits retirement age from 62 to 64. Unlike in the United States, the French government plays a huge role in the retirement plans of individuals in France, both as a source of funds and as overseer and guarantor of the pension system.

The raised age had infuriated moderate unions that the government of President Emmanuel Macron badly needs on its side. Mr. Macron has insisted the French need to work longer to strengthen a generous retirement system that is one of the world’s most generous but may be heading toward a $19 billion deficit.

On Saturday, with a crippling transport strike already in its sixth week, Mr. Macron’s government backed down, announcing that it would “withdraw” the new age limit, and put off decisions on financing the system until it gets a report on the money problem “between now and the end of April.”

Macron’s definition of meaningful reform is robbing from the poor to give to the rich.

The argument is that, in the long run, everyone benefits, but in the long term, as Keynes observed, “In the long run we are all dead.”

Europe does seem to dedicated to repeating the failures that led to the rise of Fascism and World War II.

Our Cousins in the UK

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It appears that much British banks were routinely forging documents for things like foreclosures, this strongly paralells what happened with the MERS and the foreclosure crisis.

It’s not a surprise. It’s what banks do in the absence of enforcement.

If Julian Watts is a conspiracy theorist, as his detractors would have you believe, he doesn’t exactly look the part. The former consultant, once an adviser to bosses of international companies, has the considered air of a regional accountant rather than someone who has taken leave of his senses.

Yet the otherwise mild-mannered Mr Watts, 56, has some extraordinary allegations to make. “The inconvenient truth,” he says, “is that several UK banks are engaged in persistent, serious organised crime against the public.”

From a bedroom in his modest family home in Guildford, Surrey, Mr Watts has been working around the clock for the past year or so to compile evidence that he claims suggests that banks and other financial firms are falsifying documents.

………

He alleges that his documents show they are forging signatures, including on papers used in court proceedings for cases such as small business disputes and mortgage repossessions.

So far his “bank signature forgery campaign” has produced 11 files of evidence. From these carefully indexed dossiers, he has compiled 136 separate “crime reports”, each relating to a distinct case of alleged signature forgery or document manipulation.

His claims are denied by the banks, yet he isn’t entirely out on a limb. Anthony Stansfeld, police and crime commissioner for Thames Valley, called the evidence “overwhelming”. Steve Baker, a Conservative MP and former member of the Treasury committee, said the files suggested that, at some banks, “anyone is signing” key documents, prompting concerns that home repossessions may have amounted to “fraudulent transactions”.

I have come to the conclusion that financial innovation and deregulation has fraud and corruption as its ultimate goal.

It’s not just a random consequence of policy, it is a goal.

Another Rock Turned Over at Boeing

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From recently released emails, we learn that Lion Air wanted simulator training to transition to the 737 MAX, and Boeing aggressively lobbied them not to do so, because it would be bad for their sales pitch.

When there is a safety issue, and Lion Air is on the side of the angels, you have completely screwed the pooch:

Boeing’s efforts to keep 737 Next Generation and MAX training as similar as possible included limiting external discussion of the maneuvering characteristics augmentation system (MCAS) as early as 2013, as well as an aggressive lobbying effort to dissuade Lion Air from requiring simulator sessions for its pilots, new documents released by the manufacturer reveal.

 The documents, comprising external and internal emails and internal instant message exchanges, underscore the priority Boeing placed on positioning the MAX as nearly the same as its predecessor, the 737 Next Generation (NG). They also offer some of the most compelling evidence yet that Boeing consciously chose less costly approaches over safer, more conservative ones during the MAX’s development.

 Boeing determined early on that ensuring 737 pilots could transition to the MAX without simulator time would be a huge cost advantage when pitching the model to customers. It also realized that regulators could consider some of the MAX’s new features as too much to cover in computer-based training (CBT). The MCAS, a flight control law that commands automatic stabilizer movements in certain flight profiles, was chief among them.

 ………

 Boeing’s solution: refer to the MCAS externally as an addition to the 737 Speed Trim, not by its name. Boeing knew the approach might be questioned, so it sought input from its FAA-designated authorized representative (AR) “to ensure this strategy is acceptable” for certification.

 ………

 The plan extended to keeping mention of the MCAS out of MAX pilot training materials. Its erroneous activation played key roles in two MAX accidents—Lion Air Flight 610 in October 2018 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in March 2019—that led regulators to ground the MAX in mid-March. The fleet remains grounded while Boeing addresses regulators’ concerns, including adding MCAS training and modifying the system’s logic.

 ………
 Lion Air was the first Asia-Pacific customer to order the MAX, and would be one of the model’s first operators. In June 2017, with its first delivery just days away, the airline was still developing its training curriculum, and simulator sessions were on the table. The airline’s early entry-into-service status meant other MAX customers would be monitoring its progress and fleet-related decisions, including training.

 “I would like to discuss what if any requirements beyond the Level B CBT the DGCA has required of you, or if your airline has determined any additional training is required,” a Boeing employee asked a Lion Air 737 training captain in early June 2017.

 The captain replied that the airline “decided to give the transition pilot one simulator familiarization” in addition to CBT.

 “There is absolutely no reason to require your pilots to require a MAX simulator to begin flying the MAX,” the Boeing employee replied. “Once the engines are started, there is only one difference between NG and MAX procedurally, and that is that there is no OFF position of the gear handle. Boeing does not understand what is to be gained by a three-hour simulator session, when the procedures are essentially the same.”

 The Boeing employee then listed six regulators that “have all accepted the CBT requirement as the only training required” to transition to the MAX. “I’d be happy to share the operational difference training with you, to help you understand that a MAX simulator is both impractical and unnecessary for your pilots.”

 In a subsequent email, the Boeing employee provided presentations on the MAX technical and operational differences for the Lion Air captain and his team. The Boeing employee also urged Lion Air to consider alternatives to simulator time, such as a flight-hour minimum in 737s or ensuring a pilot’s first MAX flight is always done alongside a pilot with MAX experience.

 ………

 Around the same time as the Lion Air exchange, two Boeing employees discussed the airline’s concerns in an instant-message chat.

 “Now [Lion Air] might need a sim to fly the MAX, and maybe because of their own stupidity,” one Boeing employee wrote.

If someone senior at Boeing does not go to jail over this, then the law is a lie.

Iran is Very Different from the United States

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It has taken about 48 hours, but Iran has admitted that it accidentally shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752.

Given the fraught nature of the whole affair, the (relative) transparency and candor is remarkable, particularly when compared to the US response to its shoot down of Iran Air Flight 655 (Denials for years, and giving the reckless captain of the Vincennes a medal), and the 50+ year French coverup of their shoot down of Air France flight 1611.

It’s a tragedy, but in the aftermath, the Iranian government has behaved relatively well:

After maintaining for days that there was no evidence that one of its missiles had struck a Boeing 737-800 minutes after it took off from Tehran on Wednesday with 176 people on board, Iran admitted early on Saturday that its military had shot down the passenger jet by mistake.

The military blamed human error. In a statement, it said Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 had taken a sharp, unexpected turn that brought it near a sensitive military base. Hours later, though, an Iranian official walked back that claim.

“The plane was flying in its normal direction without any error and everybody was doing their job correctly,” Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ airspace unit, said during a televised news conference later Saturday. “If there was a mistake, it was made by one of our members.”

In a post on Twitter, Iran’s foreign minister, Mohamad Javad Zarif, apologized but appeared to also blame American “adventurism” for the tragedy, writing: “Human error at time of crisis caused by US adventurism led to disaster.”

President Hassan Rouhani said on Twitter that Iran “deeply regrets this disastrous mistake.”

………

A commander of the aerospace division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Iran, Amirali Hajizadeh, said on Saturday that he accepted responsibility for the plane’s downing minutes after takeoff in Tehran, according to Iranian state TV.

In a televised address, he gave more details about the sequence of events that he said had led to the disaster. He said it had been misidentified as a cruise missile, and was shot down with a short-range missile.

He also said that the Iranian missile operator had acted independently because of “jamming.”

“I wish I was dead,” Mr. Hajizadeh was quoted as saying by local news outlets. “I accept all responsibility for this incident.”

He said that whatever decision the Iranian authorities made, “I will accept with the arms open.”

Fascinating

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A study has shown that public spending on public goods results in greater satisfaction and happiness by the citizenry.

This is yet another data point showing that privatization of public goods is a bad thing:

Baylor University political scientist Patrick Flavin’s forthcoming study in Social Science Research finds that people in states with higher public goods spending (on “libraries, parks, highways, natural resources and police protection”) report higher levels of happiness. 

It’s not clear whether they are happier because they have better services, or whether people who choose to live in places where they don’t have to pay for their neighbors’ kids’ education, parks, etc, are selfish, miserable f%$#s.

Indeed.

Tweet of the Day

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Hate to say it but reports claiming US military leaders were “stunned” when our totally normal president took their most extreme suggestion is military PR. Of course they knew it was a possibility, and they were ok with it; otherwise they wouldn’t suggest it to a lunatic.

— Alex Kotch (@alexkotch) January 5, 2020

This take is not completely accurate.

It increasingly seems that there are elements within the Trump administration, the foreign policy establishment, and the state security apparatus who have been doggedly trying to go to war with Iran for decades.

Still, whoever was involved in this decision needs to be named and shamed.

Governor Ratf%$#

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I am not a fan of Maryland Governor Larry Hogan.

He is implacably opposed to mass transit, and has made his political career on deliberately targeting minorities.

Well, now we learn that there is a corrupt method to his madness. The money hat he has diverted from mass transit, has gone to build roads going to his real estate holdings.

It appears that Donald Trump’s self dealing in office is not a norm that he has subverted.

It’s just what our corrupt political elites do:

For years, Never Trump Republicans have courted Larry Hogan to run for president. It’s easy to see why. He’s won two gubernatorial elections in Maryland, where Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one; he’s currently one of the most popular governors in America; and he’s widely viewed as a moderate who’s willing to reach across the aisle. The late-night talk-show host Seth Meyers recently described him as “a Republican who believes in climate change.” In June, he’s publishing a memoir—a move that suggests he’s laying the groundwork for a 2024 presidential bid. Last spring, he launched a national advocacy group, An America United, designed to break partisan gridlock and “bring people together to advance bold, common-sense solutions for all Americans.” Simply put, everything about Larry Hogan’s public image would lead you to believe he’s the opposite of Donald Trump.

But Hogan, it turns out, has more in common with Trump than his reputation suggests.

Both are real-estate executives who have refused to relinquish their private businesses while in office. Just as Trump maintained his ownership of the Trump Organization when he became president, Hogan maintained ownership of HOGAN, a multipurpose real-estate brokerage firm, when he became governor. Both have left close family members in charge of their businesses—Trump with his children; Hogan with his brother, Timothy—and created arrangements that allow them to be apprised of the company’s dealings. In other words, they have set up situations in which they can use their powerful government positions to increase their private profits.

………

Hogan has advanced a number of major state transportation projects that are near properties his company owns, a development that can boost the value of those properties. Before canceling the Red Line, he approved construction of an interchange down the road from a parcel of land his company controlled. Later, he approved millions of dollars in road and sidewalk improvements near property he had bought approximately two years earlier and was turning into a housing development.

Maryland law says that an official may not partake in a decision if the official or a qualifying relative—defined as a parent, spouse, child, or sibling—has an economic interest in the matter and the official or employee knows of the interest. These decisions “certainly seem to implicate the statute,” said Virginia Canter, the chief ethics counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and a former ethics adviser for the International Monetary Fund. “It looks like there’s credible evidence of a violation.”

………

But Hogan has not revealed payments he has received from specific real-estate transactions while in office. “He’s getting paid by developers all across the state—who he’s in charge of regulating in one way or another—and the public has no idea who they are,” said Democrat John Willis, a former Maryland secretary of state and now a University of Baltimore politics professor and a historian of Maryland politics and government.

………

In February 2018, Maryland Matters, a state-based politics and policy website, reported that Hogan held ownership in a company called Brandywine Crossing Realty Partners LLC. The company was chartered on March 9, 2015, and it became a controlling partner for a parcel of land behind the Brandywine Crossing Shopping Center in Prince George’s County. The land was just down the road from a major state transportation project: a new highway interchange.

………

Multiple legislators said they were not informed of the governor’s nearby real-estate interests before voting on his transportation budget. “I certainly had none of this information when working on the budget committees or in discussions,” said Bill Ferguson, a Democratic Maryland state senator, when we spoke in September. (In October, Ferguson was selected to become the Maryland Senate’s next president.) “Had I known this information, I think there would have been much more targeted and purposeful questions about the necessity of projects that appear to have a financial benefit to the governor.” (Hogan listed his holdings in real-estate LLCs in his submission to the Maryland State Ethics Commission, filed 17 days after the legislature approved his first budget, but he did not identify specific properties, let alone the dates of acquisition.)

………

Experts I spoke with who reviewed Maryland’s ethics laws were alarmed by the Hogan administration’s decisions around Brandywine and other properties. Richard Painter, a professor of corporate law at the University of Minnesota Law School and a former chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, said that Hogan should have been prohibited from participating in the decision. “The [ethics law] language suggests that he should recuse because the official or employee or qualifying relative—he himself—has an interest in the matter and he knows of the interest,” Painter told me.

………

Brandywine isn’t the only place where Hogan has advanced construction projects near his existing property interests. On November 12, 2014, just eight days after his election, Hogan’s company bought a parcel of land from Maryland’s State Highway Administration in Severn, Maryland, for $400,000. The sale was conducted through a public auction, and only one bid was made: by Timothy Hogan. In November 2014, HOGAN created a new LLC called the Villas at Severn Crest. Since Larry Hogan took office, the State Highway Administration has begun a number of transportation projects that could boost the value of that property, including intersection improvements and road resurfacing less than a mile away, which started in 2018.

………

But Hogan’s election came with an immediate complication: What would he do with his real-estate business? Maryland ethics law bans officials or employees from making decisions on matters in which they have an economic interest. But the law states that this prohibition does “not apply if participation is allowed as to officials and employees subject to the authority of the [Maryland State] Ethics Commission.” Hogan reached out to the ethics commission for advice.

………

In December 2015, Hogan entered into a trust agreement that he asserted would prevent conflicts of interest. On April 15, 2016, the trust was approved by the state ethics commission. Between Hogan’s inauguration and the trust agreement’s approval, the governor submitted two transportation budgets—including the one advancing the Brandywine interchange—and gained ownership of at least seven newly created real-estate LLCs. In other words, Hogan’s real-estate business was growing just as he was supposed to be separating himself from it.

………

But even after Hogan began talks with the ethics commission, there were signs that he had not made a clear break from his business. In February 2015, while serving as governor, Hogan himself announced a $3.4 million real-estate transaction in a press release issued by his private company. His administration began construction on projects near both the Villas at Severn Crest and the Riverfront at West Hyattsville after his trust went into place.

………

But Hogan’s trust is not blind. The ethics commission granted the governor a “financial-interest exemption,” which allows him to continue to own real-estate projects and to be apprised of his company’s business dealings, as well as how much money he’s making. In a letter to Lord, Hogan wrote that the arrangement “will not prevent me from requesting or receiving information about the status of the Hogan Companies . . . including the status of its current investments and, [sic] the identity of the investors and the locations of real property in which the Hogan Companies have an investment.”

………

But the trustees Hogan chose to manage his holdings are not just experts in the real-estate field—they are his previous business associates: Victor White, the chief operating officer of HOGAN; Jacob Ermer, the executive vice president of HOGAN; and David Weiss, a former broker at HOGAN. According to public records, all of them are Hogan campaign contributors. His brother, Timothy, is in charge of his company.

As governor, Hogan has maintained a close relationship with all four of these individuals. He had at least eight meetings with them between 2015 and 2018, according to his meeting calendar, obtained by the Washington Monthly through a Public Information Act request.

………

In its specific guidance to Hogan, the commission stated that Hogan could, and should, identify “a specific person within the Governor’s Office to act in his place on any such matters that come to the Office while he continues to retain his financial interest in his businesses.” Yet when I asked Ricci, Hogan’s spokesperson, if the governor had ever recused himself from a decision in his transportation budget that could impact his properties, he was clear that Hogan had not. “The answer is no,” Ricci said. “The governor does not make decisions on individual projects, so he has no decisions to recuse himself from.”

………

But Hogan has been, at best, silent over the president’s alleged violations of the Emoluments Clause. In fact, in 2018, he withheld $1 million from the Maryland attorney general’s office to stop a series of lawsuits against Trump, the most prominent of which alleged that the president was using his position to bolster his real-estate empire’s profits.

The governor justified his decision on fiscal grounds. “The administration takes its responsibility to find efficiency and savings in the state budget extremely seriously,” Doug Mayer, a spokesperson for Hogan at the time, told The Baltimore Sun. “This is a perfect example of that.”

Have I mentioned that Governor ratf%$# is a corrupt racist SOB who has no shame or decency?

Why You Don’t Hire or Promote Torturers

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The CIA torture fetishists are not realists, nor do they show competence or perspective.  Rather, they spend their lives trying to force the world to comply with their own paranoid and twisted version of reality. (Paraphrasing from an online post, whose sourc I cannot find)

Appearing on a video screen was Gina Haspel, the C.I.A. director, who was monitoring the crisis from the agency’s headquarters in Northern Virginia. In the days before General Suleimani’s death, Ms. Haspel had advised Mr. Trump that the threat the Iranian general presented was greater than the threat of Iran’s response if he was killed, according to current and former American officials. Indeed, Ms. Haspel had predicted the most likely response would be a missile strike from Iran to bases where American troops were deployed, the very situation that appeared to be playing out on Tuesday afternoon.

Though Ms. Haspel took no formal position about whether to kill General Suleimani, officials who listened to her analysis came away with the clear view that the C.I.A. believed that killing him would improve — not weaken — security in the Middle East.

This is why Obama should have jailed CIA torturers instead of promoting them.

Not Enough Bullets

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In their crusade to make the world safe for rich white people, the New York Times takes on the horror that is a new Massachusetts law that requires au pairs be paid minimum wage for caring for children.

I get it, you feel entitled for cheap/free labor from the people who watch your kids:

When Stephanie Mayberg, a physician assistant, learned that a court ruling meant her child care costs were about to increase by 250 percent, she was stunned. The recent federal court decision, that au pairs were entitled to the rights of domestic workers in Massachusetts, including being paid a minimum wage, left Ms. Mayberg, of Southborough, wondering how she and her husband could afford to keep their au pair from Colombia for a second year.

………

Of the legal finding that au pairs — young people from other countries who come to the United States to live with families and care for their children — were entitled to a minimum wage and protected by Massachusetts’s Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, passed in 2014, she added, “I’m a big supporter because au pairs are unprotected.”

………

In Massachusetts, the decision has thrown families who host au pairs into chaos as they sort through their new responsibilities as employers, and cope with significantly increased child care costs.

………

The minimum wage in Massachusetts, $12.75 per hour, means that families who employ au pairs will now have to pay them roughly $528 a week for 45 hours of work, when factoring in overtime and a $77 deduction for room and board. The lawsuit, which was brought in 2016, had been working its way through the courts for several years, but it appeared that many au pair agencies had not warned host families about the pending case or the possibility that the domestic workers rules might apply.

………

But some former au pairs disagreed with the parents and the view of the federal government. Thaty Oliveira, 35, who is from Brazil, was an au pair in Massachusetts in 2003. While she said she had a great experience with the family, and worked at most 30 hours a week, she said that was not the norm among her fellow au pairs, many of whom spent too many hours doing child care to get a rich exposure to American culture. Even in her case, she said, she considers the child care she performed to have been real work, deserving of a minimum wage.

“We’re not asking for a lot,” she said. “It’s really just minimum rights.”

But it’s too much for the self-absorbed assholes to offer basic human dignity to the people that they have hired to safeguard their families.

Going There

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Over at the Gray Lady, columnist Jamelle Bouie manages to invoke the writings H.P. Lovecraft to describe Donald Trump.

This is not something that I expected to see in the New York Times, but I approve:

Much of the work of H.P. Lovecraft, an American horror and science fiction writer who worked during the first decades of the 20th century, is defined by individual encounters with the incomprehensible, with sights, sounds and ideas that undermine and disturb reality as his characters understand it. Faced with things too monstrous to be real, but which exist nonetheless, Lovecraftian protagonists either reject their senses or descend into madness, unable to live with what they’ve learned.

It feels, at times, that when it comes to Donald Trump, our political class is this Lovecraftian protagonist, struggling to understand an incomprehensibly abnormal president. The reality of Donald Trump — an amoral narcissist with no capacity for reflection or personal growth — is evident from his decades in public life. But rather than face this, too many people have rejected the facts in front of them, choosing an illusion instead of the disturbing truth.

………

I think most observers know this. But the implications are terrifying. They suggest a much more dangerous world than the one we already believe we live in, where in a fit of pique, a single action taken by a single man could have catastrophic consequences for millions of people. This isn’t a new observation. When he was still a rival — and not one of Trump’s most reliable allies — Senator Marco Rubio of Florida warned Republicans that they shouldn’t give “the nuclear codes of the United States” to an “erratic individual.” Hillary Clinton said Trump was “temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability and immense responsibility” and that “a man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”

 One is an incomprehensible evil without the even smallest portion of humanity, the other is Cthulhu.

It’s Called Stock Fraud

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This (paywall protected) article misses the point about “Unicorns” and private equity and similar schemes.

What is described here is not just an unrealistic valuation, it is fraudulent.

Here is how it works:

  1. A private company raises money from private investors, who (for example) purchase 15% of the company for $10 million, giving it a valuation of ($10M/.15=) $66 million dollars.  (Remember, this is the private investor setting this value. 
  2. The company invests in office space, hiring people, etc, and burns through money, and so needs more money.
  3. The same private investors invest $25million this time, the burn rate has increased, but they only get 5% of the company,giving a valuation of (25M/.05) = $500 million dollars.
  4. Rinse, lather, repeat.

After a few rounds, the investors own 50% of the company, and have set the valuation of the company at something like $10 billion dollars while contributing about $100 million dollars for a company has no path to profitability.

Analysts go crazy, and it goes public, and the investors pocket a $9.9 billion dollar profit off of a $100 million investment, a 9900% profit margin.

Even if this shell game fails 9 times out of 10, you still have a 1000% profit margin, and someone else is left holding the bag.

You just need enough money to flood whatever market sector the company is in, and keep the balls in the air until you sell your stake.

This is Uber, Lyft, WeWork, Blue Apron, etc.

A feature in startup investing called a liquidation preference also often gives the latest investor their money back plus a return before others, meaning the newest valuation often only applies to that investor. These preferences usually disappear after a company goes public. Pre-IPO valuations of unicorns are on average 48% higher than their fair value, according to a recent study by two professors at the University of British Columbia and Stanford University.

WeWork has had a sobering effect. But there’s a lot of capital to be deployed and hot startups can still make investors compete to give them cash. There will be more valuation illusions before reality sets in.

These are not, “Valuation illusions,” this is fraud, pure and simple.

The goal is not to invest in a profitable company, it is to foist it all off on the next chump.

Good Point

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Ian Welsh has a very interesting analysis of the US policy of assassinations targeting leaders of organizations hostile to American interests.

Specifically, he notes that it doesn’t work, think about how many Taliban #2s have been drones, but we continue.

His conclusion, one I wholeheartedly agree with, is that assassination of leaders does not work to stop properly functioning organizations, and that the reason that we continue to use this strategy is because US institutions are fundamentally dysfunctional, where the loss of a leader can put the whole organization at risk:

The assassination strategy the US pursues is interesting, not in what it says about the US’s foes, but what it says about the American leaders. Al-Qaeda’s “No. 2 Man” has been “killed” so often that it’s a running joke, and Taliban leadership is regularly killed by assassination. Bush did this, Obama really, really did this. Probably a lot of these stories are BS, but it’s also probably safe to assume that a lot of leadership has been killed.

The Taliban is still kicking the coalition’s ass.

Leadership isn’t as big a deal as people make it out to be–IF you have a vibrant organization in which people believe. New people step up, and they’re competent enough. Genius leadership is very rare, and a good organization doesn’t need it, though it’s welcome when it exists. As long as the organization knows what it’s supposed to do (kick Americans out of Afghanistan), and everyone’s motivated to do that, leadership doesn’t need to be especially great, but it will be generally competent, because the people in the organization will make it so.

American leaders are obsessed with leadership because they lead organizations in whose goals no one believes. Or rather, they lead organizations for whom everyone knows the leadership doesn’t believe in its ostensible goals. Schools are led by people who hate teachers and want to privatize schools to make profit. The US is led by men who don’t believe in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Police are led by men who think their jobs are to protect the few and beat down the many, not to protect and serve. Corporations make fancy mission statements and talk about valuing employees and customers, but they just want to make a buck and will fuck anyone, employee or customer, below the C-suite. They don’t have a “mission” (making money is not a mission, it’s a hunger if it’s all you want to do); they are parasites and they know it. [I would add that our military works toward getting retired generals comfortable sinecures at Lockheed Martin]

Making organizations work if they’re filled with people who don’t believe in the organization, or who believe that the “leadership” is only out for themselves and has no mission beyond helping themselves, not even enriching the employees or shareholders, is actually hard. People don’t get inspired by making the C-suite rich. Bureaucrats, knowing they are despised and distrusted by their political counterparts, and knowing that they aren’t allowed to do their ostensible jobs, as with the EPA generally not being allowed to protect the environment, the DOJ not being allowed to prosecute powerful monied crooks, and the FDA being the slave of drug companies and the whims of politically-connected appointees, are hard to move, hard to motivate, making it hard to get to anyone to do anything but the minimum.

So American leaders, and indeed the leaders of most developed nations, think they’re something special. in fact, getting people to do anything is difficult, and convincing people to do the wrong thing, when they joined to actually teach, protect the environment, make citizens healthier, or actually prosecute crooks, even more so. Being a leader in the West, even though it comes with virtually complete immunity for committing crimes against humanity, violating civil rights, or stealing billions from ordinary citizens, is, in many respects, a drag. A very, very well-paying drag, but a drag. Very few people have the necessary flexible morals and ability to motivate employees through the coercion required.

So American leaders, in specific, and Westerners, in general, think that organizations will fall apart if the very small number of people who can actually lead, stop leading. But that’s because they think that leading the Taliban, say, is like leading an American company or the American government. They think it requires a soulless prevaricator who takes advantage of and abuses virtually everyone and is still able to get people to, reluctantly, do their jobs.

Functioning organizations aren’t like that. They suck leadership upwards. Virtually everyone is being groomed for leadership and is ready for leadership. They believe in the cause, they know what to do, they’re involved. And they aren’t scared of dying, if they really believe. Oh sure, they’d rather not, but it won’t stop them from stepping up.

This not only explains the failure of our assassination policy, it explains the failure of our business, politics, and military.

What we are seeing (taken from the comments to Mr. Welsh’s post) is that our managers are Ayn Rands John Galt made flesh.

Tweet of the Day

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If 1024 fair coins are each tossed 10 times, chances are good (> 63%) that at least one will come up heads 10 times in a row; and that coin will be proud to explain how its skill, faith, guts & determination made its achievement possible, and how that combo can work for you too.

— Marian Farah (@bayesiangirl) January 8, 2020

Far too many people are born on 3rd base, and think that they have won a triple.

Winning the birth lottery does not make you a better person.

Best Healthcare in the World

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It turns out that 25% of Americans cannot afford proper healthcare:

Millions of Americans – as many as 25% of the population – are delaying getting medical help because of skyrocketing costs.

………

Finley is one of millions of Americans who avoid medical treatment due to the costs every year.
‘I live on the street now’: how Americans fall into medical bankruptcy
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A December 2019 poll conducted by Gallup found 25% of Americans say they or a family member have delayed medical treatment for a serious illness due to the costs of care, and an additional 8% report delaying medical treatment for less serious illnesses. A study conducted by the American Cancer Society in May 2019 found 56% of adults in America report having at least one medical financial hardship, and researchers warned the problem is likely to worsen unless action is taken.

Dr Robin Yabroff, lead author of the American Cancer Society study, said last month’s Gallup poll finding that 25% of Americans were delaying care was “consistent with numerous other studies documenting that many in the United States have trouble paying medical bills”.

The free market mousketeers think that all they need to do is unleash the market.

The market is unleashed. That is why everything is crap.

If I think that beef is too expensive, I can have chicken or beans.

I cannot not opt for medical treatment.

Healthcare is coercive by nature, take this or you die.