“Autocracy’s Asymmetric Advantage” is real enough, but there’s a door that has for too many years swung against the common good that’s ripe to swing the other way
As Bill is old enough to remember, following the collapse of the Savings and Loan Crisis in the 1980s, there were at least 1,100 criminal convictions of former S&L executives, and many more followed in the Enron/dot.com days a decade later. But when the Mortgage Crisis of 2008 rolled around, individual criminal prosecutions all but stopped.
And in there place came toothless prosecutions of their corporations. Something that happened primarily for “institutional reasons.” Chief among them being the “revolving door,” where regulators, line prosecutors and tax professionals in the IRS could look forward to moving into private sector jobs drawing on their government experience and paying enough to pay their kids private school tuition, just as long as they hadn’t gone out of their way to make too many waves while in government service. Then if everything played out, and after they made partner a few years later, they might qualify for a political appointment in their old agencies, keeping them until it was time to pay for college etc.
Meanwhile corporate law firms etc were filled with people who cut their teeth in the S&L Crisis and could put on fearsome defenses against government prosecutors just starting out, and who
wants to incur a loss in their first high-profile case?
Bottom line: the laws hadn’t changed but the culture had.
Fast forward to January 2129, while the old criminal statutes will have gathered a lot of dust, they’ll probably still be on the books. And meanwhile there’s likely to be and enraged populace screaming for blood. And with federal statutes of limitations running anywhere from 5 to 20 years,
justice may be considerably delayed, but if all goes well in 2028, no one should count on it being denied.
Revenge NEVER EVER wins and Loyalty of competency doesn't work either. AND finally when you remove thousands of competent people and try to replace them with 100 or so workers it's actually going to take LONGER to get things done. Any business person SHOULD know this. But apparently that doesn't seem to be the case!
I remember when I worked for the Department of Energy back in the late 70s. We had a building that housed a data center and administrative offices whose crawlspace every Spring was the nesting ground for skunks. Very scented place for a few months.
Supposedly, Krasnov has a degree in Economics from U of PA. Must not have attended his Econ 100-series classes because he'd know what he's saying is crap.
Got to love that getting you to that El Salvador prison is just any tattoo and the fact that you're not white. If you are actually a US Citizen, they do not care. You just disappear to a foreign prison never to be seen again. MAGAs should be very, very concerned as they have tattoos, are belligerent and there is nothing to stop the government from sending you off.
So if auto makers don’t raise prices, it erodes their profit margins. Big time. And that in turn erodes the stock price. And probably results in more layoffs. But I guess the stable genius is playing 10 dimensional chess now?
How can the automakers NOT raise prices to cover the tariffs? Whoever wrote that memo doesn't understand double-entry accounting, doesn't understand math, and doesn't understand physics. You can't remit the tariff money to the government out of thin air. It has to come from somewhere. That "somewhere" is the customer, because the tariff is way to big for the car manufacturer to absorb!
"WW1 was the last great 19th century war with all those great new 20th century weapons . . . . Trump is more likely to reproduce WW1 and its aftermath."
I agree with Bill, WE are lucky. But so many in this country are not. An article in the NYT this week hit me hard. Really nothing to do with the trump administration, but in Maverick county TX, people are incarcerated with no access to attorneys, wait years just to have cases heard or even be formally charged before judges who do not have law degrees.Sometimes left in prison long after their sentences are over because no one knowsthey are there or how long their sentence is. Absolutely appalling dysfunction.
Re: Alex Karp. I watched three youtubes of him: one when Palantir was a new company; the next when he was on a panel with a retired exec from British Petroleum talking about how AI helped manage that company; and the last on CNBC. The transition is not as radical or as abrupt as in a werewolf movie, but it is a different Alex in the last interview, in which he seems angry, fearful and claims it is the height of absurdity to think Elon Musk is a Nazi *just because* he is throwing throwing zeig heils around. After working with the CIA and the DoD in the war on terror, he seems a changed man. I think he struggles between cherishing Liberalism and fearing that we might lose the the bad guys in the world. It seems right to say he never saw us being the bad guys coming.
Blake Gendebien, a local farmer running for the Dems, was gonna grab Stephanik's Republican seat. I hope the Dems get the House back soon. Johnson is as bad as Musk, and Hakeem will have a chance to hone his leadership skills as Speaker. Republicans must know they are tanking, because normally a Republican would easily replace Stephanik. Upstate farmers are pissed at Trump/DOGE for freezing their funding, breaking their contracts, and raising tariffs.
of course Virginia Basora-Gonzalez is the face of deportation. In his campaign, he asserted that all immigrants are criminals sent here by their governments, alternatively to get rid of them or invade the US. He has never wandered off-message.
It looks like some elections are already souring on the Trump 2.0 show. Two surprising PA state senate and house votes. FLA isn't looking like a sure bet for Mike Waltz's vacated seat. Things are TBD in the Wisconsin supreme court, but Musk's money and election shenanigans are an obvious admission they know things are tough. They see after only two months, voters are already feeling nauseous. With probably ten tons of buyer's remorse. After just two months- that feel like a century. I'm catching delicious whiffs of Hopium. But we shall see very soon if spring blossoms are for real.
"When the little mouse, which was loved as none other was in the mouse-world, got into a trap one night and with a shrill scream forfeited its life for the sight of the bacon, all the mice in the district, in their holes were overcome by trembling and shaking; with eyes blinking uncontrollably they gazed at each other one by one, while their tails scraped the ground busily and senselessly. Then they came out, hesitantly, pushing one another, all drawn towards the scene of death. There it lay, the dear little mouse, its neck caught in the deadly iron, the little pink legs drawn up, and now stiff the feeble body that would so well have deserved a scrap of bacon. The parents stood beside it and eyed their child's remains."
Many of us here in NY's Fighting 21st Congressional district are disappointed that our do-nothing representative, Valise Stefanik, is still with us. Soooo close.
“Autocracy’s Asymmetric Advantage” is real enough, but there’s a door that has for too many years swung against the common good that’s ripe to swing the other way
As Bill is old enough to remember, following the collapse of the Savings and Loan Crisis in the 1980s, there were at least 1,100 criminal convictions of former S&L executives, and many more followed in the Enron/dot.com days a decade later. But when the Mortgage Crisis of 2008 rolled around, individual criminal prosecutions all but stopped.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/were-bankers-jailed-in-past-financial-crises/
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/magazine/only-one-top-banker-jail-financial-crisis.html
And in there place came toothless prosecutions of their corporations. Something that happened primarily for “institutional reasons.” Chief among them being the “revolving door,” where regulators, line prosecutors and tax professionals in the IRS could look forward to moving into private sector jobs drawing on their government experience and paying enough to pay their kids private school tuition, just as long as they hadn’t gone out of their way to make too many waves while in government service. Then if everything played out, and after they made partner a few years later, they might qualify for a political appointment in their old agencies, keeping them until it was time to pay for college etc.
Meanwhile corporate law firms etc were filled with people who cut their teeth in the S&L Crisis and could put on fearsome defenses against government prosecutors just starting out, and who
wants to incur a loss in their first high-profile case?
Bottom line: the laws hadn’t changed but the culture had.
Fast forward to January 2129, while the old criminal statutes will have gathered a lot of dust, they’ll probably still be on the books. And meanwhile there’s likely to be and enraged populace screaming for blood. And with federal statutes of limitations running anywhere from 5 to 20 years,
justice may be considerably delayed, but if all goes well in 2028, no one should count on it being denied.
Revenge NEVER EVER wins and Loyalty of competency doesn't work either. AND finally when you remove thousands of competent people and try to replace them with 100 or so workers it's actually going to take LONGER to get things done. Any business person SHOULD know this. But apparently that doesn't seem to be the case!
"We’d rather have a given country eager to cooperate with us on things than nursing grudges against us or actively plotting ways to do us harm."
Now, we're the ones actively plotting ways to do our allies harm.
I remember when I worked for the Department of Energy back in the late 70s. We had a building that housed a data center and administrative offices whose crawlspace every Spring was the nesting ground for skunks. Very scented place for a few months.
Supposedly, Krasnov has a degree in Economics from U of PA. Must not have attended his Econ 100-series classes because he'd know what he's saying is crap.
Got to love that getting you to that El Salvador prison is just any tattoo and the fact that you're not white. If you are actually a US Citizen, they do not care. You just disappear to a foreign prison never to be seen again. MAGAs should be very, very concerned as they have tattoos, are belligerent and there is nothing to stop the government from sending you off.
So if auto makers don’t raise prices, it erodes their profit margins. Big time. And that in turn erodes the stock price. And probably results in more layoffs. But I guess the stable genius is playing 10 dimensional chess now?
How can the automakers NOT raise prices to cover the tariffs? Whoever wrote that memo doesn't understand double-entry accounting, doesn't understand math, and doesn't understand physics. You can't remit the tariff money to the government out of thin air. It has to come from somewhere. That "somewhere" is the customer, because the tariff is way to big for the car manufacturer to absorb!
I think Bill could be wrong about how a liberated people might act after a period of oppression. History tells us so.
https://www.ushmm.org/search/results.php?q=collaborators&q__mty=Image&start_doc=26
WOW..I wonder why so many women were in that news, surely men collaborated also?
It seems the men were more likely to be executed or sent to prison.
https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1040368
Thanks, that makes sense
Picky: we won relative peace from victory in WW2, but the bungling of the denouement of WW1 led to WW2.
OK, in Europe. Yes, war with Japan very likely would have happened had Hitler died in prison in the 1920s and nothing come of Nazism.
Getting even more cynical, exactly how WW1 ended specifically with respect to the Ottoman Empire helped produce the Armenians' peace of the grave.
Putting this another way, WW1 was the last great 19th century war with all those great new 20th century weapons.
Trump is more likely to reproduce WW1 and its aftermath.
"WW1 was the last great 19th century war with all those great new 20th century weapons . . . . Trump is more likely to reproduce WW1 and its aftermath."
Very insightful.
I agree with Bill, WE are lucky. But so many in this country are not. An article in the NYT this week hit me hard. Really nothing to do with the trump administration, but in Maverick county TX, people are incarcerated with no access to attorneys, wait years just to have cases heard or even be formally charged before judges who do not have law degrees.Sometimes left in prison long after their sentences are over because no one knowsthey are there or how long their sentence is. Absolutely appalling dysfunction.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/25/us/maverick-county-texas-court-system.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Re: Alex Karp. I watched three youtubes of him: one when Palantir was a new company; the next when he was on a panel with a retired exec from British Petroleum talking about how AI helped manage that company; and the last on CNBC. The transition is not as radical or as abrupt as in a werewolf movie, but it is a different Alex in the last interview, in which he seems angry, fearful and claims it is the height of absurdity to think Elon Musk is a Nazi *just because* he is throwing throwing zeig heils around. After working with the CIA and the DoD in the war on terror, he seems a changed man. I think he struggles between cherishing Liberalism and fearing that we might lose the the bad guys in the world. It seems right to say he never saw us being the bad guys coming.
Blake Gendebien, a local farmer running for the Dems, was gonna grab Stephanik's Republican seat. I hope the Dems get the House back soon. Johnson is as bad as Musk, and Hakeem will have a chance to hone his leadership skills as Speaker. Republicans must know they are tanking, because normally a Republican would easily replace Stephanik. Upstate farmers are pissed at Trump/DOGE for freezing their funding, breaking their contracts, and raising tariffs.
Those upstate farmers got what they voted for if they went for Trump instead of voting for a woman of color.
True, but they were about to vote for a Democrat.
Mike Johnson is the living embodiment of the Peter Principle.
of course Virginia Basora-Gonzalez is the face of deportation. In his campaign, he asserted that all immigrants are criminals sent here by their governments, alternatively to get rid of them or invade the US. He has never wandered off-message.
It looks like some elections are already souring on the Trump 2.0 show. Two surprising PA state senate and house votes. FLA isn't looking like a sure bet for Mike Waltz's vacated seat. Things are TBD in the Wisconsin supreme court, but Musk's money and election shenanigans are an obvious admission they know things are tough. They see after only two months, voters are already feeling nauseous. With probably ten tons of buyer's remorse. After just two months- that feel like a century. I'm catching delicious whiffs of Hopium. But we shall see very soon if spring blossoms are for real.
If only Hope were a strategy! 🤞
Its like a race in which Trump's utter ineptness is up against his cruelty, and both are testing the tolerance of the crowd in the stands.
Well Elise got screwed over.
She lost weight, grew her hair out some, but didn't go whole MAGA-preferred; no plastic surgery and no hair extensions.
"When the little mouse, which was loved as none other was in the mouse-world, got into a trap one night and with a shrill scream forfeited its life for the sight of the bacon, all the mice in the district, in their holes were overcome by trembling and shaking; with eyes blinking uncontrollably they gazed at each other one by one, while their tails scraped the ground busily and senselessly. Then they came out, hesitantly, pushing one another, all drawn towards the scene of death. There it lay, the dear little mouse, its neck caught in the deadly iron, the little pink legs drawn up, and now stiff the feeble body that would so well have deserved a scrap of bacon. The parents stood beside it and eyed their child's remains."
— Franz Kafka
Many of us here in NY's Fighting 21st Congressional district are disappointed that our do-nothing representative, Valise Stefanik, is still with us. Soooo close.