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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Yes, I and could also see an alliance between Le Pen and whatever UMP (hard right conservatives that used to rule all the time until Sarkozy drove the party into the wall, for non French people) calls itself these days. So, if indeed the snap election is a gamble to keep himself in power, it’s a risky gamble.

    If it’s a gamble to let them rule and fail, as you hypothesize, that’s even riskier. Fash have a way of staying in power somewhat longer than their popular support.

    Either way it’s not going to be fun days in France for a little while, damn.




  • Macron’s party got disastrous results and got trounced by the far right in the European elections.

    He had been selling himself as the shield that protected France from the rise of the local far right party. With these results, he has lost his credibility, and therefore his government did as well.

    Therefore he’s calling out-of-schedule French parliamentary elections that – I assume – he hopes will reelect his party and allies ahead of the far right. It might work: the far right party polls strong at around 30%, but has few allies, and may not be able to form a coalition government. If Macron himself can, that will strengthen his legitimacy.

    Needless to say, this is a risky gamble.






  • Astounding, isn’t it? That’s publicly traded companies for you. The company’s objective is to keep its stock up and up and up. That means shareholders must want to keep buying the stock, which in turn means that the company must demonstrate that its value will keep growing, so that by buying the stock today the shareholders will get a positive return tomorrow.

    Of course, the universe is finite and no growth is forever. The end state for such companies is not bankruptcy, at least in the immediate, but, more or less, the IBM fate: a previously uber-dominant mastodon whose market capitalization is now worth maybe one tenth of its modern competitors. The fact that it’s still turning a profit is only secondary: none of the big tech shops want to be the next IBM. Their executives are, after all, mostly paid in stocks.

    And that’s how you end up with companies that are making amounts of revenue you and I can’t even comprehend flail in a panic like they’re on the edge of the precipice whenever the technological landscape shifts.

    It’s both fascinating and remarkably dumb.