The Frankish Reich

Is that real? Not a parody account? How idiotic is she? God is sending us eclipses? Of the sort that astronomers predict literally hundreds of years in advance? Good Lord. We're doomed.

I have an idea! Maybe we should just have a trial in open court involving defendant Trump. Then everyone can see everything from "all sides." (Not sure what that 3rd or 4th or 5th side may be, RFK Jr. Maybe it's an octagon? A dodecahedron?) Let's get it on!

Pretty sure we'd have a few rings if Perry Fewell had been made permanent in 2009.

I thought he didn't go to Bedminster till June. But epicenters don't lie.

You need to work for the NY Times. Earthquake Rocks Tri-State Area Poor, Minorties, LGBTQ+ Community Worst Impacted

You just knew it was coming. I wasn't going to go there; too obvious. But you won't be satisfied until you see it. So here you go: Real Americans didn't parade around in face diapers. Why should they do it in eye diapers? Bring it on, Mr. Big Bad Eclipse! My eyes can handle it in the nude.

It's a tweet. It's about the size of the old character limit. It doesn't require much reading. But still... you couldn't be bothered to read it. If you had, you would have seen this: "The past two months of job growth were also revised up ..."

Epicenter in New Jersey. 4.8, which isn't huge, but enough to do damage.

Any news? Anyone feel it?

It seems here that the story is advocating for a free market in trans prostitution. So not Marxist, in which each retirement-aged Tarheel lab tech would be provided with a trans sex worker according to his diminishing needs.

The first link you provide gives a full explanation of how the data are collected and why they may diverge. Read it!

How much better to consume the feed, like a foie gras goose, of Julie Kelly, the stay-at-home spouse of an Archer Daniels Midland lobbyist.

Well, thank you. That makes sense. Perhaps then you could remind your fellow travelers that it is not important to post the earth-shattering news that "The Rock Won't Endorse Biden" in multiple threads?

Jesse Kelly says your guy is complicit in COMMUNISM. You have bigger fish to fry now that he's been exposed. And now that previous month job figures have been revised UPWARD, killing your stupid response (that stats are rigged!) you should probably resort to posting a meme of Trump rising, in full makeup, on the Third Day. Coming in 3, 2, 1, ....

I was trying to be nice. "Top 5% of the top 20%" is, well, meaningless. Do you mean the top 1%? If so, you could have just said that. Reduce the fraction or reduce you commentary.

And you are swayed by what The Rock says about governance?

No "talking points." No "source" because (shock!) these are my own thoughts. I actually have those, you know. I like, watch what's going on, I look at the numbers and the history, and I draw my own conclusions. That's why I'm not a Twitter feed consuming cut-and-paste monkey. Try it, it's liberating!

I'm working on it.

Thank you, Jesse, for explaining that We Are All Communists Now.

Second point first: I still expect a recession. But whatever it is the Fed has been doing, so far they're engineering the soft landing. But sometimes what looks like a soft landing turns into a rough one. On the first point: I think the Delaware case regarding Elon Musk's compensation is interesting. I tend to support Musk in this one. There's some procedural issues in the independence of the Board that are important overall. But in that specific case: Musk is 100% identified with Tesla. He is the one unique person in the world that gives that company value. It is a special case. But in general: who's the CEO of Visa? They're the 15th biggest corp by market cap. I had to look that up. A guy named Ryan McInerney. Who? Visa has been printing money for years now thanks to an increasingly cash-less economy and huge exchange fees. Has he done anything spectacular that someone else couldn't do for half the price? He made $26 million last year and the stock granted to him is now worth about $60 million. Is there any outside check on whether this compensation is warranted? No. There's a rubber-stamp Board approving whatever he thinks is "fair" or of critical importance to Visa's continued profitability.

I will remain uncommitted until I hear from Vin Diesel.

Short answer: 81 million Americans. Which is about 7 million more than will vote for a golf-cart riding fully embalmed in orange corpse.

Isn't that the same as saying "the top 5%"? I believe the economy is strong, and that it is important to measure the U.S. economy against all other developed economies. When you do that, it appears even stronger. But I'm not so blinkered that I don't see problems. I just agreed with you a few days ago that we have a real problem with bloated CEO pay compared to worker pay, and that we need some corporate reforms to address this. I also think the rise of part-time jobs vs. full-time (with full benefits) is troubling, and I'll admit that Obamacare rules drive some (a lot?) of that. My question: I don't see you willing to admit economic progress in ANY way.

The hard facts: this is a part of the country - the Pennsyltucky region - that time and economic change has left behind. Coal fields exist within Somerset County. The coal is entirely bituminous, and much of it has been mined or is being mined by Strip mining. Most of the coal is within the Main Bituminous Field, which stretched north and west to adjacent counties and southward into Maryland and West Virginia. The rest is within the Georges Creek Field.[15] There are many abandoned mines in the county, and acid mine drainage is an environmental problem in many areas. Fishless streams exist as a result of the discharge from the abandoned mines. These include parts of the Casselman River, Shade Creek, Stonycreek River, and Quemahoning Creek, as well as many of their tributaries. The bituminous coal there is largely played out or is no longer in demand in the modern economy. It is not coming back, not even if the anti-coal/pro-renewable focus of the government changes. One party seems to be offering false hope, whereas the other is the realist. This, by the way, is the exact opposite of where the parties stood in the age of Reagan. Reagan's economist and Republican think tanks saw what was coming and they wanted to issue a kind of "relocation payments" to these communities - an incentive to move to where the jobs are now being created. That should have happened, but politicians (Dems back then) didn't want to lose their base of voters. So back then the Dems pretended that these communities could come back strong. It was a political lie. Now the tables are turned and the new (Trump) Republicans sells them the same lie. Of course their political allegiances have changed because the party willing to pander to them has changed.

So ... anything GOOD happening out there in the economy? Anything??