Whenever I see a politician or regulator arrested for accepting bribes, I think, what an amateur. American elites have perfected the art of the grift: do a turn in government or academy, and then become a ‘thought leader’ or form an NGO and collect speaking fees from Wall Street and foreign powers. Wait for your party to get back in power, do another round in government, rinse and repeat. Even the Presidency and Prime Ministership are just a stage in one’s path towards hedge fund riches.
In Japan they have a wired for it, “amakudari” (descending from Heaven). I think it helps people understand the concept and the prevalence to have a dedicated word and not have to describe it.
The turning point was the Clinton administration. Before that, no former president would dare sully the office by accepting honorarium or speaking fees. At least, not nearly on the scale Clinton took it to.
What do you propose? Every party involved has the freedom to associate with whomever they want and the right to conduct business with them. If Yellen was doing a lousy job then presumably far fewer people would be willing to pay her a speaker fee. But hey, if people want to pay her to speak then that's their business.
The Fed isn't the government and Yellen isn't a politician. Those statements aren't technicalities, they are facts. The Fed was vested by Congress to be the U.S.' banker due to Congress' abysmal history of failure managing money policy.
As far as money == political power, start with campaign finance reform. That's the vehicle being used to "buy" politicians.
It's only 'unsavory' if you're ignorant of the history and reality of Korea. Korea is a small, culturally and racially homogenous nation that, within living memory, was colonized by a power that attempted to wipe out its ethnic identity. It has no native racial minority groups. The ethnic and cultural unity of the nation is a source of pride for Koreans. You can't expect a nation like this to import millions of immigrants from other cultures.
Yeah when it falls from 10 kids per couple to 2-3. But not when it falls below 1, which is what happened in South Korea:
"Kim, a product designer and art instructor, calls her hopes of one day having children "just a fantasy" — especially now, when housing costs are soaring, the job market is oversaturated and marriage rates are plummeting."
Kim would not have been literate and utterly dependent on marriage to survive not that long ago. Now she is a web designer and has choices .. in dating, housing, etc.
Complaints are not desperation.
From 1960 to 2021 the population of South Korea increased from 25 million to 52 million people ... 107% in 61 years!
Over 80% percent of Koreans live in larger cities now, just mind-boggling urbanization.
Below a certain amount of wealth, you need kids to take care of you when you are older. Within a certain range (and better safety nets for elderly than for children), you can take care of yourself but not kids. Above that range, you can have kids aplenty.
Does Kim have her own job? Does she get to choose her own dating partners? Does she have to settle for some drunk guy who beats her? Does she worry about going hungry?
Kim has wealth and abundance. She just refuses to make the sacrifices necessary to have children like people did in the old days, where women didn't work and were basically property of their husbands.
The "problem" these days is that women want to be treated as equals and have a nice life and be able to control the direction of their lives, instead of just marrying whatever shitty guy they can get just so they can survive. The byproduct of that is that the birthrate is much, much lower.
Said sacrifices were made by a whole lot of servants, not wives if they could help it. (Almost slaves.)
Even poorest used to have help, and parents on hand to help with raising the kids too.
And in Korea in particular, the villages were partly communal. Cities are hyper individualistic. People who moved to cities do not have access to their parents or other villagers for help.
State cannot fully cover this problem without extra manpower or even more advanced tech solutions that do not exist. Especially when people who have the most problem are the poorest.
Putting it onto one woman is extremely miserable and unfair.
Changing the structure of a society to not have this problem is hard too. Money cannot patch a problem of massive lack of manpower and said manpower being expensive. Not quickly and not cheaply, anyway.
Well we can't go back to living in villages unless we want to regress to a Medieval standard of living or worse. People have been living in cities for many centuries; remember Rome? And there's nothing forcing peoples' parents from living in cities, and in many older cities you'll see plenty of elderly people, since it's the best place for them to live since it has easy access to medical care.
While aspects of what you are saying is true, arguably, South Korea's problems are deeper than that. Choices are also limited by tremendous amounts of nationalism, racism, and xenophobia. This goes way deeper than people know. South Koreans are not really free to socially associate, date, or marry who they want. They can be ostracized or shunned for doing so, and this can have very restrictive barriers and limitations. Few have the personality or character to overcome this. What's acceptable can create such a narrow range of choices, on top of just female hypergamy or materialism, that few can ever attain this.
And for nationalist (to be polite), it can be very acceptable that their "race" dwindles to the very few, as long as it's "pure". For those not familiar with that brand of nationalism (to be polite), this can include other Asians who are not Korean or don't "look" Korean.
I’ve talked to my friends about this (we all have young children) and they had no idea softcore porn is prevalent on twitch. Not to mention actual adult stars regularly streaming.
And before anybody replies “and whats wrong with that” blah blah, parents still think of twitch as a place where kids can watch minecraft.
Of course we do! That's why we're talking to each other about it. Twitch risks a backlash from parents if adult content comes more prevalent on the site.
"think of the kids is used too often for evil" is used too often these days.
Not all "think of the kids arguments" are "think of the kids" arguments. A platform ostensibly for game streaming serving softcore is certainly surprising, so for parents too. It's strange to me that tech companies have convinced so many that _obviously_ one should suspect people gaming the system everywhere and the onus is on the user. Curation and basic levels of QA are just no longer expected by huge cohorts I guess? Well, I still do. I guess tech should be avoided then.
Lots of game streams with no one watching them, sure. Meanwhile "Just Chatting" is by far the largest category. And the biggest channel on right now is a pretty young woman in pajamas.
The #1 woman streamer on Twitch is Amouranth who's known for fanservice*, but the #2 is Ironmouse who's a bedridden vtuber and is never even going to show her face.
* but says her abusive boyfriend made her do it for money
Not sure why you are getting grayed but you are right. Ironmouse has the record for third most subs held at a single time on the whole platform since it began tracking this stuff. There are unfortunately a lot of "hot tub girls" and similar on the site, but to say that Twitch is mostly that and barely any gaming streams is super disingenuous. The number of nsfw streamers is pretty small compared to all of the gaming streamers and the nsfw streamer audience is a pretty small portion of Twitch audience as a whole. It is also incorrect to say that Just Chatting is always the top category because of the nsfw content. KaiCenat, who is currently the streamer that pulls in the most viewers at between 90k and 200k viewers each stream and he is in Just Chatting quite often. There are also many, many streamers that make Just Chatting content that is perfectly safe for work(At least if you aren't getting in trouble for watching anything at work!). One of the streamers I watch most is always in Just Chatting and his content is exploring Tokyo and other parts of Japan. Other than the occasional crude joke, his stream is pretty wholesome. I think a lot of people underestimate the scope of Twitch and the size of it's userbase. For the year of 2022, Twitch had an average of 2.58 million concurrent viewers. NSFW channels are a small portion of that, they are just especially noticeable when scrolling through stream lists since they intentionally dress provocatively to pull in viewers.
I won't say "What's wrong with that" but I will point out that Twitch has in place safe modes for "Mature" streams that isn't much of a gate keeper, but neither is the little M that pops up in the corner of mature TV programs. The site also doesn't seem to do anything to intentionally market directly to children. Not that it doesn't attract kids, but so does TV. I don't think it's unfair to expect parents to keep an eye on what their kids watch.
I've seen one or two adult movie stars streaming on Twitch and they're known for being relatively polite. I mean, they don't need to act out for attention the way pro streamers do.
Yeah, there are a handful of (some retired) adult movie stars that stream on the site. I'm not sure how to distinguish the traditional adult movie stars from OnlyFans people in regards to this post, but for the "traditional" stars, they all seem super cheerful and friendly, and other than wearing tight-fitting shirts I don't know that any of them have done anything lewd at all. From what I can tell, they are good members of the overall Twitch community, same as tons of other people.
Not saying it’s not there, but I’ve never seen anything like soft core porn on twitch. What’s wrong with me that the algorithm thinks I don’t like naked people?
I understand why they went after her (although stealing 6 million should also be punished, even if no one else stole anything).
I was respond to:
> While SBF received much more, I wonder how much in total benefits everyone received. The penthouse, private jets, and vacations probably add up quick.
They don't add up quick. Not in any meaningful sense.
If a person with zero legal training was to sit down in front of the LSAT, with all of the prep material and no time limit, are you saying that they wouldn’t pass?
Seems super short sighted - there’s no real world benefit into forcing companies to spread their checking accounts over hundreds or thousands of banks. Also seems like a good way to ensure that all of the business concentrates with the biggest banks.
The only people doing anything risky were the executives at SVB, and they’re going to be wiped out completely. Its a terrible idea to punish depositors for the crime of leaving their funds in a checking account at one of the top 20 largest banks in the country.
I suspect we’ll see a “Fannie Mae” for checking accounts in the future and that seems like a good idea.
If you are risk averse have your money at a big global systemic bank with a big customer base and therefore deposit base, not a bank focused on holding money for high-risk ventures.
There’s nothing unique about SVB - and their customer makeup was only obliquely related to this failure. The “high risk” nature of their customers had nothing to do with why the bank failed. Letting depositors lose money here would send a signal that any bank smaller than something like B of A is at risk.
Funny you mention BofA. They have $116 billion in unrealized losses. What all these banks are doing is very typical. If you've ever worked in the industry, you would know that.
I work in treasury and need to find a safe place for $150M in cash… there’s no universe in which I’ll spread that across $250k tranches in hundreds of other banks, so in your vast experience in the matter that’s evident from your confidence here, what would you recommend we do?
When did I ever say that you should do that? We know that the government will backstop BofA. They aren't going to backstop SVB. FDIC is only intended for regular people as you imply.
There kind of is - formerly called CDARS, but it goes by IntraFi now. You establish a “home” bank and they dump your balance into their network and they set up the hundreds or thousands of other accounts. It’s dumb and expensive and shouldn’t be necessary..
“Starlink's second-generation satellites include the V2 Minis and the larger V2. The larger V2s are designed for the SpaceX Starship, which isn't quite ready to launch yet, but the V2 Minis are slimmed-down versions that can be deployed from the Falcon 9 rocket.”
"One explanation for the age-based reduction in music consumption simply posits that responsibility-laden adults may have less discretionary time to explore their musical interests than younger people."
This seems most likely? I'm so busy with life and work that I don't have time to explore new music as I used to.
That said, today's pop music sounds really bad to me, so my musical tastes may have solidified and I'm not as open to new music.
