Debt Bubble Close to Popping

There are serious warning signals coming from a variety of markets, including the used-car loan market.

Every Friday I conduct a team meeting to recap our week.

This morning, one of our General Managers opened up DealerTrack — a portal that dealers use to communicate with auto lenders — and highlighted something very concerning: 9 of our lending partners have started WAIVING “open auto stipulations” for consumers.

Wait, wtf does that even mean? Let me explain using a simple, hypothetical scenario:

1) Consumer takes out an auto loan in 2020/2021 on an overvalued car
2) 2022 comes around and that overvalued car is now rapidly declining in value
3) With the car declining in value, consumer now owes more on the car than it is worth
4) Consumer no longer wants the car. Maybe they outgrew it. Or maybe it keeps breaking. So consumer wants to trade it in.
5) But dealer can’t trade the car in because the consumer owes WAY too much on it.
So dealer asks consumer for lots of money down to cover the difference.
6) But of course, the consumer doesn’t have $1,000s to cover the difference between what they owe on the car and what it’s worth. And here comes the perfect storm…
7) Dealer can’t sell consumer a car, consumer can’t buy a car, and, you guessed it, lender can’t finance a car! Everybody loses! Oh no! So what happens next?
8) Lender knows that most consumers are stuck in this situation, and does the following:

WAIVES THE OPEN AUTO STIPULATION.

Meaning, the lender lets the consumer buy the car KNOWING that they already have an open auto loan with another bank!

It’s becoming apparent that 2023 has the potential to be worse than 2008. How much worse, we will have to wait and see. In the meantime, it’s a very good idea to be prepared to lower your standard of living and focus your spending on a) things you really need, b) things that will last, and c) things that provide high value for the money.

Live well within your means and you’ll be all right. This is not the time to live a champagne lifestyle on a discount beer budget.

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Monday Arktoons

HOW TO SUCCEED LIKE A DARK LORD Episode 23: Something Overlooked

CHUCK DIXON PRESENTS: WAR Episode 77: Marine Raid on Munda

EVIL MONKEY MEMES Episode 69: Can I Get A Witness

DEUS VULT Episode 18: Left to Die

CHUCK DIXON PRESENTS: COMEDY Episode 70: Christmas at Greyfriars

There is a bit of a historical Easter egg in today’s HOW TO SUCCEED. A free ebook to the first person who can correctly identify what it is. Hint: it’s also in the previous two episodes.

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On Thought Leadership

Earlier today, I was accused of considering myself to be “a thought leader”. Let me hasten to make it clear that I do not consider myself a thought leader, nor do I even believe it is possible for me to become a thought leader. Over the last five decades, I have reliably observed that most people are constitutionally incapable of following my thought processes for various reasons that are usually, though not necessarily, related to the Bell Curve.

Communication is very difficult across two standard deviations, which is why most “thought leaders” are, by necessity, midwits. I’m not a thought leader because I’m one of the various individuals that the thought leaders read in order to formulate their thoughts.

As I have said many times, I don’t expect you to agree with me. I don’t even expect you to understand.

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Gammacaust on Gab

Remove Reply and Remove Reply and Block are two killer features that will help Gab continue to grow. @a and his team are absolutely killing it. Only retards and losers with zero reach are opposed to these new features, because it limits their ability to spam threads and their attempts to hijack the posts of others. The vast majority of users will greatly appreciate the ability to ignore the retards.

Gab has, with one fell swoop, successfully targeted its biggest weakness, which was the ability for the ill-intentioned to target and harass users on their own posts. This was extremely detrimental to Gab’s most important users, namely, those with large followings, because they are the ones who possess microphones worth hijacking.

Of course, the very retards and losers who are most affected by the fact that most users would very much like to pretend they don’t exist are now screaming “censorship”, which is literally retarded. Gab isn’t censoring anyone. This is not censorship, this is freedom, because forcing people to listen to those they don’t want to listen to is the exact opposite of freedom.

But it should surprise no one that the Gammas on Gab are viewing these new features as a Gammacaust. Now they are only guaranteed the ability to talk about others on their own posts, which means that everyone else has the ability to exclude them and go back to completely ignoring them. And there is no greater fear for the Gamma than being excluded by his social superiors. They’re apoplectic about losing their self-perceived ability to correct, condemn, and criticize people who have no interest in anything they have to say.

UPDATE: In response to the wailing and gnashing of teeth, I added the following:

Dear Self-Appointed Gab Police,

It is amusing to see how you pretend every response is an intelligent and substantive critique that merits serious contemplation on the part of the original poster. This is not even close to being the norm.

The fact is that overwhelming number of “critical” responses are posted by a) retards, b) gammas, c) fedposters, d) paid hasbara accounts, and e) bots. Most of those responses are, at best, a complete waste of time and an insult to human intelligence.

For Gab to give its users the ability to ignore the constant stream of retardery and fake comments is not censorship, it is freedom and user-empowerment. It’s not taking any power away from you, to the contrary, it is giving you and everyone else the freedom to choose how to engage with others on the platform.

If you wish to respond politely and substantively to this post, please do so, whether you agree with me or not. And if you wish to respond in a retarded and vulgar manner, you can certainly do that too.

I just don’t have to put up with that nonsense anymore, thanks to the wisdom of the Gab team.

Regards,
Vox

UPDATE: Torba weighs in with the only two cents that matter. The key being the “hands off” objective. What he’s doing is the exact opposite of censorship.

Gab’s goal has always been to be as hands off as possible with user content. Instead we want to give you the community the tools to create and shape your own experience. Freedom of association is just as important as freedom of speech.

We have a new feature today that gives you the user more control over your own content and your own experience on Gab. Users now have the ability to moderate comments under their own posts. When you post original content on your profile you are the moderator of the conversation happening under that content because it’s your content on your profile.

The comments are not removed completely from the site, they will still be in the “comments” section of someone’s profile who left the comment–but they will no longer be in the comment section under your content when you remove them.

Users also cannot moderate “quote post” replies to their content because those are new pieces of content on someone else’s page. This is a healthy balance that allows for dissent to still be discovered in quote posts and for spam to be removed from the comment section.

No one in entitled to an audience on someone else’s content. If you want to “dunk” on people’s posts with your own take you can always do so with a quote post to your own audience.

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Where All Roads Lead

MIDNIGHT’S WAR UPDATE

Days Left: 5

% of Goal: 202.9 percent

% of Stretch Goal 1: 101.5 percent

% of Stretch Goal 2: 67.6 percent

Backers: 359

It’s official. Castalia House will publish a short novel set in the Midnight World entitled OUT OF THE SHADOWS. As promised, chapter two:

MIDNIGHT’S WAR: Out of the Shadows

Chapter Two: Where All Roads Lead

All throughout the following day, Elliott found himself somewhat distracted. He zoned out during a conference call with Bank of America, and twice had to be pulled out of his reveries during a meeting with the Human Resources team by his executive assistant, Natalie.

He couldn’t stop thinking about what this mysterious meeting might entail, and what “very profitable,” might mean. It couldn’t be Blackrock behind this, could it? Even if they wanted to keep their interest on the down low in order to hide their intentions from the competitors that trailed them like remoras sticking to a great white shark, Elliott was pretty sure sending an executive to the site in question wasn’t their modus operandi. To paraphrase the Muslims, Mohammed would have to go to the Rock, as the Rock wasn’t in the habit of coming to him.

For a reason that he couldn’t quite rationalize, he felt there might be a European element lurking somewhere underneath it all, perhaps even a very old European element. Being a second-generation son of Silicon Valley, Elliott knew very little about the money markets of the Old World, the London oligarchs, the Swiss private banks, and the ancient Italian investment firms that seemed to own everything from Greek shipping firms to Vietnamese wineries without anyone ever even knowing their names.

So what would the play be, he wondered. That old generational money never seemed to be very interested in the stock markets, let alone in splashy public offerings and the media attention they attracted. But how would an outright buyout make any sense at this point in time? Making money was all about the multiple, but what potential buyer, no matter how well-endowed, could match the buying power of an entire market pumped up on hype and the hypothetical promise of longer life?

Continue reading “Where All Roads Lead”

Weekend Arktoons

MY SISTER SUPREMA Episode 34: An Actual Evil Lair

PAPER DOLL VERONIKA Episode 43: Voices in the Depths

FULL OF EYES Episode 15: This is Love

CHUCK DIXON PRESENTS: ADVENTURE Episode 70: A Pirate Christmas

CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 182: Aggregated Assault

ENTER: NIGHT Episode 10: Missing Person

THE RED TATTOO Episode 27: The Tattoo

VEGFOLK FABLES Episode 170: Saint Lennon’s Hair

INVASION ’55 Episode 23: Ricky & Jimmy

BEN GARRISON CLASSICS Episode 74: JP Morgan .999 Stops .666

CHUCK DIXON PRESENTS: COMEDY Episode 69: Christmas In July


Black Magick War

Zelensky might sound insane, and from a rational materialist perspective he probably is. But then, rational materialists, by definition, are not capable of recognizing or analyzing the esoteric:

‘Reconquest’ of Crimea has started – Zelensky

Ukrainians are now psychologically ready to retake the Crimean Peninsula from Russia by force, President Vladimir Zelensky told French broadcaster TF1 in an interview on Sunday. “The Reconquest” of Crimea has supposedly already started in Ukrainians’ heads, the president claimed, hinting that he could visit the “de-occupied” peninsula as early as 2023.

“The operation itself has not started yet,” Zelensky said, when asked about Kiev’s plans for Crimea. “When it starts, you will definitely hear about it,” he told TF1, adding that he personally believes “the reconquest of Crimea has started in people’s heads, and that’s very important.”

There is genuine intent behind this seemingly lunatic announcement. It’s an obvious attempt to speak will into being. However, the Russians are also actively engaged in the spiritual war, which is why Zelensky has banned the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. He regards the Christians in Ukraine as being as much his masters’ enemies as the Russians.

I suspect it won’t be long now before the Russians launch a massive offensive, because Zelensky appears to be rapidly approaching the “Hitler in the bunker” stage.

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2-2 (4-2)

Argentina have won the World Cup. Congratulations to the Albiceleste and their fans. It’s good to see a national team that actually represents its nation win, instead of the team that represents the state that successfully imports the best Africans. And while it was a fun and exciting tournament, one is left with one conclusion.

Too many penalties. So many penalties.

The game really should not be designed to encourage teams to build their offense around playing for fouls in the box.

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