not sure the State is equipped to take over the first level of insurance...go to the DMV some time and ask if that is who you want to deal with when you have roof damage from hail etc

this is just State Farm looking for concessions.

there is at least one county out there that doesn't have ANY building codes...you can build whatever you want

forewarned, it is expensive to get anything done in the middle of nowhere

less than 10% of Americans even know who McCarthy is, no one will blame him

there is no external context for a buyer of debt to assess value outside of sovereign currencies, which are basically ALL junk for G7 nations

the other G7 nations with worse stats all have AAA...its meaningless...if you want to buy G7 debt, you MUST buy toxic waste

maybe one day Mars will issue high-quality debt backed by hard assets...until then...

then why am I being asked to bail out a generation's college loans?

then why is food bank use at an all time high?

then why are more six-figure earners reporting to be living paycheck-to-paycheck?

then why is personal credit card debt at an all time high?

the US dollar is beyond the power of a rating agency

the fact that all of the industrial economies have generated so much debt in the last generation and still get AAA ratings tells you how pointless these ratings are for currencies-that-matter

Canada has the highest debt-to-GDP ratio in the G7 now and it also has AAA rating

until someone sells Martian government bonds backed by hard assets and yearly balanced budgets...buyers have no choice but to buy toxic assets

when governments inflate, they pay back debt with less worthy currency...so the US and everyone else is basically slow-motion defaulting over time anyway

in any case they wouldn't get far...who is supplying them with ammo and fuel on the road to Moscow? the US? Putin would empty the silos

Putin is using them as a battering ram, and is presumably not bothered by leaving their corpses in a burn pit to preserve the Russian Army

Putin is not too different than Stalin...the penal units Stalin forced to walk into German minefields had a 90% loss rate...but they weren't regular Red Army so who cares?

in fact its the opposite...look closer to home

no one on the Harvard or Yale rowing teams died in the Civil War...they didn't even put on uniforms (and if anyone asked them to, they could pay someone else to go in their place)

fast forward to Vietnam when we decided the elite should fight too...the nation ripped itself apart

fast forward again to the pointless quagmire of Afghanistan...all volunteers, mostly from poor backgrounds...no meaningful public dissent for twenty years

back to Russia, they already have 500k fresh recruits who will soon be ready to deploy...no riots so far

all the major techs are massively overbought because its become a safety trade

Microsoft doesn't care, they moved on to Azure and AI

Intel kinda cares, but they are moving on to being a fab provider

Dell, Lenovo, Acer...they're screwed...they have no other play but Wintel

a loan used to buy a degree

a degree which isn't generating enough income to pay off the loan

if you buy out other underperforming assets like foreclosed homes, there is a discount...where is the discount on these underperforming degrees?

why do I want your underperforming asset? I already have a degree, but thanks!

WFH means work-from-anywhere, which dooms the leverage of a union

unfortunately most teams don't schedule a periodic `go mod tidy` so you just end up with ancient deps

most people never read the code of the deps they pull in, so I don't think vendoring provides any security assurances

indeed a brutal footgun but will be fixed soon