TACO Tuesday again

PTO, parental leave, pensions: Even the most prized benefits are on the chopping block In a tough labor market, workers often have fewer options for job-hopping, and employers can rethink what benefits they offer.

Here's why labor unions are important: www.businessinsider.com/deloitte-zoo...

Can This Chaotic Brooklyn Plaza Be Car-Free? Mamdani Says Yes.

I love it when we refuse to settle for the way things are as the way they have to be. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/n...

Plant still sounds great at 77. He’s got quite the band backing him too these days.

This is a great line, Hunter.

He’s incredibly easy to hate

RE: cash on hand, parts of Dodd-Frank were rolled back in the first Trump Administration, but lenders of a certain size are still required to have liquidity on hand to avoid crises. I think we should be periodically re-examining how much liquidity on hand lenders should retain but the policy exists!

As an aside, FinTech had the bonus of VC money which just skews the usual business models. It's basically trying to max user growth and then finding a means of cashing out, either via IO or acquisition. Profits are secondary if that.

ah correct, although 25-30% is still a very, very healthy profit margin for most businesses.

If CCs are making 50%+ profit margin each year, why would they need to do this unless forced?

It often takes a while before a consumer goes into default and in that time, the CC companies are making a lot of money off of them. CCs also make money off of vendors so there's a lot of risk mitigation built into their business model.

Re: default rate, my guess is a lower interest rate overall would have some effect on default rates, although maybe not to a great degree. But also, from the original proposal, it sounds like CCs would still have access to a variety of fees they could charge like late fees.

Except people who game the CC system like The Points Guy and those types. Most people don't have the time or energy to work it like that though.

They offer lower introductory rates frequently and those revert to higher rates after some period, but the advertising for the lower rates is of course much more prominent than the notice for what the rates will turn into. So yes, in a way they do this, but it predictably sucks for consumers.

That is a very fair critique!

From what I could read about this particular issue online, I think the reasoning that if a CC company like Visa has around a 50% profit margin like they had last year, they could still be quite healthy with something less than 50%, especially if it had a wider benefit to consumers.

I think given the choice to make no money off of a population segment or some money, most CCs will take the some money option. They don't seem to mind the risk and the T&Cs they put out, even with a lower interest rate, would mitigate that risk to a degree.

If you can't tell, I've grown disillusioned with the free market. It very clearly does not work for a majority of people. Adding some controls, which the US did with great success especially in the post-depression era, would help make markets work more broadly imo.

But the market most definitely needs regulation. Left unchecked, we have rates in the 20-30% range, locking some people into near permanent debt. Caps in a vacuum without any other policy probably leads to higher annual fees so they'd want to address that too.

Have you seen CC rates? Letting the market decide those rates has led to insane CC interest rates. My guess is that credit card companies will still find ways to make very healthy profit margins even with CC rate caps because they are quite good at making money.

I think her policy is easier to critique but my reading of this piece was that Ned was trying to get inside her head a bit and get at her thinking and I think that's tricky to do without talking with her at all.

I say all this not to bait a fight or anything. I'm a big fan of your housing policy analysis. I just had critiques of this Warren piece in particular, which I think doesn't hold up to the usual standards that you have for policy critiques.

I haven't asked her so I don't know. I don't think a lot of people have asked her that. It would be great if we did so we could get some insight into her thinking instead of drawing conclusions based on assumptions.

Is it credible to believe that Warren is unaware of the more poisonous strains of populism? I doubt that she is unaware. I get that her support of Platner is off-putting. She might be making a political calculation based on polls or maybe she's tired of candidates who are older than she is.

Was she wrong to try and limit stock buybacks among defense companies? There's a section of progressive thinkers that believe we should be limiting stock buybacks across the board, as buybacks are a way for a company to manipulate its own stock price (beyond the accepted ways of turning a profit).

Honestly, I read it and I think there's a lot of assumptions about what and how Warren is thinking without quotes or proof to back it up. The housing bill language is a mistake on her part for sure, but was she wrong to try and push to cap CC interest rates? Definitely not.

This is a wildly inaccurate summation of what Trump threatened. He threatened to wipe out their civilization forever. Genocide is the usual shorthand for describing such an action.

Armageddon is terrible, but our only other option was diversity trainings at work.

The rest of the world should probably collectively stand up to the U.S. right now, tbh

At the risk of stating the obvious, Iran should have had nukes this whole time. Clearly it's the only thing a country can have that will keep the US from messing with them.