You serious? Your own examples aren’t even isolated to Boomers. Beanie babies was primarily a Millennial and Gen X phenomenon (which made sense because it was a toy trend amplified through the rise of the internet as mainstream, and took off among those early adopters of dial-up), and was one of many consumerist toy trends of the 80’s and 90’s, like pogs or Cabbage Patch Kids or Magic: The Gathering cards.

Satanic panic was driven as much by Silent Generation as it was the boomers, and is unfortunately part of a long line of religious othering that traces back to the dawn of human history. Mike Warnke’s The Satan Seller hit bestseller lists in 1972, and Silent Generation authors like Lauren Stratford and Lawrence Pazder ran away with their made up stories (and made a killing on book sales). By the time that panic hit its peak in the early 80’s, most parents of young children were boomers, but the collective messaging was still driven by older people in publishing and news.

Meanwhile, the basic idea of fads or trends are universal. The people mimicking TikTok dances or YouTube pranks transcend any one generation. More seriously, people are falling for conspiracy theories en masse, of all generations. Is anti-vax, or anti-seed-oil, or 9/11 truthers, or QAnon believers confined to a specific generation? This shit is everywhere, and believing that these things will die off with the boomers is going to result in a lot of surprise and disappointment that these things will always be with us.

That’s not unique to any one generation. Herd behavior is, like, part of the human condition.

Your link is wholesale prices of white non-organic caged eggs, updated daily. It also excludes the eggs sold on long term contracts.

The AP article takes the CPI report of the consumer price of all eggs (white vs brown, organic vs non organic, caged versus cage free versus free range) in a weighted average of how much is sold, and averages over the entire month. Plus retailers simply can’t update prices daily, and prefer to price things at numbers that end in 9.

The bird flu issues seemed to affect caged non-organic producers harder, so that those prices moved a lot more than the free range organic stuff. That led to some unexpected flips of which was more expensive, as I’d seen some traditional eggs going for $8.99 (up from around $3 before) while the free range organic stuff was only slightly up to $7.99 (up from about $5 before), literally in the same store on the same shelves.

Taken all together, you’d expect the monthly CPI price of an average of all types of eggs to be much less volatile than the daily wholesale spot price of the cheapest type of grade A whole fresh eggs.

Anecdotally I’ve already seen egg prices drop this month. Lots more availability of the sub-$5 options when I was in the store earlier this week. I’d expect next month’s CPI report, about the current month, to reflect a drop in retail egg prices.

The Senate has already passed a bill that limits the President’s power to set tariff rates on Canada. The House probably won’t take that up.

Right now, there’s also a Senate Bill with 7 GOP senators signed on that would limit the President’s power to unilaterally set tariffs (requires 48 hours notice to Congress, can’t last more than 60 days without Congressional approval, gives Congress fast track procedures for voting down new tariffs). There are some serious constitutional flaws in it (most notably the legislative non-aggrandizement doctrine, but also an issue with tying to sidestep the bicameralism and presentment requirement), though, and I’m not sure it would hit the point where it could overcome a presidential veto.

So right now it’s not clear whether this GOP opposition would actually build into real legislation that could actually have an effect, or whether this is all showmanship trying to influence Trump himself to roll this back.

1987: Black Monday

That one didn’t really matter that much to regular Americans. Less than a third of Americans owned stock back then, and that crash didn’t have an obvious cause from actual economic fundamentals. And the Fed managed to contain the liquidity crisis, as your linked Wikipedia page describes, so that the broader economy was largely unaffected.

Recessions matter. Stock market crashes only matter when they are caused by, or are the cause of, an actual recession in the real world.

suffering for 50 years

In Europe, feudalism lasted 600 years last time, and only ended because a plague loosened up the nobility’s power over peasants. Vestiges of that old system endured in some parts of Europe for another 200 years after that, too.

In some neofeudalist future, where the lords and nobles have access to incredibly invasive technology for monitoring the thoughts and actions of all people, for controlling even more links in the chain of the production of food or tools or weapons, that power structure may turn out to be even more entrenched than the last time around. It’s not far fetched to say that the next time strictly inherited class comes around, it becomes a permanent feature of all societies that follow.

Sure, I get if the “good side” were to be as cavalier with the law as trump is, the entire thing falls apart even faster. But I have no doubt in my mind the “rule of law” in the USA is over.

I’m not willing to make that call, yet. It’s on life support, with the doctor in charge coyly hinting at whether he’s going to finish it off himself, but it hasn’t happened yet.

And in this case, the Supreme Court bailed out the President. They went ahead and said all 9 justices disagree on whether the courts have the power to review this dispute (rejecting the most extreme and most unaccountable theory of executive power), but said that the proper forum is in Texas, not in DC. So this DC judge who was weighing contempt was stripped of jurisdiction to do so.

That’s not a constitutional crisis, which is what I’m very concerned about being that uncrossable line, but it is still separately a bad result.

These are nuanced distinctions, and I don’t want to make it seem like I’m only watching out for a constitutional crisis and ignoring all the other ways that Trump is hurting the rule of law, but I think that violating court orders is a special kind of harm that needs to be viewed as its own especially dangerous thing.

This is one of the basic reasons why Political Compass Memes is such a bad idea.

No kidding. Not only do people fall on different parts of that two dimensional map depending on context (e.g. different positions on how much government support there should be for the arts versus for the sciences, how much government should regulate guns versus automobiles, etc.), but elevating these two axes above all the other unseen dimensions (ideological purity versus pragmatic compromise or versus consensus seeking, at what point process should yield to substance, the extent to which our institutions should have inertia that resists change, etc.), which causes people to oversimplify political issues into just those two dimensions.

There are many dimensions, and each problem may call for a different solution that would fall into a different place in any given dimension than the solution to another problem.

No. The 7% breaker went off 4 separate times in March 2020, though.

It’s a rule hard baked into the NYSE that trading is paused for at least 15 minutes if it drops 7% in a single day. It is paused again for at least 15 minutes if it drops 13%, and then trading is ended for the day if it drops 20%.

There’s not a goal post being moved. I’m describing now where the line has always been for a constitutional crisis: a judicial contempt order that gets disregarded by the executive branch. And the path to that is basically:

1. The executive branch does something illegal.
2. Someone sues in court.
3. The court rules that action to be illegal.
4. The executive branch doesn’t obey the court order.
5. The court orders the executive branch to show cause why contempt should not issue.
6. The court finds the executive branch officials to be in contempt and orders sanctions (aka a punishment).
7. The executive branch disregards that punishment and refuses to enforce it or obey it.

Steps 1 through 3 are pretty routine, and happen all the time.

And there are off ramps that avoid that constitutional crisis. Maybe it’s a case where the court’s ruling gets overruled on appeal. Maybe the court finds that it doesn’t have jurisdiction to rule on that issue. Maybe the executive branch backs down. One of those has happened so far in all of the cases that have ended.

It’s the cases that are still active where things might go off the rails. This particular Salvadorean deportation case has made it further than any other (past the fifth step I described above) and is the one where DOJ has suspended its own lawyer for admitting that he didn’t have the answers the judge was looking for. In a closely related case, DOJ has suspended its own lawyer for admitting personal frustration with his client (that is, ICE/DHS). These are concerning and worth pushing back on at every turn, and to sound the alarms when that line is actually crossed.

This defeatist attitude, that Trump has already won and is unaccountable, is counterproductive. We’re still busy fighting, and we can still win because we haven’t lost yet.

No, and this is really important.

Intentionally disobeying court orders is a red line, in a way that merely breaking the law isn’t.

If you argue that the Trump administration has already crossed that red line several times, and people start believing it, it carries less force when they actually do cross it. It’s a big deal, and the mere fact that his administration is arguing that they haven’t crossed it (yet) is important for a few reasons:

• The rank and file federal employees don’t yet feel that they have the precedent to follow executive branch orders that would violate court orders.
• The political actors aligned with Trump don’t yet feel emboldened enough to do the same, if Trump hasn’t done it first.
• The resistance can point to that specific act, of crossing the red line, as a position to fight on, for both recruiting fence sitters and their effort to active resistance (and justification for no longer fitting themselves purely within the bounds of the law).
• On the other hand, crying wolf about the red line before it is crossed confuses those fence sitters (hyper technical arguments about whether and how the Trump administration broke the law don’t carry the day) and makes it less politically powerful when that line is crossed.

So long as the Trump admin still pretends to care about the law, there’s still a lane for lawsuits and litigation as active resistance. If the Trump administration starts openly flouting court orders, which has not happened yet, that opens up a new chapter.

Trump is pushing limits, but is still being really careful about what is technically legal. If they stop tip toeing around that line, then the resistance is clear to escalate into technically illegal conduct, too, while still aiming for a return of the rule of law.

Muddying the waters by arguing that the line has already been crossed is misreading where we are in this resistance movement.

And disclosure: I’m a lawyer and I have filed things in court against the government, so I have a vested professional and personal interest in believing that what happens in court still matters. But I also have an above average understanding of exactly what the constitutional and statutory powers of the presidency are, and what kind of actions would actually threaten the continued viability of our constitutional government.

No, it hasn’t.

It’s been threatened several times, and there’s been plenty of arguments by Trump’s DOJ that they didn’t actually violate the text of orders (including in this case, where the judge didn’t include in the written order to return flights that have already left U.S. airspace), or that any violations were inadvertent and not intentional, but this is the first case that is dealing with the question of whether the administration intentionally violated a court order.

The judge is taking the steps to learn the facts here, and the shocking thing is that DOJ just put the main attorney on administrative leave (and pulled him off this case) for conceding obvious things in open court. Despite just promoting him to his position the week before.

And the vastly wealthy will benefit, as they always do, by picking up those bargain basement stocks which will, eventually, become valuable again.

I don’t think that’s correct.

Imagine, if you will, an uptick in vandalism on Tesla Cybertrucks. Insurance companies notice and increase the price of insuring them. The used car market price for those vehicles goes down, with fewer people wanting to buy vehicles that are more expensive to insure and are more likely to be vandalized.

Is that price drop a dip that a savvy investor can take advantage of? Is there an investment case for buying used cybertrucks and then hoping that Elon’s stink fades? I don’t think so. The value of that thing has permanently decreased.

Look to American soybean farming. Trump put tariffs on China in 2018, and China retaliated with tariffs on soybeans, among other products. Brazil stepped in and started exporting a lot of soybeans to China, and maintained that market share even as the tariffs were canceled. Basically, American farmers never recovered. Buying up all that farmland for cheap wouldn’t have done anything because the new owners of that land can’t benefit from some kind of higher profits from that land.

Sometimes things drop in price because they just become less valuable. I think that’s what’s happening with American stocks right now, because the damage that is being done is hard to reverse.

Nope. This is more like The Oligarchs Who Came to Regret Supporting Hitler or, in The Dark Knight Rises, the billionaire who finds that funding Bane’s rise to power doesn’t actually give him any power, or another business dude learning that working with Bane doesn’t even save him from the movement itself.

The billionaires thought they could buy influence and just get the things they want, while stopping Trump from getting what he wants. For whatever reason, Trump is a true believer in tariffs, so that’s what giving him power will result in.

I’d argue that’s reversing cause and effect. A cratering economy on Main Street often gets reflected as a crash on Wall Street.

Sometimes the outcomes diverge. One common analogy in finance circles is that the stock market is like a hyperactive puppy on a long leash being walked by a slow owner whose gradual movements trend in a particular direction while the puppy erratically moves back and forth near that owner. Maybe it’s some kind of hype or panic moving markets in a way that’s uncorrelated with the underlying economic activity. Or it’s a specific play on a specific type of financial instrument that has become untethered from a thing it used to be tightly wound up with. Many financial panics happen when correlations between things break down, and all the financial engineering in a particular type of product relied on a bad assumption so that it spreads to other financial products.

But in many cases, they move together because the people buying and selling stocks feel sentiment driven by actual economic fundamentals.

Of course I have to show valid, government issued ID to vote.

Let’s talk about flying instead of voting.

What happens if you fly somewhere, have your wallet stolen, and have to fly home without an ID? Does your country have a procedure for dealing with this case?

The answer is pretty obviously yes. There are methods of confirming identification by other means, for issuing a new identification card quickly, etc.

With voting, the question isn’t whether government issued IDs can be used to streamline identity verification. Every polling site uses and accepts IDs. The question is what happens when someone doesn’t have their ID on them, or can’t get to the polling place in person: is there a procedure that still allows them to vote somehow? Those are the alternative procedures being banned by legislation like this.

Musk overpaid at $44B,

Yes, but about $14 billion was financed by debt rather than shares of stock, so the market cap immediately dropped to $30B as a result (enterprise value is market cap + outstanding debt because in a liquidation the debt would be paid out of the assets before the shareholders get anything). So in a sense, the current shares were worth about $30B at the time of the 2022 transaction.

If this new merger is a private transaction that values X at $33B and xAI at $80B, and everyone agrees, it’s functionally the same as if it were worth $3.3B and $8B.

That’s what I’m getting at in my first comment. Any explosive is inherently in a state of high stored chemical energy. That energy will want to come out somehow. And if it isn’t released, it will always stay there, ready to be released at any time.

It’s the equivalent to stacking a bunch of really heavy objects on really high shelves above where people walk. When that energy gets released, it’s going to be really destructive. And if that energy gets released in an unsupervised, unplanned way, people are gonna get hurt.

slowly release the chemical energy to the ground

In what form? Like a really hot rock that warms the earth around it for a few decades? That’s dangerous in itself, and, like my example about electrical batteries, susceptible to their own runaway reactions that cause fires or explosions.