Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?

POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
VIEWED: 185382
PAGE 90 of 479

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

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Originally posted by second:
6ix, can you feel the winds of change blowing?

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Yup.

The world you thought you were living in 6 months ago no longer exists.



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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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6ix, Trump will stop your Medicaid for diabetes and your brother's SSI for being an afflicted child and your aunt's Social Security for being old. You will all be paying inflated prices because that's the world Trumptards will die for once Trump gets his way.

Social Security Is Changing Under President Donald Trump
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/social-security-changing-under-presiden
t-085500811.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Quote:

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Originally posted by second:

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

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Originally posted by second:
6ix, can you feel the winds of change blowing?

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Yup.

The world you thought you were living in 6 months ago no longer exists.



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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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6ix, Trump will stop your Medicaid for diabetes and your brother's SSI for being an afflicted child and your aunt's Social Security for being old.

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No. He won't.

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You will all be paying inflated prices because that's the world Trumptards will die for once Trump gets his way.

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We're already paying inflated prices because Joe Biden* fucked up the economy.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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SIGNY: ... and all corporations had to become privately held companies? No more stock options! No more corporate personhood! No more speculating on the stock market!

SECOND: What's the largest privately owned company in the world? SpaceX.

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So what?

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Where have I heard that name in connection to Trump?

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What's the connection you're trying to make?

Making "corporations" illegal isn't beneficial to other privately held companies. If anything, most of them would be competing against many other companies just like them.

In my observation, publicly held companies waste an awful lot of $$ on stock buybacks, M&As, hostile takeovers, and other (nonproductive) fun and games.

Ralphs, my local grocery chain, was taken over by Kroger, which used Ralph's assets as collateral for the loan they took out for the takeover. Since Kroger had to pay back the loan, they jacked up prices. Meanwhile, Stater Bros, a privately held full service grocery store, just keeps plodding along, offering lower prices overall.

And altho privately held companies don't have to issue quarterly/ annual reports, they DO have to pay taxes. Maybe those tax filings should be made public, since I don't believe that companies have a privacy right. That would help guide consumers to the comoanies offering the best value for money.

Can you imagine what would happen if that process was applied to hospital corporations?

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"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Can you imagine what would happen if that process was applied to hospital corporations?

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Hospitals and Pharma companies slashing prices to be competitive because they're no longer operating under a virtual monopoly? What a wonderful world that would be.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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I am so glad that my aunts are now long dead. They would be worried about the US right now.

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If Democrats were 1/10th as worried about your aunts as you were, they wouldn't have destroyed themselves.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

And altho privately held companies don't have to issue quarterly/ annual reports, they DO have to pay taxes. Maybe those tax filings should be made public, since I don't believe that companies have a privacy right. That would help guide consumers to the comoanies offering the best value for money.

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Trump's companies are the proof that privately held companies can produce phony records to document whatever income tax they wish to pay. Several Trump employees went to jail over their tax cheating, but it took extraordinary forensic accounting resources to penetrate Trump's organization, resources only available for that legal case because Trump was constantly in the news. If privately held corporations took over the business world because the public stock market was closed in Signym's imaginary redesign of Capitalism, those millions of new Corporations could cheat on their taxes because the extraordinary resources do not exist to investigate more than one or two corporations at a time.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Russia Is Losing the War of Attrition

Ukraine is not on the verge of collapse. That makes the Trump administration’s decisions particularly shortsighted and tragic.

By Phillips Payson O’Brien and Eliot A. Cohen | March 7, 2025, 11:33 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/03/russia-ukrai
ne-war-status/681963/

Ukraine has no “cards” according to President Donald Trump, while Russia has many. Vice President J. D. Vance has asserted that superior Russian firepower and manpower mean that the war can end only in a Russian victory. Other supposedly realistic commentators agree, arguing that Russia’s advantages are insurmountable.

As military historians, we think this a misreading not only of what is happening on the ground, but of how wars unfold—and, in particular, of the difference between attritional campaigns and those built on maneuver. The Luftwaffe and the German submarine force during World War II, to take just two examples, were defeated not by a single blow, but by a technologically advanced, tactically and operationally sophisticated approach that rendered those organizations, large as they were, unable to function effectively. In the same vein, the advances of the German army in the spring of 1918 concealed the underlying weakness in that military produced by attrition, which ultimately doomed the Kaiser’s army and the regime for which it fought.

We have been here before. Prior to the war, the intelligence community, political leaders, and many students of the Russian military concluded that Russia would easily overrun Ukraine militarily—that Kyiv would fall in a few days and that Ukraine itself could be conquered in weeks. We should consider that failure as we assess the certainty of Vance and those who think like him.

Wars are rarely won so decisively, because attrition is not only a condition of war, but a strategic choice. Smaller powers can, through the intelligent application of attrition, succeed in advancing their own goals. This is particularly true if, like Ukraine, they can exploit technological change and get the most from outside support and allies. Vietnam was outgunned by the United States, as the American colonies were once outgunned by the British empire. Iranian forces outnumbered those of Iraq during a long and brutal war in the 1980s, and lost nonetheless.

The pessimistic analysis has not paid nearly enough attention to the weak underpinnings of Russian military power. Russia’s economy, as often noted, is struggling with interest rates that have topped 20 percent amid soaring inflation, and with manpower shortages made critical by the war. Its condition is dire, as one study noted, partly because the military budget amounts to 40 percent of all public spending, and partly because oil revenue is taking a hit from lower prices, Ukrainian attacks, and tightening sanctions.

Russian weakness is particularly visible in the army. One report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies estimated that in 2024 alone, the Russians lost 1,400 main battle tanks, and more than 3,700 infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers. At the same time, Russian production of such vehicles, including refurbished units, totaled just 4,300, not enough to make up for its losses. In desperation, Russia has turned to restoring its oldest and least effective combat vehicles, many of Soviet vintage. One recent study by Chatham House asserts that the Russian military-industrial complex is “ill adapted to deal with the effects of a prolonged war against Ukraine or to achieve a sustainable future in terms of production, innovation and development.”

The same holds true for Russian manpower. The number of soldiers that the Russians were able to maintain at the front seemed to peak in the spring and summer of 2024, above 650,000. By the end of the year, it had fallen closer to 600,000, despite the extraordinary bonuses that the Russian government offers new recruits, amounting to about two and a half times the average annual Russian salary in 2023.

Russian

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
What do you think of this, Sigs?

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/03/06/treasury_secretary_
bessent_were_going_to_transition_from_a_public-sector_to_private-sector_economy.html

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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BESSENT: "When you think about 25% of GDP flowing through area code 202, everybody's trying to skim a portion of it, trying to reallocate it," he said. "This has been a government-driven economy, you want to make this a private sector-driven economy. We want to, as I understand it, disempower the public federal bureaucracy and re-empower the kind of risk-taking and investment that goes along with private sector advances."
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LARRY KUDLOW: What you know that I saw a study just to finish this point, over 10 years the differential between 3% growth and 1.8% growth comes to about three trillion dollars of extra money which could be poured in for any number of private sector uses.

TREASURY SECRETARY SCOTT BESSENT: Yeah, and again Larry, it's back to the predictability that if we can do that and then all those benefits actually accrue out into the economy, not to the bondholders, not to the government.

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I have no idea what Bessent is trying to say. Cutting the Federal budget/ workforce doesn't mean that the private sector will automatically grow. If you eliminate ... extreme case ... 25% of the GDP, it's possible that the only thing that happens as a result is that the GDP drops by 25%.

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LARRY KUDLOW: And just one last point on the budget being DOGE. DOGE savings, are you, I saw it's interesting, a poll, a Democratic poll, my friend Mark Penn in his poll, 69% favored the idea of a $1 trillion budget savings, I'll call it, from Elon Musk and DOGE. This is a Democratic poll, so it's quite interesting. As you incorporate your big six projections and you put out a Trump budget, you are doing it at OMB obviously. Is there a DOGE, you know, is there a DOGE spot for this, and perhaps how much might that be?

TREASURY SECRETARY SCOTT BESSENT: Larry, I don't know yet, but to think that there's no waste, fraud, or abuse in the US government, you know, think about it.

Now that I live in DC, 25% of US GDP blows through area code 202.

Everybody is trying, there are all these markers on that same thing, Americans with healthcare, every Monday is paying for your healthcare. But when you think about 25% of GDP flowing through area code 202, everybody's trying to skim a portion of it, trying to reallocate it. I don't know what the savings level can be, but I think examining a lot of these contracts, a lot of this employment.

I was with Glenn Youngkin, Governor of Virginia, the other day, and I thought he would, all these people are in a state over government layoffs. So his Northern Virginia would probably be the area most affected, and he said, "Governor, how are you handling this, how are you messaging it?" And he said, "We have 350,000 private sector jobs available in Virginia. My office has a portal up, and anyone can go on the portal and come and join us in the private sector.

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Private sector jobs are lower pay with fewer benefits.

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LARRY KUDLOW: I mean, that goes to your theory which I think President Trump has adopted, but it was your note, your idea. You want to, this has been a government-driven economy, you want to make this a private sector-driven economy. We want to, as I understand it, disempower the public federal bureaucracy and re-empower the kind of risk-taking and investment that goes along with private sector advances.

You'll see headlines, "Federal jobs are down, oh my God," but the fact is private jobs, the fact is the private sector should be vastly bigger than the public sector anyway, and your tax policies have a lot of it.

So I want to end on your theory t

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