- reenorapWhy is America all of a sudden part of this? HK was a British colony, what is the UK doing to preserve freedom in HK?
- 10,000+ arrests a year for posting offensive tweets? The fact there is no freedom of speech in UK and the politicians will willfully arrest people for wrongthink is disgusting. It means that any rational person will keep their mouths shut for fear of getting arrested.
- The UK has turned into the worst parts of 1984. The politicians are absolutely stark raving mad at this point, what a horrible country to be living in.
- Private equity is even more insidious than you can imagine.
How it works is that PE will buy a profitable company, and then strip out everything it can, and then load on the debt. In exchange for loading on the debt, the banks will give preferential treatment to the other companies in the PE fund's portfolio. <----- This is the part everyone misses.
In addition, they will force the company to purchase services and even entire companies from the PE company's fund portfolio. <----- This is the part everyone misses.
Then, after a year or so, PE will IPO the company and sell to retail suckers. Mutual fund companies will hold their nose and buy into the IPO even though everyone knows it's a shitty company. The reason why is because the PE company will give early access to investment in their other more promising companies. <---------- This is the part everyone misses.
So PE companies will make a lot of money by stripping every part of the company out, maximizing and leveraging its portfolio of other companies so that banks and mutual fund companies will dump money into them. It's literally like harvesting a farm animal and carving absolutely everything of value off of it, as well as leveraging other companies to dump into it with the promise of access to other companies in its portfolio.
And then they turn around and dump the carcass into the hands of retail suckers, either through their mutual funds like Fidelity or straight onto the markets.
- I worked at a crypto exchange and after I came to the conclusion that 99% of crypto was scams and rugpulls, I sold all my crypto and vowed to have nothing to do with it. It's more of a religion than a financial instrument and absolutely nothing has shown to me that crypto is anything more than a speculative gamble, basically tulips with the religious promise of a better world. The number of employees that lost money on rugpulls while I was there, but "still believed in crypto" was staggering.
- Obama was hated by San Franciscan progressives because he came in with all of these promises and then backtracked on almost all of them. He basically turned into a Bush-lite, and he even maintained every single one of Bush's policies as well as deadlines. For example, he talked a lot about abortion and then immediately said it wasn't a priority for him once he got into office. He never closed Guantanamo and in both elections said he didn't support gay marriage.
ACA is a failure and the only thing it did was make it mandatory and unaffordable at the same time. Income inequality skyrocketed under him as well. Anyone who wasn't rich enough to afford some sort of asset like stocks or real estate was left behind and is now suffering.
- You can't have a sustainable ecology when China sends a city of trawlers to devastate fish stocks around the world and then sends it all back to China. It leaves the countries that were depending on that fish suffering with no repercussions for China. As far as I'm concerned, those cities of fishing boats should be sunk because it's an act of war by China.
- You are literally uttering nonsense.
No one is blaming PG&E for all wildfires. We are blaming PG&E for the wildfires THAT THEY CAUSED. These fires could have been prevented if THEY BURIED THEIR POWERLINES back in the early 2000s when it was far cheaper and like they promised. They instead decided to ditch that and instead buyback stock and pay lucrative dividends.
Burying powerlines would 100% prevent wildfires which were caused by sparking or broken power equipment, which has been the documented reason why several extremely large and fatal wild fires were caused by.
- If the electricity bills ever drop I will eat my hat. Even if they drop the rates, they will increase the connection fees to make up for it.
- Yes, exactly. There was no point in getting vaccinated with that vaccine.
- > That the virus would mutate this much was not something that scientists could have predicted at that point.
The common scientific consensus has always been "Don't vaccinate in the middle of a pandemic" because it would cause more variants. This was one of the things they absolutely violated.
> The updated vaccines against newer strains still did their job at preventing death and serious illness.
No this is not true at all. Most deaths occurred after vaccinations rolled out.
- Has the UN actually solved any problems in the last 40+ years? It seems like a massive bureaucracy that is absolutely ineffective. They have been completely ineffective with respect to Ukraine, Gaza, COVID, any other conflict around the world.
When the W.H.O. went into China to "investigate" the COVID virus and came back saying "Nope, nothing to see here!" was probably one of the most predictable and pathetic things from the UN.
- They were supposed to bury them underground but they didn't. This is a well known issue that they ignored because they didn't want to spend the money and instead paid dividends and did massive stock buybacks. Now, 20 years later, the costs have skyrocketed because of inflation.
- I wouldn't care if the money were actually going to improving the system but it's not, it's going to shareholders and paying for their crimes. The fact we have to pay for their crimes and their CEO and execs and shareholders can continue to increase their salaries and bonuses along with our rates just makes me very angry. The entire company should be held responsible and things like THEIR bonuses should be withheld until the company has fixed everything.
- Also, they charge natural gas rates that are ridiculous compared to the current price of natural gas. They give rebates on electrically powers appliances and then jack up the prices on electricity, and then tell us not to charge our cars during the summer because the grid can't handle it. These are all excuses on how to keep raising electricity prices instead of dropping them.
- PG&E instead of constantly upgrading and maintaining their distribution system, decided to pay out dividends and buy back stock, as well as pay their CEO $50 million per year. That's why their outdated equipment kept starting fires.
They took a risk by underspending on upgrading, and we as Californians are paying for them paying out their shareholders.