Vegas64

I like it, it's a mind-bender for sure. Not sure what sort of audience or following this has gotten because it's confusing and a minor Marvel property, but it's been...interesting I guess. Not sure it's been good.

Bones Hyland is like Ja Morant if Ja was weaker and too skinny.

I can't unsee Matthew Stafford now when I see Elon Musk, especially in that AT&T commercial they are spamming during the playoffs.

We all saw it. Shhhh.

Eminem won the diss battle imo, but like I said and probably an unpopular music opinion, MGK landed the hardest punch against Em ever attempted with the benefit of time to be objective. Eminem basically ended his rap career though, but again, good for him for finding a second act as a punk rocker who may or may not know how to play the guitar. https://www.eonline.com/news/1322487/machine-gun-kelly-calls-out-tiktok-user-claiming-he-doesnt-actually-play-his-guitar

The flip side is seeing smoke that a loan forgiveness jubilee could exacerbate inflation. I'm not smart enough to know about the economics of it all, but that seems not good. But maybe the good of $10k loan forgiving is greater than the bad of additional inflation in a mid-term year.

Seeing a bit of "where there is smoke there is fire" with Biden potentially signing an EO to forgive up to $10k of federal student loans to head into mid-terms with a bump in favorability and popularity. That would be AWESOME.

Will it pair with Five Alive?

Rough times for subscription service businesses with stock prices but also some data/info now that there is some distance from the Joe Rogan controversy for Spotify. Spotify’s Joe Rogan problem might not be a problem at all. The streaming giant reported a 15% increase in premium subscribers year-over-year, reaching 182 million globally by the end of March, despite continued controversy over Rogan’s podcast. Earlier this year, artists like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell left Spotify in response to Rogan’s spread of vaccine misinformation, and members got hashtags like #SpotifyDeleted trending on Twitter. These protests don’t appear to have hurt Spotify—overall active monthly users also rose to 422 million up from 406 million in late 2021. Rogan later apologized, but said he gained 2 million new subscribers as a result of the controversy around his podcast. Spotify noted that they slightly missed subscriber estimates due to its suspension of services in Russia after the start of the war in Ukraine. After releasing its first quarter report, Spotify’s stock price fell to an all-time low despite its positive subscriber growth. Analysts at companies like Citi and JPMorgan said they were concerned about operating losses and gross margins for the next quarter.

Lillard’s wingspan is surprising. I loved him in his prime but he’s the exhibit A of how fast you seem to fall off a cliff when your “athleticism” peak is over, which doesn’t bode well for Ja if making that comp.

And he’s got that Pete Davidson vibe to him that women seem to be enjoying.

He made a succesful pivot to punk pop rock actually, believe it or not (his last album was #1 on the charts I think and seems to have a big fan following), after Eminem destroyed his rap career. Which honestly, if you look back at it honestly, his Eminem diss was actually a very solid effort and the best punch to ever land on Eminem imo.

I went back and listened again to see if I might have missed something. Again, I was reading the initial, breathless praising and reports when the album dropped and "Album of the Year" being thrown around, so I was expecting something I think more interesting, transformative, moving, I don't know. I can see how sonically it is good, Kanye and Pharrell are up to par, but it didn't really blow (pun intended) me away to be honest. Most people like the Rock and Roll track the best and the Beyonce sample seems forced and the song weak-- Kid Cudi is my favorite part. The rest of the album it's much the same-- above average production (not great) and extremely tired lyrics, wordplay and content from Pusha T. Better production from Neptunes & Kanye and better rap from Pusha T, together, can be found on YouTube from 10 years ago: "What Happened to that Boy", "New God Flow", and "What I Don't Like Cruel Summer remix", respectively. That said, Daytona was boring to me too. Maybe I had my fill of the same old coke rap metaphors from the oversaturated 2010's.

It needs a sub; can you copy and paste? This is pretty near and dear to my heart right now so I'd like to read it if you wouldn't mind.

Readers are Leaders. or is it, Leaders are Reader?

It just dawned on me, this is why people hate billionaires. It's a cheat code to ignore all the griping and complaining from people who disagree with you.

Can we start crap-posting about how the #10 NOLA seed is going to beat the #1 PHX seed tonight or is it too early to dream and hope?

That's a big problem. Get to a rheumatologist post-haste. I'm not a doctor, but GCP's are worthless with auto-immune generally speaking.

Steroids knock down inflammation, so your inflammation markers will be lower. Not sure about the RA factor, but if you have something that is multi-system (e.g. joints/swollen arthritis) but is not actually RA or PA, then it will be harder to nail down. Do you have a good rheumatologist you are going to or is this all your GCP?

Look at UT-Austin as an example as well-- most of us went when the school was an average, cheap, in-state option with average to above average admission barriers. Now 90% of us on this site would be kindly asked to get off the lawn.

Bad move to take steroids before doing the bloodwork, IMO. I have had a bout with this stuff and I don't have the time to write out a novel now, but the long and short of lessons learned is always do blood work and testing before starting treatment because you can mask or make diagnosis longer and harder when treating symptoms to lead to a clinical impression.

When I think of Northeastern I think "meh", and probably because I'm older and remember it before it paid to transform itself.

An interesting (take it with a grain of salt) blind poll. I don't know if you guys are familiar with Blind (I use it for my company to get the scoop on layoffs and rumors, etc.) from NYT: Many Twitter employees feel personally invested in the company’s effort to encourage healthy conversation — even if they do not directly work on content moderation — and have pressed executives to crack down further on hate speech and misinformation, six employees said. They see Mr. Musk’s proposal to revert to Twitter’s early, lax approach as a rebuke of their work. But other employees have argued in internal messages seen by The Times that their co-workers have shifted too far to the left side of the political spectrum, making employees who support Mr. Musk’s plans too uncomfortable to speak up. In a worker-run survey of nearly 200 Twitter employees on Blind, an anonymous workplace review app, 44 percent said they were neutral on Mr. Musk. Twenty-seven percent said they loved Mr. Musk, while 27 percent said they hated him.

A couple of pages back folks were talking about how 7500 employees for twitter felt bloated, especially since they are not A-list talent either (FAANG). Looks like cuts will come if you read the tea leaves on the financials of this upside-down-topsy-turvy-kinda-LBO. From NYT: So to summarize: $13.5 billion of Musk’s offer is a loan to Twitter; the aforementioned 4.51% interest rate would mean $609 billion in annual interest payments, which, you will note, was just covered by last years free cash flow of $630 billion. That leaves $33.5 billion of Musk’s offer as cash for equity. $12.5 billion of that cash is a margin loan against Musk’s Tesla stock; $21 billion is out-of-pocket…somehow. The first thing to note is that Musk is taking on enormous risk, and doing so in a way that actually limits his potential return. Remember, most LBO’s entail putting up around 10% of the purchase price, not 72%; the benefit of that approach is not simply less downside risk, but also more leverage to generate a higher return. This certainly lends credence to Musk’s insistence that this acquisition isn’t about the economics. That noted, I suspect that margin loan in particular is something Musk would like to get rid of as soon as possible. The best way to do that is to bump up Twitter’s cash flow and refinance that $12.5 billion, and the easiest way to increase cash flow is to make big cuts to Twitter’s workforce. Here are some rough calculations on what that might look like: Twitter, as of the end of 2021, had 7,500 full-time employees. That, to be perfectly honest, is a lot, particularly given the anemic nature of Twitter’s business: the average Twitter employee generates $677k in revenue (for reference, each of the 35,587 Facebook employees generates $3.3 million in revenue). Twitter spends just over $3 billion on Research & Development, Sales & Marketing, and General & Administrative; for the sake of argument let’s assume that those costs are Twitter’s employee costs, which means each employee costs Twitter around $401k/year (this obviously isn’t correct, but it’s close enough for this exercise). $12.5 billion more in debt (to refinance the margin loan) would require $564 million more a year in free cash flow (at an interest rate of 4.51%); that is about 1,400 employees at $401,000/employee.

I know we all hate him, but Stephen A Smith made some great points about Ben Simmons-- mostly about how we can all foresee a "Ben Simmons Rule" for pay-for-play in the next collective bargaining agreement because of this clear abuse and how he is screwing his peers. And it's funny how many times he says the word pathetic: