At the same time, if a bank goes under, that means they owe more than they own, so “ownership” of that entity is basically worthless. In those cases, a bailout of the customers does nothing for the owners, because the owners still get wiped out.

The GM bailout in 2009 also involved wiping out all the shareholders, the government taking ownership of the new company, and the government spinning off the newly issued stock.

AIG required the company basically issue new stock to dilute owners down to 20% of the company, while the government owned the other 80%, and the government made a big profit when they exited that transaction and sold the stock off to the public.

So it’s not super unusual. Government can take ownership of companies as a condition of a bailout. What we generally don’t necessarily want is the government owning a company long term, because there’s some conflict of interest between its role as regulator and its interest as a shareholder.

They’re killing the middle class though

Some schools might be, but not places like Chicago or Harvard. At least not through their tuition policies. They give financial aid to those up to a pretty high income threshold.

UChicago, for example, gives free tuition to anyone who is the first in their family to attend college, or makes less than $125k a year. Harvard, as I mentioned, essentially gives free tuition up to $150k. MIT’s threshold is $200k. Families in these income ranges are doing pretty well for themselves.

And then when students graduate from these schools they have a pretty easy path to being rich themselves. The degree, the connections, and possibly the education itself provided a pathway towards six figure jobs, maybe $200k+, before the age of 30.

So no, I think these schools are a pretty good value proposition for even the middle class. Upper middle class has to pay the highest percentage of their own income, but it’s still worth the cost for them.

All the schools rip off the rich to subsidize the middle class. You’re essentially subsidizing a bunch of students who are paying close to nothing.m, because you can afford $70k tuition.

As another example, Harvard is free for anyone whose family makes less than $85k per year. Not just the tuition ($56k per year), but also the housing (worth $13k), food ($8k), health insurance ($1600), books, and a modest living stipend designed to cover things like a computer, commuting/travel, other expenses.

And those who make up to $150k per year are capped at 10% of their income to pay for all that. In the end, the average cost of Harvard for the typical student is about $15,000 per year including housing and food.

In other words, attending Harvard is cheaper than not attending school for anyone whose families make less than $150k, which is basically 75% of the nation. So if you’re actually paying full tuition, you’re probably pretty rich.

there was a $10k bounty,

$60k. $10k from NYPD and $50k from the FBI.

when he emigrated to New York

New York City?!?

Which business leaders were killed on the way to securing a 5-day workweek? Those gains were achieved through direct action affecting business bottom lines: strikes, sabotage, and direct action on the streets, not secret targeting of soft targets.

Put another way: there were two attempted assassinations of Donald Trump in the past year. Do you think that will change his political actions to be more popular?

Do you think that United Healthcare’s next CEO will suddenly forgo profits? What about hospital administrators, pharma CEOs, or any of the other tens of thousands profiting off of this fucked up system? Do you think that a mass assassination campaign will actually happen in large enough volume to change any behavior at all?

You’d take the 2nd choice and hire bodyguards. Sure, you might. But not everybody would.

No, the question isn’t whether everyone would. It’s whether anyone would. And the answer is obviously yes.

So now the position is filled. Did the healthcare system change?

My argument is that no, you can’t kill your way to reform on this one. There will always be another CEO to step into that place.

And the ratio of dead would-be assassins to CEOs would also pile more bodies on.

This is ludicrous. A person faced with unpopular decisions that might send assassins after him is going to make himself harder to assassinate, not less hated.

There’s a difference once they start considering their own lifes on the line.

They won’t. Anyone who has a semblance of belief that their decisions in the job might actually cause their own death just won’t do the job. Instead, it becomes a filter for choosing even more narcissistic/sociopathic people in the role.

And once they’ve internalized the idea that any decision made by any one employee of the company, including their predecessor CEOs, can put them in danger, it’s pretty attenuated from the actual decisions that they themselves make.

It’s a dice roll on a group of people, which isn’t enough to influence the individuals in that group.

Note that Kaiser, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Caresource are nonprofit. Also, integrated care organizations like Kaiser usually have lower denial rates in large part because the actual treating provider/doctor is an employee of the insurer, so there’s not going to be that tug of war between a fee for service provider wanting to make money on a treatment versus an insurance provider trying to deny coverage on that treatment.

Personally, I think integrated care is better, and this is one of the reasons, but I also think this particular statistic isn’t an apples to apples comparison between insurers.

We all know that the death of a CEO is a blip in the actual day to day operations in the company. The teams and departments will continue operating as before, and the broad strategic decisions made by the executives aren’t going to factor in a remote likelihood of violence on a particular executive.

After all, if they’re already doing cost/benefit analysis with human lives, what’s another life of a colleague, versus an insurance beneficiary?

They’ll just beef up personal security, put the cost of that security into their operating expenses, and then try to recover their costs through the business (including through stinginess on coverage decisions or policies).

You’re absolutely right and I’d argue it boils down to the fundamental error in OP’s shower thought:

Killing the CEO doesn’t save the lives on the other track. It just adds another dead body to the pile.

Figuring out grid scale storage isn’t easy, but the good thing about it is that you can figure out storage at slightly smaller scales to alleviate the problem somewhat, and build on that success to try to get to daily storage to meet nighttime demand, then up to weekly storage to handle fluctuations in weather, and maybe even seasonal storage to deal with seasonal variation in both supply and demand.

But storage doesn’t have to just be chemical batteries, either. Some can be demand shifting, like desalination or water pumping based on excess power supply. Maybe even intermittently powering direct air capture of CO2 if there’s so much excess energy they don’t know what to do with it. Some can be storage of heat, whether really hot like molten salt that can run turbines for dispatchable electricity, or just at the residential scale with a bunch of distributed hot water tanks, or everything in between. There are also some storage technologies relying on gravity (pumped hydro if the geography supports it), compressed air, flywheels (could be important for maintaining grid inertia for stability).

And there’s always curtailment, where you just don’t generate the power, and turn off some the panels in the middle of the day.

Contracts can be modified by the bankruptcy code.

In 11 U.S.C. § 365(f)(1):

Except as provided in subsections (b) and © of this section, notwithstanding a provision in an executory contract or unexpired lease of the debtor, or in applicable law, that prohibits, restricts, or conditions the assignment of such contract or lease, the trustee may assign such contract or lease under paragraph (2) of this subsection.

So any continuing contract in which there are obligations on both sides, such as a premium account where the accountholder pays a fee and the service provider continues providing access to the service, is assignable in a bankruptcy, even if the contract itself says it’s not assignable.

There’s a few other bankruptcy principles at play, but that’s the main one that jumps out at me.

There’s also a classic case where the bankruptcy trustee can sell a bankruptcy debtor’s Pittsburgh Steelers season tickets, including the right to renew for the next year on the same terms as all other season tickets holders. Just because the season tickets are revocable by contract doesn’t mean that the team has the right to exercise that revocation against a bankruptcy debtor just because they don’t like what’s happening in the bankruptcy.

The “what is a bank” question is complicated, so “fintechs” have been operating in areas that are in some gray areas in between “definitely a bank” versus “definitely not a bank.”

At the most informal, you’ve got things like a roommate who collects everyone’s fair share of rent before sending one payment to the landlord, or a parent who keeps track of their kids’ virtual balances of what the kids are allowed to spend. These definitely aren’t banks.

Then you’ve got things like short term balances between people who deal with each other: an employer who keeps track of hours and pays the employee at the end of the pay period, a retail customer who has some store credit from a returned item, a contractor who periodically invoices a customer for work performed, etc. Despite the “credit” and “balances,” these aren’t bank accounts.

Some gray areas get a little bit more complicated. You have airline mileage and hotel point programs where the miles/points can be used to purchase goods and services, including sometimes those not even being offered by the business where the miles were accumulated.

Then you get into banking-like structures that might be, or might not be banks. Is it banking when you buy something on a periodic payment plan? What about when you put down a deposit to reserve a preorder for something you expect to buy when that product is released? Or give someone a gift card for a specific store? Does it matter if these programs are administered by third parties separate from the buyer or seller?

Even things like Apple Cash or PayPal or Venmo or CashApp perform functions that can be bank-like, or not really bank-like.

Fintechs have looked at the constantly updated rules of what they can or can’t do before needing to comply with certain banking regulations, and usually try to avoid accidentally triggering certain rules. And the rules don’t divide into just bank versus not bank, as many of the rules apply to non-banks that do certain things, and many of the rules don’t apply to even banks that stay out of certain product lines. So it’s not a binary yes or no, but a series of complicated areas where some are yes and some are no.

The big problem, where this Synapse bankruptcy is hurting people, is when people worked with an entity that provides certain services, who relied on the back end on a middleman that provides other services, and then the middleman fails. People operating in the gray areas are exposing themselves to systemic risks they might not fully understand.

This isn’t about shareholders being wiped out. It’s about account holders of what they thought were bank accounts losing everything because their accounts were powered on the back end by a company they’d never heard of or directly dealt with.

These are supposed to have AI facial recognition for matching to government issued IDs, which just sounds like a huge attack surface (or even unintentional bugs).

Cigarette vending machines used to be quite common. Even today, there are some alcohol vending machines in controlled areas (some fancy hotels have 24/7 vending machines stocked with a particular brand of champagne bottles).

leftist themed nujob conspiracy mill

The Republican party is ripe for conspiracy theory targets.

Epstein had close ties with Trump and his attorney general Bill Barr (whose father hired Epstein to teach at a prestigious private high school without a college degree, where he was known for ogling the high school girls and showing up to parties where underage drinking was happening). The waitresses and hostesses at Trump’s Mar a Lago were also regularly recruited to work at Epstein’s island. Alex Acosta, the federal prosecutor who agreed to a secret plea deal where Epstein served a slap on the wrist in a local jail instead of real prison was later elevated to Trump’s cabinet, as Labor Secretary.

Now, Trump has named another child sex trafficker as his nominee for Attorney General.

There are suspicious ties between the Saudi royal family and key members in Trump’s orbit, including his son in law Jared Kushner. Elon Musk has been doing sketchy shit with the Saudis and the Russians, as well. Basically everyone in Trump’s circle, including his nominee to be the director of national intelligence, has shady ties with foreign adversaries.

There’s lots of other little things about financial profiteering by the Trump folks: an SBA COVID bailout that went to huge businesses, a move to privatize or sabotage the public postal service and the weather service to help the private competition, arbitrary or politically motivated regulations to help certain businesses while hurting others, etc.

I mean, it really wouldn’t be hard.

There’s been some reporting that Musk’s Super PAC has been paying its workers so well that it’s poached a bunch of the volunteers from the official campaign, and is so poorly run/audited that a lot of the workers are entering false data into the canvassing reports to qualify for bonuses. If that turns out to be true, then it will have been the case that Musk is burning his own money while hurting the Trump campaign.

I’m not ready to call the race, but stories like this at least reassure me that for Republicans, they’re not sending their best.