ahem

A few notes.

1) The first time I saw the Sopranos "bust out" analogy used was towards the Bush administration in Iraq. It fit better - the idea was it's not your money, you'll never pay for it, you know it's doomed, keep it alive long enough to get whatever you can. This was, of course, the era of fractional-billion-dollar embassies and pallets of cash released onto the wind.

2) Ben just kinda sorta obliquely mentions Amazon in there, which is dishonest as fuck considering he's done two or three bits on Amazon stock and its unreasonability (the best one was, I believe, in 2014). Let's be honest: it's 2014. You have a massive collection of legacy brick'n'mortar housewares stores while Amazon is busily rolling out Amazon Pantry and Same Day Delivery. There has been exactly zero movement on anti-trust and fucking Walmart is getting killed. What's your move, exactly? Pack up the tent? Turn yourselves into a giant Williams Sonoma? Sucking the blood out of the company is obviously shitty but Ben does a real good job of not listing all the other companies doing the exact same thing (which is doubly dishonest as he loves linking to his own work, and usually when he does one of these he links all the others).

3) It's 2020. Interest rates are climbing a cliff. Nothing is getting refinanced, you're never buying your own debt ever again but everyone is sitting at home playing the ponies on RobinHood. What are you going to do? Don't worry, the little guys you're fucking over are going to get their hero moment because of course they are.

4) It's 2023. Interest rates have been up that cliff and they're never coming back down again. As Alvin Smith pointed out in 1908, interest rates are the price of monopoly and it's the fuckin' 70s again, y'all. Biden has actually used the phrase "anti-trust" in a speech (the first president to do so since FDR), CDs are at five and a half fucking percent and the era of stock market shenanigans is drawing to a close, as any sensible observer will point out. Grab the fucking ring.

Do I think these guys are blameless? No. Do I think they're shameless? Yes. Do I think they're unique? LOL. Do I think this is some sort of societal... fuck you, Ben:

It’s not going to stop because we are increasingly a nation of weak men, degenerate gambling men, men who in their desperation for wealth or recognition will bet more than they can afford to lose over and over and over again. And I’m not talking about a loss of money, although yes that, too. I’m talking about a loss of autonomy of mind, where the weak man willingly gives away his very identity to a political party or economic creed if they will just allow him to be part of the action. Because in the end that’s all the weak man, the degenerate gambling man, has left. The action.

I was a "pack member" for a year. It was excruciating. I noped out after three weeks. It's a room full of Thurston Howell IIIs whingeing about the collapse of the American character. to a man. It's a bunch of rich dipshits insisting that the problems with the world are all these week-kneed others, not the financial conditions they themselves created.

And you know why Ben has nothing to fucking say anymore? Because the tide's turning on his ass and he as abso-fucking-lutely no idea what to do now.