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Kaiserreich Beta 0.25.1

2023.06.02 21:19 Alpinia_KR Kaiserreich Beta 0.25.1

As pleased as we are with our Ukraine rework and the great reception it received, no large rework like this would be complete without some last-minute bugs that crept in on the final stages of testing. To remedy this, this hotfix should get rid of the most game-breaking bugs, and keep things running more smoothly. Enjoy!
Changes
New Decisions
GFX
Music Mod
Mapping
Other Changes
Fixes
Notable Fixes
Other Fixes
We hope you enjoy playing Kaiserreich as much as we did making it!
- The KR4 Team: 84F8D8, Alpinia, Arvidus, Augenis, Blackfalcon501, Carmain, Chazem, Chiang Kai-shrek, Chiron29, Cody, Conchobhar, DuoDex, El Daddy, Fedex, Flamefang, Gaboemi, Gideones, Hamfast, hildagrim, Ido, Igor050301, JazzyHugh, Jeankedezeehond, Jonny BL, Juliet Wehrwolf, Kano, katieluka, Kennedy, kergely, KFateweaver, Klyntar King, Krčo, Luwofe, Matoro, McOmghall, ~mw~ // miwaco, NukeGaming, Owenomaly, PPsyrius, Pelmen, RagnoStrangeros, Rnk, Shiroe, Sonny O’Cad, SuperGreenBeans, suzuha, The Alpha Dog, The Irredentista, The Italian Jojo, Vidyaország, and Zimbabwe Salt Co.
submitted by Alpinia_KR to Kaiserreich [link] [comments]

2023.06.02 19:12 Alyafei-Ameera Payment gateway vs Payment processor vs Merchant account

Payment gateway vs Payment processor vs Merchant account
The payments industry is a fast-paced market that is constantly changing due to the introduction of new payment systems and new technologies.
We're seeing payment technology companies play a bigger role in the payments industry, particularly as technology advances—and many of them are even integrating with traditional financial institutions to appeal to the new consumer and merchant preferences. Unlike in the past, when payment processing was simply about facilitating the flow of money, the latest payment processing players are completely redefining the customer experience and enabling business owners to operate their businesses with remarkable ease.
On the surface, the payment processing industry appears to be easy, but there are many parties involved in what appears to be a simple procedure. When a customer swipes their credit or debit card at a payment terminal, the transaction usually takes just a few seconds—but the procedure itself requires several steps and several players that communicate with one another. So, first and foremost, we must understand how it functions.
Let us begin with the individuals involved.
  1. The cardholder is the person who possesses the credit card used to make a purchase.
  2. The business that offers products or services to cardholders is known as the retailer.
  3. The acquirer is the merchant bank that manages credit card transactions on the merchant's behalf, accompanied by the credit card brand or networks, such as Visa and MasterCard.
  4. Finally, the financial institution that issued the credit/debit card is known as the issuing bank.
Now, using this example, let's see how these participants conduct a credit/debit card transaction.
Fatima, a cardholder, buys an apple from Mohammed, a brick-and-mortar dealer, for 1.00 QR. Fatima inserts her credit card into a chip reader and dials out to obtain an authorization code at the POS (point-of-sale) terminal. What happens next is as follows.
The Authorization Process
Ø The information collected on the POS terminal is first sent to the acquirer by the payment processor.
Ø The acquirer sends the information to the issuing bank through the credit card network, says Visa, and requests payment authorization for a one QR transaction from the issuing bank.
Ø The issuing bank checks to see if Fatima has enough money if the expiry date is correct, and several other items, such as matching Mohammed's business address and the cardholder's billing address.
Ø When the issuing bank confirms that all is right, it issues an approved authorization code and returns it in the same manner that it received an authorization request from Visa and the acquirer.
Ø On his POS terminal, Mohammed sees the accepted message.
Ø The issuing bank places a one QR hold on Fatima's credit card account in order for Mohammed to collect the proceeds from the transaction.
The Settlement Process
Ø At the end of the day, all these authorizations are stored in a batch in the POS terminal.
Ø When Mohammed close the batch, the payment processor sent it back to the respective issuing bank for final clearance, using the same channels as before.
Ø They are sent to the acquirer first, and then to the issuers via credit card networks.
Ø Following the acquirer's funding of the merchant's bank account, each issuing bank eliminates the hold and withdraws actual funds from the cardholder's account.
Now you understand the whole payment cycle. So it's time to dive in and grasp the most puzzling words that merchants encounter while searching for online payment services: a merchant account, a payment processor, or a payment gateway.
What is a Merchant Account?
In layman's terms, a merchant account is similar to a holding account where all payments are routed before being deposited into a traditional bank account. This account is dedicated to accepting payments from online merchants. So all the online payments received for your sales are stored in this account. A merchant account is the same whether you sell physical things, subscriptions, or digital products.
After successfully applying for a merchant account, each merchant is granted a unique Merchant ID. A merchant ID is a one-of-a-kind code provided to merchants by a payment processor. This code, which is frequently abbreviated as MID, is provided to parties involved in transaction reconciliation along with cardholder information. When communicating with their processor and other parties, a merchant can use the MID to help them identify themselves.
Your merchant account might be classified as either high risk or low risk based on criteria defined by merchant service providers.
The following are the most common criteria, considered to classify high-risk and low-risk merchant account:
ü Average monthly sales volume
ü Average credit card transaction
ü Different currency accepted
ü Offer recurring or subscription package
ü History of excessive chargeback
ü Main product offering
ü Sell to a high-risk country
These criteria differ considerably depending on the payment processor's guidelines.
Many times, small business owners have never heard the phrase "high-risk merchant account" unless their company is recognized as such. At first, it appears to be a bit mysterious. In some situations, it may appear to be an unjust judgment against your company, the service you give, the items you offer, or you personally. However, this should not be cause for concern. You would be able to obtain better payment options if you have a thorough understanding of this term.
At first falling into the high-risk merchant account category seem like a disaster, but it isn't. It really has a lot of advantages.
  1. Economic expansion is a possibility: In contrast to conventional merchant accounts, which are limited to transactions only within the parent country, high-risk merchant accounts have no restrictions and can transact money in any currency, giving them a real possibility of globalizing their market.
  2. There are no volume controls: High-risk merchants do not have to worry about a monthly volume target, which means they can transact as much as they want.
  3. Account termination is less likely: If a typical merchant receives a large number of chargebacks (more than 1%), their account will be terminated; this is not the case for high-risk merchant accounts because the providers are aware that it is possible, so they are secure, and their account will not be terminated due to high chargebacks.
Understanding these phrases and determining which group your firm belongs to is preferable.
What is a Payment Processor?
A payment processor is a financial organization that provides payment processing services to online retailers. For merchant acquiring banks, they manage transactions from different sources such as credit cards and debit cards. It may form alliances with other businesses that interact with merchants or consumers. They are usually divided into two types: front-end and back-end.
o Front-end processors have links to different card organizations and provide merchant banks with authorization and settlement services.
o Back-end processors approve settlements from front-end processors and, for example, transfer funds from the issuing bank to the merchant bank through the Central Bank.
To offer their services directly to an online merchant, a payment processor gets into a reseller relationship with a payment gateway or a merchant account provider.
Payment processor example: PayPal is the first online payment processing company, founded in 1998.
What is a Payment Gateway?
A payment gateway allows you to be paid online when your clients make an online purchase. You can accept card payments directly from your website with the authorization granted by a payment gateway. As a result, it serves as a link between the transactions on your website and the payment processor. Transaction data cannot be disclosed due to security issues.
Before submitting the authorization request to the processor, several payment gateways offer tools for automatically screening orders for fraud and calculating tax in real-time. The tools for detecting fraud include geolocation, velocity pattern analysis, 'blacklist' lookups, delivery address authentication, identity morphing detection, and basic AVS tests.
There are many other factors to be considered when selecting a payment gateway. Check out here for more detailed information about payment gateway https://sadad.qa/en/best-payment-gateway-qata
Payment gateway vs Payment processor vs Merchant account
The most crucial parts of online commerce are payment processors, payment gateways, and merchant accounts. Any company that accepts online payments must understand the key differences and similarities between these three.
​
https://preview.redd.it/5p2lsnkn0n3b1.png?width=729&format=png&auto=webp&s=4dc12a9e2f1d96f057a97cc8cbcfad7475fd797b
Account approval:
Certain compliance and formalities must be followed if a retailer wishes to open some sort of account.
In order to obtain a merchant account, you must have extensive paperwork showing that what you offer is legal and does not violate any foreign laws or internal bank regulations.
Following the initial compliance audit, an additional bank compliance verification, such as:
· Do your company and website meet the compliance criteria of major card providers such as Visa, MasterCard, or American Express?
· Your chargeback History – have you kept a fair number of chargebacks?
This phase could take up to a week or month in total.
As you can see, obtaining a separate merchant account is a difficult task, but it is well worth the effort.
There is even less documentation to fill out in order to receive processor approval, and you will have access to your account in a matter of hours. As a result, this is one of the fastest strategies in terms of approval time. But it comes at a price.
For payment gateway, you need not wait for your account to be accepted, you will have immediate access to it.
Implementation:
For merchant account setup, you will be given either a snippet of code to implement on your website or full API and testing sandbox access. Custom integration with your website or app will be needed. You may need to perform custom integration with your website or app. Payment processors have regular solutions. There is no space for customization. Payment gateway implementation varies depending on the service provider and the technologies used to create the API or website.
Account stability
Account stability refers to the assurance that your account will not be shut down or placed on hold unexpectedly.
For an individual merchant account, you have complete control over the stability and efficiency of your account. In the event of a problem, your account manager will contact you. In the case of a payment processor, Merchants are not reviewed for Visa/MasterCard compliance and, instead of assisting them in complying with the regulations, the chances of account termination are increased without much clarification. While using a payment gateway, account stability varies depending on whether you're connecting with a payment processor or a merchant account.
Pricing
Expect a flat-rate pricing model when working with a payment processor. In contrast, depending on the merchant's business model and transaction volume, pricing in a merchant account is typically versatile and completely negotiable. If you use a third-party payment gateway solution, you can incur costs for integration and usage.
Risk Management
You can build your own anti-fraud rules and exceptions with a merchant account and a payment gateway to allow legitimate customers in. In a payment processor, this type of freedom is not available. As a result, the rate of payment acceptance is poor.
Terms & conditions
Terms and conditions for merchant accounts can be negotiated depending on the business model and processing volume. However, this is not the case for payment processors.
Support
There are several crucial circumstances that could have an effect on your online payment infrastructure. When selecting either of these, you should keep support in mind as a critical factor. You will be assigned a dedicated merchant account manager when you open a dedicated merchant account. In the case of a payment processor, you must meet standard protocol to get the problem resolved. Support for payment gateways varies depending on whether you're integrating with a payment processor or a merchant account.
You don't have to be concerned with payment gateways, payment processors, or merchant accounts. Since, Sadad will provide you with anything you need to sell effectively anywhere in the world, including a payment gateway, merchant account, and plenty of other advanced processing features. The All-in-One Payment Platform from Sadad is easy to use and adaptable. When you have concerns or want to expand your sales territory, you can count on us for customized advice and help.
If you have any payment problems, please let us know https://sadad.qa/en/ so that we can assist you.
submitted by Alyafei-Ameera to u/Alyafei-Ameera [link] [comments]

2023.06.02 19:06 Raiden720 Where does 261 stand on “ShotSpotter surveillance” gunshot detection systems in high crime areas?

On the one hand, yes, we have to admit that these are being installed in minority areas pretty much 100% of the time. On the other hand, that is where a lot of the crime takes place and a lot of the gunfire, so it makes sense to install these systems in these areas where these happen the most? This article is clearly critical of the system, and it says that there are only arrests made in 1% of the times when it “spots” gunfire. But wouldn’t removing these systems hurt the communities that these are in? Someone help me understand the counter-argument here, thank you!
https://www.minnpost.com/other-nonprofit-media/2023/05/minneapolis-schools-secretly-partnered-with-shotspotter-surveillance-company-cyber-attack-reveals/
Minneapolis schools secretly partnered with ShotSpotter surveillance company, cyber attack reveals
Data breach unmasks locations of gunshot detection sensors on rooftops of schools that predominantly serve Black youth
By Mark Keierleber, The 74
Shortly after a dozen gunshots erupted from a stolen red SUV on the northside of Minneapolis this month, emergency dispatchers were notified of the drive-by shooting that shattered a window at the school district’s administrative headquarters.
District officials promptly reported the shooting to the cops, who briefly halted their chase when they encountered a school bus dropping off students. A second police report, this one from a California-based surveillance company, had also alerted authorities to the ear-piercing pops.
The incident resulted in the arrest of three teenagers, who were ultimately chased down by cops on foot and a state police helicopter in the air. Shootings and car thefts have surged in Minneapolis over the last several years and, in a press release, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said that out-of-control youth had become “a danger to themselves and to anyone who happens to be around them.”
Yet in some ways, the teenage arrests were an anomaly: The controversial ShotSpotter surveillance sensors that notified police to the blasts, multiple reports have found, rarely direct police to the scenes of firearm crimes. Concerns about ShotSpotter false alarms and their disproportionate effects on Black residents didn’t stop the city’s school district from secretly partnering with the company, an investigation by The 74 has revealed.
For nearly a decade, Minneapolis Public Schools has made northside campus buildings available to bolster a massive surveillance network that peppers neighborhoods with microphones designed to detect, analyze and geolocate gunfire.
Since at least 2014, the school district has agreed to host nondescript ShotSpotter sensors on the rooftops of campus buildings, according to contracts that were leaked as part of a massive cyber attack on Minneapolis Public Schools earlier this year. Six agreements, signed in 2014 and 2019, authorize the sensors to be mounted atop school buildings “in an ‘out of sight’ fashion. The city maintains the primary contract to station ShotSpotter sensors throughout Minneapolis; the school district simply agreed to host the devices on their property. Last year, the city’s latest contract for the sensors totaled $168,000, according to GovSpend, a database that tracks government procurement.
Subjected to a relentless stream of mass school shootings, school districts nationwide spend billions of dollars each year on campus security, including on gun-detection hardware. Yet ShotSpotter’s footprint in education remains largely unknown. The locations of the gun-detection sensors in Minneapolis and urban communities nationwide have for years been intentionally hidden.
In the leaked contracts, Minneapolis school officials agreed to withhold from the public information about its participation in the surveillance program. Details about the sensor locations, officials agreed, “cannot be disclosed under any circumstances.”
In Minneapolis, campus ShotSpotter locations were uncovered during The 74’s investigation into the fallout from the February cyber attack. Highly sensitive information about students and educators, as well as confidential campus security information, were published online in March after the district failed to pay the Medusa cyber gang’s $1 million ransom demand.
ShotSpotter’s efforts to thwart bloodshed from gun violence is commendable, said Teresa Nelson, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota. But, she said, privacy and racial disparities in ShotSpotter locations, as well as reports calling into question the sensors’ effectiveness, outweigh their potential benefits. And efforts to withhold the school district’s ShotSpotter agreement from the public, stifle resident’s ability to engage in conversations about how to keep their communities safe, Nelson said.
Ultimately, “it adds a layer to the idea of policing in our schools” that could be problematic, she said. ShotSpotter coverage of schools, she worried, could send police who are “ready for an extremely dangerous confrontation” to campuses “for no reason” due to false alarms from fireworks, backfiring cars and other loud noises.
“That changes the tenor of policing in that area,” she said. “Police have tremendous power and so the community is entitled to know how they’re using that power and how they’re using new technologies that allow them to effectively conduct general mass surveillance.”
The Minneapolis school district didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. The district has been criticized for not sharing more information with the public about the nature and extent of the breach — its most recent statement on its website is from April 11. It declined interview requests from The 74 for a May 15 investigation about the breach of closely guarded campus security information and didn’t respond to questions for a May 5 article on the leak of highly sensitive information about students and staff.
In an email, Minneapolis Police Department spokesperson Garrett Parten declined to disclose the number of ShotSpotter sensors deployed across Minneapolis, adding that the company selects installation locations. The technology, he said, “has been an excellent tool in aiding the quick location of shooting victims” so they can receive medical attention “when seconds count.”
“In general, ShotSpotter pinpoints the location of gunfire,” Parten said. “This allows officers to respond directly to a location rather than doing a grid search looking for evidence. As such, Officers are able to quickly locate and secure evidence that might otherwise be removed, compromised, or missed altogether.”
Thomas Chittum, the senior vice president of analytics and forensic services at ShotSpotter owner SoundThinking, said the data breach in Minneapolis is a rare occurrence but the publicly traded company is taking the incident seriously. Though the sensors are regularly placed on municipal buildings like police departments and schools, he declined to specify how many are stationed on campuses in Minneapolis or nationwide. Sensor locations are confidential, he said, to prevent vandalism, retaliation against businesses and agencies that agree to host the devices, and efforts by gunmen to get around the system.
“Now that these things are known publicly, we have to assess whether or not we think it poses a risk to the efficacy of the system,” said Chittum, who retired last year as acting deputy director of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. “The sensors are not hard to relocate but we’ll have to assess whether or not that’s feasible and necessary.”
Few arrests, little evidence of gun-related crimes
Researchers and civil rights groups have warned for years that the technology, which is disproportionately deployed in communities of color, could do more harm than good by routinely sending militarized police into high alert over false alarms. SoundThinking maintains that its ShotSpotter sensors are 97% accurate.
The most comprehensive study on ShotSpotter’s efficacy, published in 2021 in the peer-reviewed Journal of Urban Health, reported dismal findings. The analysis of ShotSpotter in 68 metropolitan counties from 1999 to 2016 found the sensors had no significant impact on firearm-related homicide rates or arrest outcomes.
ShotSpotter deployments have been especially contentious in Chicago, where the sensors are disproportionately installed in neighborhoods with large percentages of Black residents. In more than 31,000 incidents each year, ShotSpotter alerts send Chicago police to locations where they failed to find evidence of gun crimes, according to research by the MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University’s law school. Between April 2021 and April 2022, researchers found, 90% of ShotSpotter dispatches failed to find evidence of guns. In a 2022 lawsuit, the group accused the city of relying on a surveillance tool that enables discriminatory policing without a clear public safety benefit.
A separate report from the city’s Office of Inspector General, published in 2021, reached similar results, concluding that the alerts rarely produced evidence of gun-related crimes, investigatory stops or recovered firearms. Yet the sensors led police to make more aggressive stops in certain neighborhoods, the office found, offering fodder for advocates who argue the devices lead to the over-policing of Black residents.
In a company-funded report by Edgeworth Analytics, researchers called the MacArthur analysis “misleading” and concluded that, “based on client reports,” ShotSpotter sensors were 97% effective in detecting gunfire.
Chittum said the sensor locations are selected based on historical crime data and rejected advocates’ concerns over racial disparities.
“The people that balk at the idea that you would deploy public safety infrastructure in the place where it could do the greatest good boggles my mind,” he said. “Of course you’re going to deploy it in the place where it’s most likely to help the people that have had the greatest impact from gun violence. I just don’t understand why you wouldn’t want law enforcement to know about shootings that occur in those neighborhoods.”
While the City of Chicago has long been a key ShotSpotter customer and former Democratic mayor Lori Lightfoot called the tool “a lifesaver,” that could soon change. New progressive Mayor Brandon Johnson campaigned on a promise to end the city’s $33 million ShotSpotter contract, vowing to instead “invest in new resources that go after illegal guns without physically stopping and frisking Chicagoans on the street.” After Johnson’s election, the company’s stock prices tumbled more than 25%.
After weighing the costs against their benefits, officials in several cities — including San Antonio, Texas, and Charlotte, North Carolina — have ended their ShotSpotter subscriptions. In San Antonio, officials spent more than $500,000 for the sensors, an expenditure that led to four arrests and seven weapons seizures in a two-year period.
Similarly in Minneapolis, ShotSpotter alerts have rarely led to arrests or evidence of gun-related crimes, according to a local television news investigation. An analysis found that Minneapolis police responded to about 8,500 ShotSpotter activations from January 2020 to September 2021. About 80% of the time, police didn’t locate evidence of a gun-related crime and only 32 activations — less than 1% of the total — led to an arrest.
On one occasion, in 2012, the city temporarily disabled the sensors on New Year’s Eve because the system became overwhelmed by alerts from the blasts of fireworks.
‘Still losing our young people’
The six Minneapolis campus ShotSpotter locations disclosed in the breach are clustered in the city’s northside. Districtwide, about a third of Minneapolis students are Black. At the campuses where ShotSpotter sensors were disclosed, nearly two-thirds of students are Black.
The roughly 33,000-student district operates just shy of 100 schools. It’s unclear whether the devices were placed at a limited number of district locations or whether information about other campuses that serve as ShotSpotter hosts were spared in the data leak. Though police said ShotSpotter alerted them to the recent drive-by shooting — along with calls from educators — the leaked contracts don’t outline a sensor location at the district’s administrative offices.
While the specific locations of ShotSpotter sensors citywide haven’t been publicly disclosed, residents are well aware of their presence in certain neighborhoods, said Marika Pfefferkorn, a Twin Cities-based student privacy advocate and executive director of the Midwest Center for School Transformation. Yet the devices, she said, haven’t done enough to keep people safe.
“It’s not preventing the shots (from being) fired,” Pfefferkorn said. “We’re still losing our young people.”
In Minneapolis, homicides have surged by 166% since 2019 and the number of gunshot victims has more than doubled, according to city data. More than four-fifths of shooting victims in the city are Black, according to the data, as are 89% of suspects.
Outside Minneapolis, three school districts — one in Texas and two in Massachusetts — have purchased ShotSpotter services, according to GovSpend.
In 2021, the Newark, New Jersey, school district agreed to install the sensors on 30 school buildings in predominantly Black neighborhoods, according to a Chalkbeat investigation. Information about the agreement was removed from the school system’s website after the school board received an email inquiry from the education news outlet.
In a 2022 email also exposed in the Minneapolis data breach, a ShotSpotter employee declined to disclose to a school district facilities official the on-campus locations of its sensors, arguing that could allow the information to “fall into the wrong hands.”
“If the location of all sensors became known to the public,” the employee wrote, “criminals would have the capability to disable the gunshot location and detection functionality of the system, or otherwise seriously compromise the law enforcement utility of the system.”
As communities nationwide debate efforts to bolster security in school buildings, parents are demanding a seat at the table, said Kenneth Trump, president of the Cleveland-based National School Safety and Security Services.
“Parents expect authentic, transparent communication from school officials,” he said. When schools and cities equip communities with emerging security technology, officials “had better be transparent about expectations and limitations, and I’m not sure that’s occurring.”
Ultimately, it’s up to the City of Minneapolis to assess whether the sensors work as intended, said Nelson of the ACLU’s Minnesota chapter.
“Without strict limitations and auditing, we can never really be certain that it’s not being abused,” she said. “There needs to be more transparency and more assurances that it’s not going to be abused.”
submitted by Raiden720 to gamefaqs261 [link] [comments]

2023.06.02 18:42 Adderalin test

Money Markets, T-Bills, and Box Spreads Oh My! My Guide to Fixed Income Trading

Why trade fixed income? Why not be all 100% in equities? Why not be in leveraged equities?
Well, you certainly can! However having some sort of fixed-income allocation can lead to greater risk-adjusted returns. Then for certain strategies, such as selling options to profit off theta and shorting volatility, stuffing your gains in a fixed income portfolio tends to be an excellent choice given how margin rules, house margin rules, etc., work on portfolio margin. You're already getting some significant returns on options trading:
Options selling is its own type of asset allocation just like you have long equity positions, real estate, etc., and finally... fixed income. Many people including myself find paring short options with fixed income allocations tends to have higher risk-adjusted returns and easier portfolios to manage and hedge than adding long equity components.
Imagine being long spy at 200% leverage and maxed out on BP selling puts despite buying long puts to hedge out the components = hello margin call, hello breaking SUT all the time. I know, as I previously was!

Bond Basics

This guide is written that you have the understanding on how bonds work, maturity dates, coupon rates, yield curve rates, duration (interest-rate) risk, etc.
If you don't understand how they work - bogleheads.org has a wonderful article called Bond Basics.
Now I want to cover the most important decisions in picking your fixed income allocation: duration, type, and fund vs individual trades.

Picking Duration

The next critical decision is picking how long you want your fixed income to expire. Longer duration = more credit risk. If interest rates keep rising you'll have higher mark-to-market losses on your fixed income the further out duration goes. A good rule of thumb is 1 years duration = 1% NLV loss if interest rates increase by 1%.
So an ETF like VGSH has 1.9 years of duration, meaning they buy 1-3 year treasuries and so they're on average always expiring in 1.9 years. This is why the fund lost 6.6% in November 2022. If we plot interest rates over a year the 2 year rate increased to 4.33% from 0.41%, or a 3.92% increase. Multiplying that by 1.9 duration = an estimated 7.4% loss by the rule of thumb, so the above ETF did well.
Duration is a temporary risk. The new bonds are yielding higher rates, so as the fund sells old bonds and buys new bonds they start getting paid the higher rates. Another rule of thumb is duration = how many years until you break even on average. It's not guaranteed that you'll break even by that time, but you probabilistically will - given there are no more interest rate increases.
You will want to match your duration to when you need your money:

Fixed-Income Type

The next critical decision is picking your type of fixed income. We have US Treasuries which are the safest and quoted for the risk-free rate. We then have municipal bonds which are slightly more risky (imagine investing in bonds that Detroit defaulted on.) Then followed that we have various other asset classes of bonds - corporate bonds (investment grade rated vs junk), mortgage backed securities, inflation protected securities (did horrible in 2022! did not perform to anyone's expectations.), and a bunch of other bond types.
Picking your fixed-income type is the second critical decision as what matters is known as default-risk. Higher risk of default > higher interest rate. My recommendations are either sticking to US Treasuries or Investment-grade corporate bonds. Any other assets - mortgage backed securities, TIPS, junk bonds, etc., don't have a higher risk-adjusted return unless you have stock picking skills (and why waste that gift on fixed income? Well unless you're Bill Gross.)

ETFs vs Individual Bonds

The last critical decision is picking ETFs vs Individual Bonds.
ETF Pros:
Individual Bond Pros:
Bogleheads.org has another great Wiki article on this decision: Bogleheads.org Individual Bonds vs a Bond Fund

My Favorite Bond ETFs

Here is a list of my favorite bond ETFs, their type & duration, and how much portfolio margin TD Ameritrade currently charges me:
ETFs I don't like:
Total Bond-Anything (BND). It invests in all bonds in market cap weighting, which market cap weighting is a great idea for stocks, or for investment grade corporate bonds, but I feel it's a terrible idea for anyone else fixed income purposes. Why do I want to sprinkle some long duration bonds that life insurance companies are buying to hedge their 30-year term life insurance policies with?
You get a slightly higher return, roughly the same risk adjusted return, and slightly higher market correlation with corporate bonds than total-bond-market anything.
Hell even Long-Term US Treasuries does better than Total Bond Market.
Speaking of iBoxx... I box too! I love box spreads which brings me to the next part of the guide! :D

SPX Box Spreads as a Borrowing and Lending Mechanism

Now that we understand how fixed income trading works, we can get the same return by trading box spreads on the S&P 500 European options or another euro option index.
Why European? So you don't get assigned early and blow up your box trades. If you still don't understand why I suggest uninstalling portfolio margin until you understand this.
There is a great website to price out box spreads - Boxtrades.com
If you want to be a lender and gain interest, you buy the box. As of writing this guide long boxes in SPX expiring 6 months from now in 17 Nov 23 are trading around 5.39% APR. Lending this trade will look something like this:
Lend 97,595 today, receive 100,000 on November 17th, 2023 Example trade Buy 1 SPX 17NOV23 4000 CALL Sell 1 SPX 17NOV23 4000 PUT Sell 1 SPX 17NOV23 5000 CALL Buy 1 SPX 17NOV23 5000 PUT
You can also borrow money and not pay margin interest on debit balances. Borrow a giant box and you can stop paying TD Ameritrade margin interest! :D
Borrow 97,595 today, repay 100,000 on November 17th, 2023 Example trade Sell 1 SPX 17NOV23 4000 CALL Buy 1 SPX 17NOV23 4000 PUT Buy 1 SPX 17NOV23 5000 CALL Sell 1 SPX 17NOV23 5000 PUT

My updated experience trading box spreads

Ever since the website boxtrades.com was published - spreads have tightened considerably. They are very liquid now no matter what strikes.
They tend to trade at 0-30 basis points above US treasuries in a normal market, sometimes below treasuries when we're having a debt ceiling crisis lol.
They are very liquid for $50k or more orders. Under $50k my experience is you might have a 50 basis point spread against market makers. Above 50k the spread feels to be around 10-20 basis points for long or short. I like to wait 2-3 minutes trying to fill a box as either as a lender or seller (I've done both now!), and give up some edge if it doesn't fill in the next few minutes.
Need some money fast from box spreads? Let's say you have 1m invested but only need 100k. Remember you don't have to close your position or buy lots of contracts to have that flexibility (ie 10x 100k trades.) You can always put on a really wide box spread

Box Spreads vs T-Bills/other income

Box Spread Pros:
Box Spread Cons:

Boxtrades.com Website Issues

  1. Data is a day's old. It doesn't show real time data.
  2. They don't properly account for settlement dates in their interest rate calculations and are off by 1 day. So over 30 days a off by 1 day is a 1/30 = a 3.33% error band. At 5% interest that is a 0.165% error. I'd try to fill at least 30 days+ if you base your rates off the website's calculations. Or calculate interest rate manually given that fact. The proper interest calculation is settlement to settlement of when cash enters/leaves your account.

TD Ameritrade Box Spread Issues

  1. Your weekend NLV shows super high for expiring short boxes or super low for expiring long boxes as they're not debiting/crediting the cash you receive as you don't receive that until they officially settle on Monday. It's ok, you'll get the cash!
  2. Possibly blocked on withdrawals even if you have plenty of BP if Portfolio Margin Team isn't around when you make the withdrawal request. Make withdrawal requests before 4pm eastern when the PM margin team is present. The Reg-T margin staff don't seem to understand box spread trades.
  3. TOS shows you getting SPX AM settled boxes money on Friday of settlement. This is an annoying display bug. You don't get your money until Monday when they settle, as its T+1 from when the settlement value is recorded and the SET index can't be computed until Monday in the morning when the SPX has fully opened, which can be 1-2 hours after exchanges start trading. You'll pay margin interest if you time trades thinking box spread money is settled on Friday due to this display bug!

Box Spread FAQ

  1. Aren't they illiquid? No, not really, you're just not trying hard enough to get filled. For a 50k box the spread is 30-50 basis points, which is $150-$250 extra if it's a whole year out. Going past 50k the spread gets almost as tight as treasuries! What market maker wouldn't want to profit $150 risk free by filling both sides?
  2. Do I have to sell my entire position if I need cash? No, you can "borrow" against your long position by selling different strikes in the same expiration. It all nets out on expiration! Minimize your number of contracts then borrow smaller amounts if you need to.
  3. Counter Party Risk? The Options Clearing Corporation as explained earlier. Ironically it seems safer right now than short-dated t-bills with the debt ceiling crisis!
  4. How wide boxes? Wider = less contracts and lower commissions. 1000 wide as quoted by box-trades = really liquid since others are trading them. Market makers care about the total notional size of the order, so if you're certain you don't need the cash save the commissions.
  5. Can I trade boxes on Reg-T? No, not really, its a portfolio-margin trade. Depending on the broker they might reserve 30% of buying power easily for this trade, possibly 100% buying power. Ouch.
  6. How far out? See the part that talks about duration risk. Rule of thumb: 1 year = 1% NLV gain or loss if interest rates changed by 1%.
  7. Should I use PM settlement boxes? Unfortunately boxtrades.com only has AM settlement options data so you'd have the con of calculating your own interest rates. You have the same con of Friday expiring PM settled boxes showing NLV bugs on TD Ameritrade's website. Holding to expiration and not seeing NLV glitches = only trading monday-thursday PM settled boxes, which only trade up to 39~ days to expiration. I'm sticking with AM settled box trades.

Resources

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2023.06.02 18:27 johnmakhubele5 How to Pay Back Your Student Loan Fast?

How to Pay Back Your Student Loan Fast?
Disclaimer: This article contains affiliate links. Although we are independent, we may receive compensation from our partners, but this does not directly or indirectly affect the loan and interest.
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There are stories about people paying off their student loans early, and many of those stories are real. Some students have paid off their R80,000 loan in under five years. How did they do it? You shouldn’t need a lot of motivation to pay off your loan as quickly as possible to enable you to do other things with your money.

Loan Priority

Does buying a new car, buying your first home, or traveling sound better than paying off a loan for years? That student loan needs to be paid off first, and here’s why. There are more than 44 million Americans with student loans and owing over R1 trillion. No doubt, they all want to pay back their loans as well. The average college student has more than R38,000 in student loan debt when they graduate. Some students make it their priority to pay off that debt. It doesn’t matter whether they are federal student loans, private loans, or education grants. If you should prioritize paying off a student loan as soon as possible.

What’s the Best Way to Quickly Pay off Your Student Loans?

Start with your mindset. If you do nothing, then nothing changes. You need to be willing to work hard. Be ready to make some short-term sacrifices. They will eventually pay off. Keep a focus on your goals. That feeling of freedom when your debts are paid will be great. Imagine that feeling of happiness and satisfaction when you make your last payment.
Besides changing your mindset, here is a list of real steps to pay off your student loan fast. Some are budgeting tips, and others are opportunities you can create yourself. See what category will fill you with inspiration to push you towards a debt-free life.

Understand Student Loans

Make the time to understand fully all about student loans and what other financial aid there is available. A student loan may sound straightforward, but there are a lot of potential options that you can also consider.
Many students graduate and have several different bad credit loans from direct lenders and the federal government. You need to make up your mind about which loan best suits your situation. Choose from federal student loans, financial aid from the state, scholarships from colleges, and many more. If you select the suitable one, you will pay it off in no time!

Paying Off Student Loans While Still in College

Here are a few tips on how to pay off student loans while still in college.

Apply For Grants and Scholarships

Find out if there are any grants or scholarships available. You might be pleasantly surprised at the number of private and public awards for which you can apply. There are scholarships for sports accomplishments, good grades, music success, and many more.

Look For a Part-Time Work

Can you manage a part-time job while studying? If the answer is yes, start looking for a gig that fits into your study schedule. The money you earn can go towards your education. Most students find good offers in college bars and cafes, libraries, and shops.

Try Alternative Ways to Make Money

There are numerous money-making jobs you can do while attending school. Things like freelancing, crowd-working, tutoring, and signing up for work-study programs.

Start Repayments Before Graduation

You may be able to pay back the student loan before graduating, depending on the type of loan you have. Carefully read the terms of your student loan before signing it.
Warning! Any money you pay before graduating goes straight onto the principal loan balance because interest does not accrue until you have finished or left school. You need to check that your loan does not attract early payment penalties.

Simple Tips For Paying Off Student Loans Fast

There are a few steps that will help you repay your student loan faster. Some of them include payment setup, schedules, and sticking to budgets.
​
  • Calculate Your Loan
If you want to pay off your student loan quickly, you better figure out the payments you will need to make to achieve that goal. Use a student loan calculator. You will see the amounts and the time frame quickly and see if it’s realistic.
​
  • Arrange Auto Payments for Student Loans
This is silly and simple. Lenders sometimes offer lower interest rates if you set up automatic online payments.
​
  • Punctual Payments
Late payments or defaulting on payments will cost you penalties and additional interest. Just add all that to your total repayable amount!
​
  • Pay Student Loans Fortnightly
By paying fortnightly, you will make one additional payment each year. It also means you are paying down your principal faster, and that helps shorten your loan period.
​
  • Is Your Student Loan Interest Tax Deductible?
When doing your annual tax return, see if the interest you have paid qualifies as a deduction. When you receive your tax refund, put the amount towards your loan.

Stay on Track With Your Goals

Buying a new car or taking a luxury vacation may sound great, but if by doing any of these, you set back your loan repayment goals, it’s not worth it. Live within your means, or below them without taking additional same day loans, and make paying back your student loan a top priority.
Source Page for this post: https://www.ipayloans.co.za/how-to-pay-back-your-student-loan-fast/
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2023.06.02 18:25 fairlyunlit What would you do? Card Recs for Apartment furnishing/moving costs

​
I am moving mid July to a new apartment. I only have bedroom furniture, need to furnish living room, kitchen, bathroom, balcony etc. All of which I plan to shop in person, Looking at possibly spending $5,000 of my savings but I'd rather look into a 0% APR into card to lessen the blow of my hard earned cash.
Interested in:
BoA Customized cash (0% into APR, and 3% choice category - I would pick furnishing/home improvement for the IKEA inclusion, but wanted to also shop at Home Goods, and World Market which I have no idea if they fit in this category, Which is why I have hesitation). Planned to get this card at some point anyway for the online shopping category, but so many online stores offer Apple Pay I don't know if the extra 1% is even worth it.
Discover IT: This is a card I REALLY been eyeing. Esp. with the announced new quarter categories. I could use digital wallet in a lot of furnishing stores but.. I just don't know.
My SavorOne card has 0% APR until January 2024, which I can pay off before then - if I go this route... 1% cash back.
I don't want to use my Citi Custom, that's my current grocery store card and I only get 5% on one category - which does not include any of the stores i'm looking to shop.
I could also Apple Pay with Apple Card and get 2% on a few of these stores.
I just want some opinions from people like y'all because my friends already judge my wallet even though I have $0 debt, besides my car.
Current cards: Apple Fed. Credit Union Card: $7,000 limit, Nov. 2017
Target RedCard: $500 limit, Oct. 2021
Chase Amazon Prime Rewards: $4,800 limit, March. 2022
Capital One SavorOne: $3,000 limit, Sept. 2022 0% APR until January 2024
Apple Card: $3,000 limit, Jan. 2023
Citi Custom Cash: $4,300 limit, April 2023 0% APR til August 2024
FICO Score: 743 Oldest account age: 5 years 7 months Chase 5/24 status: 5/24 Income: $45,000/yr Average monthly spend and categories: dining $200 groceries: $350 gas: $100 car payment: $100 Open to Business Cards: not really What's the purpose of your next card? I prioritize cash back, don't see myself traveling with current income. I looove cash back micromanaging, and currently saving all my cash back for christmas shopping this winter. Are you OK with category spending or do you want a general spending card? I am fine with category spending
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2023.06.02 18:13 bikingfencer Galatians: introductions through chapter 2

Galatians  
The Gospel of Paul  
Paul can be forgiven for equating the destruction of Israel with the end of the world. Everyone who loves Israel wants to save her, the controversy between the Judaizers and Paul was over how to do it.  
From The Interpreters’ Bible:  
"Introduction  
-1. Occasion and Purpose  
Conservative preachers were persuading the Galatians that faith was not enough to make sure of God’s kingdom. Besides believing that Jesus was the Messiah, one must join the Jewish nation, observe the laws and customs of Moses, and refuse to eat with the Gentiles (2:11-14, 4:10). One must have Christ and Moses, faith and law. Paul insisted that it must be either Moses or Christ. (5:2-6). [Mind you, the congregations were literally segregated at meals according to whether the male members’ foreskins were circumcised; compare with the trouble regarding the allocations between the two groups of widows reported in Acts.]  
Not content with raising doubts concerning the sufficiency of Christ, the Judaizers attacked Paul’s credentials. They said that he had not been one of the original apostles, and that he was distorting the gospel which Peter and John and James the Lord’s brother were preaching. They declared that his proposal to abandon the law of Moses was contrary to the teaching of Jesus, and they insinuated that he had taken this radical step to please men with the specious promise of cheap admission to God’s kingdom (1:10). If he were allowed to have his way, men would believe and be baptized but keep on sinning, deluding themselves that the Christian sacraments would save them. Claiming to rise above Moses and the prophets, they would debase faith into magic, liberty into license, making Christ the abettor of sin (2:17). The Judaizers were alarmed lest Paul bring down God’s wrath and delay the kingdom. They had not shared the emotion of a catastrophic conversion like Paul’s, and they found it hard to understand when he talked about a new power which overcame sin and brought righteousness better than the best that the law could produce.  
Another party attacked Paul from the opposite side. Influenced by the pagan notion that religion transcends ethics and is separable from morality, they wanted to abandon the Old Testament and its prophetic insights. They could not see how Paul’s demand to crucify one’s old sinful nature and produce the fruit of the Spirit could be anything but a new form of slavery to law (2:19-20, 5:14, 2-24). They accused him of rebuilding the old legalism, and some said that he was still preaching circumcision (2:18; 5:11). Whereas the Judaizers rejected Paul’s gospel because they believed it contrary to the teaching of the original apostles, these antilegalists felt that he was so subservient to the apostles as to endanger the freedom of the Christian Movement.  
Actually Paul had risen above both legalism and sacramentarianism ... his faith was qualitatively different from mere assent to a creed (5:6). He was living on the plateau of the Spirit, where life was so free that men needed no law to say ‘Thou shalt’ and ‘Thou shalt not’ (5:22-24). But this rarefied atmosphere was hard to breathe, and neither side could understand him. The conservatives were watching for moral lapses… and the radicals blamed him for slowing the progress of Christianity by refusing to cut it loose from Judaism and its nationalistic religious imperialism.” (Stamm, TIB 1953, vol. X pp. 430)  
Paul’s defense of his gospel and apostleship was the more difficult because he had to maintain his right to go directly to Christ without the mediation of Peter and the rest, but had to do it in such a way as not to split the church and break the continuity of his gospel with the Old Testament and the apostolic traditions about Jesus and his teaching. …  
To this end Paul gave an account of his relations with the Jerusalem church during the seventeen years that followed his conversion (1:11-2:14). Instead of going to Jerusalem he went to Arabia, presumably to preach (1:17). After a time he returned to Damascus, and only three years later did he go to see Peter. Even then he stayed only fifteen days and saw no other apostle except James the Lord’s brother (1:18-20). Then he left for Syria and Cilicia, and not until another fourteen years had passed did he visit Jerusalem again. This time it was in response to a revelation from his Lord, and not to a summons by the authorities in the Hoy City.  
Paul emphasizes that neither visit implied an admission that his gospel needed the apostolic stamp to make it valid. His purpose was to get the apostles to treat the uncircumcised Gentile Christians as their equals in the church (2:2). Making a test case of Titus, he won his point (2:3-5). The apostles agreed that a Gentile could join the church by faith without first becoming a member of the synagogue by circumcision. … They … recognize[d] that his mission to the Gentiles was on the same footing as theirs to the Jews – only he was to remember the poor (2:7-10). So far was Paul from being subordinated that when Peter came to Antioch and wavered on eating with the Gentile Christians, Paul did not hesitate to rebuke him in public (2:11-14). (Stamm, 1953, TIB vol. X pp. 430-431)  
Paul’s defense of his apostolic commission involved the question: What is the seat of authority in religion? A Jewish rabbi debating the application of the kosher laws would quote the authority of Moses and the fathers in support of his view. Jewish tradition declared that God delivered the law to Moses, and Moses to Joshua, and Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the men of the Great Synagogue, and that they had handed it down through an unbroken rabbinical succession to the present. If Paul had been a Christian rabbi, he could have treated the Sermon on the Mount as a new law from a new Sinai, which God had delivered to Jesus, and Jesus to Peter, and Peter to Paul, and Paul to Timothy and Titus, and so on through an unbroken apostolic succession until the second coming of Christ. Instead of taking his problems directly to this Lord in prayer, he would ask, ‘What does Peter say that Jesus did and said about it?’ And if Peter or the other apostles happened not to have a pronouncement from Jesus on a given subject, they would need to apply some other saying to his by reasoning from analogy. This would turn the gospel into a system of legalism, with casuistry for its guide, making Jesus a second Moses – a prophet who lived and died in a dim and distant past and left only a written code to guide the future. Jesus would not have been the living Lord, personally present in his church in every age as the daily companion of his members. That is why Paul insisted that Christ must not be confused or combined with Moses, but must be all in all.  
The Judaizers assumed that God had revealed to Moses all of his will, and nothing but this will, for all time, changeless and unchangeable; and that death was the penalty for tampering with it. The rest of the scriptures and the oral tradition which developed and applied them were believed to be implicit in the Pentateuch as an oak in an acorn. The first duty of the teacher was to transmit the Torah exactly as he had received it from the men of old. Only then might he give his own opinion, which must never contradict but always be validated by the authority of the past. When authorities differed, the teacher must labor to reconcile them. Elaborate rules of interpretation were devised to help decide cases not covered by specific provision in the scripture. These rules made it possible to apply a changeless revelation to changing conditions, but they also presented a dilemma. The interpreter might modernize by reading into his Bible ideas that were not in the minds of its writers, or he might quench his own creative insights by fearing to go beyond what was written. Those who modernized the Old Testament were beset with the perils of incipient Gnosticism, while those who, like the Sadducees, accepted nothing but the written Torah could misuse it to obstruct social and religious progress. (Stamm, 1953, TIB X pp. 431-432)  
To submit to circumcision would have betrayed the truth of the gospel because it contradicted the principle that all is of grace and grace is for all (2:5). Perpetuated in the church of Christ, the kosher code and other Jewish customs would have destroyed the fellowship. Few things could have hurt the feelings and heaped more indignity upon the Gentiles than the spiritual snobbery of refusing to eat with them.  
The tragedy of division was proportional to the sincerity of men’s scruples. The Jews were brought up to believe that eating with Gentiles was a flagrant violation of God’s revealed will which would bring down his terrible wrath. How strongly both sides felt appears in Paul’s account of the stormy conference at Jerusalem and the angry dispute that followed it at Antioch (2:1-14). Paul claimed that refusal to eat with a Gentile brother would deny that the grace of Christ was sufficient to make him worthy of the kingdom. If all men were sons of God through Christ, there could be no classes of Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female (3:26-28). What mattered was neither circumcision not uncircumcision, but only faith and a new act of creation by the Spirit (5:6; 6”15). (Stamm, 1953, TIB X p. 433)  
Church unity was essential to the success of Christian missions. Friction between Aramaic and Greek-speaking Jewish Christians in Palestine had to be eliminated (Acts 6:1). The death of Stephen and a special vision to Peter were required to convince the conservatives of the propriety of admitting the Gentiles on an equality with the Jews; and even Peter was amazed that God had given them the same gift of the Spirit (Act 11: 1-18). This hesitation was potentially fatal to the spread of Christianity beyond Palestine. Many Gentiles had been attracted by the pure monotheism and high morality of Judaism but were not willing to break with their native culture by submitting to the painful initiatory rite and social stigma of being a Jew…. Had the church kept circumcision as a requirement for membership, it could not have freed itself from Jewish nationalism.” (Stamm, 1953, TIB X p. 433)  
III. Some Characteristics of Paul’s Thinking  
… “the law” of which Paul is speaking does not coincide with “law” in a twentieth-century state with representative government. His Greek word was νομος [nomos], an inadequate translation of the Hebrew “Torah,” which included much more than “law” as we use the term. [When “תורה ThORaH” appears in the text I translate it as “Instruction” – its literal definition - capitalized.] Torah was teaching on any subject concerning the will of God as revealed in the Scriptures. Since the Jews did not divide life into two compartments labeled “religious” and “secular,” their law covered both their spiritual and their civil life. Nor did Paul and his fellow Jews think in terms of “nature” and the “natural law.” They believed that everything that happened was God’s doing, directly or by his permission. The messiah was expected to restore the ancient theocracy with its power over both civil and religious affairs.  
The Gentiles too were accustomed to state regulation of religion and priestly control of civil affairs. The Greek city-states had always managed the relations of their citizens with the gods, and Alexander the Great prepared the way for religious imperialism. When he invaded Asia, he consolidated his power by the ancient Oriental idea that the ruler was a god or a son of God. His successors, in their endless wars over the fragments of his empire, adopted the same device. Posing as “savior-gods,” they liberated their victims by enslaving them. The Romans did likewise, believing that the safety of their empire depended upon correct legal relations with the gods who had founded it. … Each city had its temple dedicated to the emperor, and its patriotic priests to see that everyone burned incense before his statue. Having done this, the worshiper was free under Roman ‘tolerance’ to adopt any other legal religion. … Whether salvation was offered in the name of the ancient gods of the Orient, or of Greece, or of the emperor of Rome, or of Yahweh the theocratic king of the Jews, the favor of the deity was thought to depend upon obedience to his law.  
One did not therefore have to be a Jew to be a legalist in religion. … Since Paul’s first converts were drawn from Gentiles who had been attending the synagogues, it is easy to see how Gentile Christians could be a zealous to add Moses to Christ as the most conservative Jew.  
This is what gave the Judaizers their hold in Galatia. The rivalry between the synagogue, which was engaged in winning men to worship the God of Moses, and the church, which was preaching the God who had revealed himself in Christ Jesus, was bound to raise the issue of legalism and stir up doubts about the sufficiency of Christ.  
Gentile and Jewish Christians alike would regard Paul’s preaching of salvation apart from the merit acquired by obedience to law as a violently revolutionary doctrine. Fidelity to his declaration of religious independence from all mediating rulers and priesthoods required a spiritual maturity of which most who heard his preaching were not yet capable. … Paul’s gospel has always been in danger of being stifled by those who would treat the teachings of Jesus as laws to be enforced by a hierarchy. (Stamm, TIB 1953, X pp. 434-435)  
V. Environment of Paul’s Churches in Galatia  
The conclusion concerning the destination of the epistle does not involve the essentials of its religious message, but it does affect our understanding of certain passages, such as 3:1 and 41:12, 20.  
From the earliest times that part of the world had been swept by the cross tides of migration and struggle for empire. The third millennium found the Hittites in possession. In the second millennium the Greeks and Phrygians came spilling over from Europe, and in the first millennium the remaining power of the Hittites was swept away by Babylon and Persia. Then came the turn of the Asiatic tide into Europe, only to be swept back again by Alexander the Great. But the Greek cities with which he and his successors dotted the map of Asia were like anthills destined to be leveled by Oriental reaction.  
About 278 B.C. new turmoil came with the Gauls, who were shunted from Greece and crossed into Asia to overrun Phrygia. Gradually the Greek kings succeeded in pushing them up into the central highlands, where they established themselves in the region of Ancyra. Thus located, they constituted a perpetually disturbing element, raiding the Greek cities and furnishing soldiers now to one, and now to another of the rival kings. Then in 121 B.C. came the Romans to 'set free' Galatia by making it a part of their own Empire. By 40 B.C. there were three kingdoms, with capitals at Ancyra, Pisidian Antioch, and Iconium. Four years later Lycaonia and Galatia were given to Amyntas the king of Pisidia. He added Pamphylia and part of Cilicia to his kingdom. But he was killed in 25 B.C., and the Romans made his dominion into the province of Galatia, which was thus much larger than the territory inhabited by the Gauls. (Stamm, 1953, TIB X pp. 437-438)  
War and slavery, poverty, disease, and famine made life hard and uncertain. In religion and philosophy men were confused by this meeting of East and West. But man’s extremity was Paul’s opportunity. The soil of the centuries had been plowed and harrowed for his new, revolutionary gospel of grace and freedom.  
Not all, however, were ready for this freedom. The old religions with prestige and authority seemed safer. Most Jews preferred Moses, and among the Gentiles the hold of the Great Mother Cybele of Phrygia was not easily shaken. Paul’s converts, bringing their former ideas and customs with them, were all too ready to reshape his gospel into a combination of Christ with their ancient laws and rituals. The old religions were especially tenacious in the small villages, whose inhabitants spoke the native languages and were inaccessible to the Greek-speaking Paul. To this gravitational attraction of the indigenous cults was added the more sophisticated syncretism of the city dwellers, pulling Paul’s churches away from his gospel when the moral demands of his faith and the responsibilities of his freedom became irksome. This was the root of the trouble in Galatia. (Stamm, 1953, TIB X p. 438)  
VI. Date and Place of Writing  
Some consider it the earliest of Paul’s extant letters and place it in 49 … In support of this date it is said that Paul, who had come from Perga by boat, was met by messengers from Galatia, who had taken the shorter route by land. They reported the disturbance which had arisen in his churches soon after his departure. He could not go back immediately to straighten things out in person, because he saw that he would have to settle the matter first in Jerusalem, whence the troublemakers had come. So he wrote a letter.  
But … [w]e do not know that the trouble in Galatia was stirred up by emissaries from the church in Jerusalem … Moreover, this solution overlooks the crux of the issue between Paul and the legalists. His contention was that neither circumcision nor the observance of any other law was the basis of salvation, but only faith in God’s grace through Christ. … On the matter of kosher customs, as on every other question, he directed men to the mind and Spirit of Christ, and not to law, either Mosaic or apostolic. That mind was a Spirit of edification which abstained voluntarily from all that defiled or offended.  
We may say that the situation [in Galatia] was different – that in Macedonia it was persecution from outside by Jews who were trying to prevent Paul’s preaching, whereas in Galatia it was trouble inside the church created by legalistic Christians who were proposing to change his teaching; that in one case the issue was justification by faith, and in the other faithfulness while waiting for the day of the Lord.  
The letter to the Romans, written during the three months in Greece mentioned in Acts 20:2-3, is our earliest commentary on Galatians. In it the relation between the law and the gospel is set forth in the perspective of Paul’s further experience. The brevity and storminess of Galatians gives way to a more complete and calmly reasoned presentation of his gospel. (Stamm, 1953, TIB X pp. 438 - 439)  
At Corinth, as in Galatia, Paul had to defend his right to be an apostle against opponents heartless enough to turn against him the cruel belief that physical illness was a sign of God’s disfavor … and they charged him with being a crafty man-pleaser … He exhorts his converts to put away childish things and grow up in faith, hope and love…  
Most childish of all were the factions incipient in Galatia, and actual in Corinth … He abandoned the kosher customs and all other artificial distinctions between Jews and Gentiles and laid the emphasis where it belonged – upon the necessity for God’s people to establish and maintain a higher morality and spiritual life… He substituted a catholic spirit for partisan loyalties ... (Stamm, 1953, TIB X pp. 440-441)  
VII. Authorship and Attestation  
If Paul wrote anything that goes under his name, it was Galatians, Romans, and the letters to Corinth. … F.C. Baur and his followers tried to show that the letters ascribed to Paul were the product of a second-century conflict between a Judaist party and the liberals in the church, and that they were written by Paulinists who used his name and authority to promote their own ideas.  
[But] the earliest mention of the epistle by name occurs in the canon of the Gnostic heretic Marcion (ca. [approximately] 144). He put it first in his list of ten letters of Paul. A generation later the orthodox Muratorian canon (ca. 185) listed it as the sixth of Paul’s letters. … While the first explicit reference to Galatians as a letter of Paul is as late as the middle of the second century … the authors of Ephesians and the Gospel of John knew it; and Polycarp in his letter to the Philippians quoted it. Revelation, I Peter, Hebrew, I Clement, and Ignatius show acquaintance with it; and there is evidence that the writer of the Epistle of James knew Galatians, as did the authors of II Peter and the Pastoral epistle, and Justin Martyr and Athenagoras. (Stamm, 1953, TIB X pp. 441-442)  
VIII. Text and Transmission  
Although the epistle was composed neither carelessly nor hastily, the anxiety and emotional stress under which Paul dictated his cascading thoughts have produced some involved and obscure sentences … and a number of abrupt transitions… These have been a standing invitation to scribal clarification. … Paul’s debate with his critics takes the form of a diatribe, which is characterized by quotations from past or anticipated objectors and rapid-fire answers to them. Paul did not use quotation marks, and this accounts for the difficulty in 2:14-15 of deciding where his speech to Peter ends. The numerous allusions to person and places, events and teachings, with which Paul assumed his readers to be acquainted, are another source of difficulty. All theses factors operated to produce the numerous variations in the text of Galatians." (Stamm, 1953, TIB p. 442)  
From Adam Clarke’s Commentaryi :  
"The authenticity of this epistle is ably vindicated by Dr. Paley: the principal part of his arguments I shall here introduce …  
'Section I.  
As Judea was the scene of the Christian history; as the author and preachers of Christianity were Jews; as the religion itself acknowledged and was founded upon the Jewish religion, in contra distinction to every other religion, then professed among mankind: it was not to be wondered at, that some its teachers should carry it out in the world rather as a sect and modification of Judaism, than as a separate original revelation; or that they should invite their proselytes to those observances in which they lived themselves. ... I … think that those pretensions of Judaism were much more likely to be insisted upon, whilst the Jews continued a nation, than after their fall and dispersion; while Jerusalem and the temple stood, than after the destruction brought upon them by the Roman arms, the fatal cessation of the sacrifice and the priesthood, the humiliating loss of their country, and, with it, of the great rites and symbols of their institution. It should seem, therefore, from the nature of the subject and the situation of the parties, that this controversy was carried on in the interval between the preaching of Christianity to the Gentiles, and the invasion of Titus: and that our present epistle ... must be referred to the same period.  
… the epistle supposes that certain designing adherents of the Jewish law had crept into the churches of Galatia; and had been endeavouring, and but too successfully, to persuade the Galatic converts, that they had been taught the new religion imperfectly, and at second hand; that the founder of their church himself possessed only an inferior and disputed commission, the seat of truth and authority being in the apostles and elders of Jerusalem; moreover, that whatever he might profess among them, he had himself, at other times and in other places, given way to the doctrine of circumcision. The epistle is unintelligible without supposing all this. (Clarke, 1831, vol. II p. 361)  
Section VII.  
This epistle goes farther than any of St. Paul’s epistles; for it avows in direct terms the supersession of the Jewish law, as an instrument of salvation, even to the Jews themselves. Not only were the Gentiles exempt from its authority, but even the Jews were no longer either to place any dependency upon it, or consider themselves as subject to it on a religious account. "Before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto faith which should afterward be revealed: wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith; but, after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster." (Chap. [chapter] iii. 23-25) This was undoubtedly spoken of Jews, and to Jews. … What then should be the conduct of a Jew (for such St. Paul was) who preached this doctrine? To be consistent with himself, either he would no longer comply, in his own person, with the directions of the law; or, if he did comply, it would be some other reason than any confidence which he placed in its efficacy, as a religious institution. (Clarke, 1831, vol. II pp. 366-367)  
Preface  
The religion of the ancient Galatae was extremely corrupt and superstitious: and they are said to have worshipped the mother of the gods, under the name of Agdistis; and to have offered human sacrifices of the prisoners they took in war.  
They are mentioned by historians as a tall and valiant people, who went nearly naked; and used for arms only a sword and buckler. The impetuosity of their attack is stated to have been irresistible…’” (Clarke, 1831, vol. II p. 369)  
From The New Jerome Biblical Commentaryii  
"Introduction  
The Galatai, originally an Indo-Aryan tribe of Asia, were related to the Celts or Gauls (“who in their own language are called Keltae, but in ours Galli”) ... About 279 BC some of them invaded the lower Danube area and Macedonia, descending even into the Gk [Greek] peninsula. After they were stopped by the Aetolians in 278, a remnant fled across the Hellespont into Asia Minor …  
Occasion and Purpose  
… He … stoutly maintained that the gospel he had preached, without the observance of the Mosaic practices, was the only correct view of Christianity … Gal [Galatians] thus became the first expose` of Paul’s teaching about justification by grace through faith apart from deeds prescribed by the law; it is Paul’s manifesto about Christian freedom.  
... Who were the agitators in Galatia? … they are best identified as Jewish Christians of Palestine, of an even stricter Jewish background than Peter, Paul, or James, or even of the ‘false brethren' (2:4) of Jerusalem, whom Paul had encountered there. (The account in Acts 15:5 would identify the latter as ‘believers who had belonged to the sect of the Pharisees.’) … The agitators in Galatia were Judaizers, who insisted not on the observance of the whole Mosaic law, but at least on circumcision and the observance of some other Jewish practices. Paul for this reason warned the Gentile Christians of Galatia that their fascination with ‘circumcision’ would oblige them to keep ‘the whole law’ (5:3). The agitators may have been syncretists of some sort: Christians of Jewish perhaps Essene, background, affected by some Anatolian influences. … (Joseph A. Fitzmyer, 1990, TNJBC pp. 780-781)   END NOTES
i The New Testament of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. The text carefully printed from the most correct copies of the present Authorized Version. Including the marginal readings and parallel texts. With a Commentary and Critical Notes. Designed as a help to a better understanding of the sacred writings. By Adam Clarke, LL.D. F.S.A. M.R.I.A. With a complete alphabetical index. Royal Octavo Stereotype Edition. Vol. II. [Vol. VI together with the O.T.] New York, Published by J. Emory and B. Waugh, for the Methodist Episcopal Church, at the conference office, 13 Crosby-Street. J. Collord, Printer. 1831.  
ii The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, Edited by Raymond E. Brown, S.S., Union Theological Seminary, New York; NY, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J. (emeritus) Catholic University of America, Washington, DC; Roland E. Murphy, O.Carm. (emeritus) The Divinity School, Duke University, Durham, NC, with a foreword by His Eminence Carlo Maria Cardinal Martini, S.J.; Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1990  
  Chapter One  
…  
Tiding of [בשורת, BeSOoRahTh, Gospel] one
[verses 6-10]  
…  
…………………………………………  
How [כיצד, KaYTsahD] was [היה, HahYaH] Shah`OoL [“Lender”, Saul, Paul] to become a Sent Forth [Apostle]
[verses 11 to end of chapter]  
…  
Chapter Two  
Sending forth of Shah’OoL required upon hands of the Sent Forth
[verses 1-10]  
…  
…………………………………………  
The YeHOo-DeeYM [“YHVH-ites”, Judeans] and the nations, righteous from inside belief
[verses 11 to end of chapter]  
...
-16. And since [וכיון, VeKhayVahN] that know, we, that [כי, KeeY] the ’ahDahM [“man”, Adam] is not made righteous in realizing commandments [of] the Instruction [Torah, law],
rather in belief of the Anointed [המשיח, HahMahSheeY-ahH, the Messiah, the Christ] YayShOo`ah [“Savior”, Jesus],
believe, also we, in Anointed YayShOo`ah,
to sake we are made righteous from inside belief in Anointed,
and not in realizing commandments [of] the Instruction,
that yes, in realizing commandments [of] the Instruction is not made righteous any [כל, KahL] flesh.  
“As a Pharisee, Paul had been taught that works of law were deeds done in obedience to the Torah, contrasted with things done according to one’s own will. The object of this obedience was to render oneself acceptable to God – to ‘justify’ oneself. Having found this impossible, Paul reinforced the evidence from his own experience by Ps. [Psalm] 143:2, where the sinner prays God not to enter into judgment with him because in God’s sight no man living is righteous. Into this passage from the LXX [The Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible] Paul inserted ‘by works of law,’ and wrote σαρξ [sarx], ‘flesh,’ instead of ζων [zon], ‘one living.’ This quotation warns us against setting Paul’s salvation by grace over against Judaism in such a way as to obscure the fact that the Jews depended also upon God’s lovingkindness and tender mercies (I Kings 8:46; Job 10:14-15; 14:3-4; Prov. [Proverbs] 20:9; Eccl. [Ecclesiasticus] 7:20; Mal. [Malachi] 3:2; Dan. [Daniel] 9:18).” (Stamm, 1953, TIB X p. 483)  
“Justified is a metaphor from the law court. The Greek verb is δικαιοω [dikaioo], the noun δικαιοσουνη [dikaiosoune’], the adjective δικαιος [dikaios]. The common root is δικ [dik] as in δεικνυμι [deiknumi], ‘point out,’ ‘show.’ The words formed on this root point to a norm or standard to which persons and things must conform in order to be ‘right.’ The English ‘right’ expresses the same idea, being derived from the Anglo-Saxon ‘richt,’ which means ‘straight,’ not crooked, ‘upright,’ not oblique. The verb δικαιοω means ‘I think it right.’ A man is δικαιος, ‘right’ when he conforms to the standard of acceptable character and conduct, and δικαιοσυνη, ‘righteousness,’ ‘justice,’ is the state or quality of this conformity. In the LXX these Greek words translate a group of Hebrew words formed on the root צדק [TsehDehQ], and in Latin the corresponding terms are justifico, justus, and justificatio. In all four languages the common idea is the norm by which persons and things are to be tested. Thus in Hebrew a wall is ‘righteous’ when it conforms to the plumb line, a man when he does God’s will.  
From earliest boyhood Paul had tried to be righteous. But there came a terrible day when he said ‘I will covet’ to the law’s ‘Thou shalt not,’ and in that defiance he had fallen out of right relation to God and into the ‘wrath,’ where he ‘died’ spiritually… Thenceforth all his efforts, however strenuous, to get ‘right’ with God were thwarted by the weakness of his sinful human nature, the ‘flesh’ (σαρξ) [sarx]. That experience of futility led him to say that a man is not justified by works ‘of law.’” (Stamm, 1953, TIB X p. 483)  
[Actually Paul changed his point of view as a result of his encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus, not as a result of intellectual contemplation. His many failures hitherto had not led him to this conclusion. The description of Paul in the preceding paragraph is a fiction.]  
“In the eyes of the psalmists and rabbis this was blasphemously revolutionary. Resting on God’s covenant with Abraham, they held it axiomatic that the ‘righteous’ man who had conscientiously done his part deserved to be vindicated before a wicked world; otherwise God could not be righteous. … In Judaism God was thought of as forgiving only repentant sinners who followed their repentance with right living …  
The theological expression for this conception of salvation is ‘justification by faith.’ Unfortunately this Latin word does not make plain Paul’s underlying religious experience, which was a change of status through faith from a wrong to a ‘right’ relationship with God… It conceals from the English reader the fact that the Greek word also means ‘righteousness.’ … (observe the ASV [American Standard Version] mg. [marginal note], ‘accounted righteous’).  
But ‘reckoned’ and ‘accounted’ expose Paul’s thought to misinterpretation by suggesting a legal fiction which God adopted to escape the contradiction between his acceptance of sinners and his own righteousness and justice.  
On the other hand, Paul’s term, in the passive, cannot be translated by ‘made righteous’ without misrepresenting him. In baptism he had ‘died with Christ’ to sin. By this definition the Christian is a person who does not sin! And yet Paul does not say that he is sinless, but that he must not sin. … This laid him open to a charge of self contradiction; sinless and yet not sinless, righteous and unrighteous, just and unjust at the same time. Some interpreters have labeled it ‘paradox,’ but such a superficial dismissal of the problem is religiously barren and worse than useless.  
The extreme difficulty of understanding Paul on this matter has led to a distinction between ‘justification’ and ‘sanctification,’ which obscures Paul’s urgency to be now, at this very moment, what God in accepting him says he is: a righteous man in Christ Jesus. Justification is reduced to a forensic declaration by which God acquits and accepts the guilty criminal, and sanctification is viewed as a leisurely process of becoming the kind of person posited by that declaration. This makes perfection seem far less urgent than Paul conceived it, and permits the spiritual inertia of human nature to continue its habit of separating religion from ethics. To prevent this misunderstanding it is necessary to keep in mind the root meaning of ‘righteousness’ in δικαιοω and its cognates.” (Stamm, 1953, TIB X pp. 484-485)  
-19. I died according to [לגבי, LeGahBaY] the Instruction, because of [בגלל, BeeGLahL] the Instruction, in order [כדי, KeDaY] that I will live to God.  
“… The Pharisees taught that the Torah was the life element of the Jews; all who obeyed would live, those who did not would die (Deut. [Deuteronomy] 30:11-20).” (Stamm, 1953, TIB X pp. 488-489)  
-20. With the Anointed I was crucified, and no more I live, rather the Anointed lives in me.
The life that I live now in flesh, I live them in the belief of Son [of] the Gods that loved me and delivered up [ומסר, OoMahÇahR] himself in my behalf [בעדי, Bah`ahDeeY].  
“The danger was that Paul’s Gentile converts might claim freedom in Christ but reject the cross-bearing that made it possible. Lacking the momentum of moral discipline under Moses, which prepared Paul to make right use of his freedom, they might imagine that his dying and rising with Christ was a magical way of immortalizing themselves by sacramental absorption of Christ’s divine substance in baptism and the Lord’s Supper. The church has always been tempted to take Paul’s crucifixion with Christ in a symbolic sense only, or as an experience at baptism which is sacramentally automatic. It has also been tempted to reduce Paul’s ‘faith’ to bare belief and assent to his doctrine, and to equate his ‘righteousness’ with a fictitious imputation by a Judge made lenient by Christ’s death.  
Against these caricatures of ‘justification by faith,’ Paul’s whole life and all his letters are a standing protest. He never allows us to forget that to be crucified with Christ is to share the motives, the purposes, and the way of life that led Jesus to the Cross; to take up vicariously the burden of the sins of others, forgiving and loving instead of condemning them; to make oneself the slave of every man; to create unity and harmony by reconciling man to God and man to his fellow men; to pray without ceasing ‘Thy will be done’; to consign one’s life to God, walking by faith where one cannot see; and finally to leave this earth with the prayer ‘Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.’  
… When Christ the Spirit came to live in Paul … Paul was guided at each step, in each new circumstance, to answer for himself the question: What would Jesus have me do? And the answer was always this: Rely solely on God’s grace through Christ, count others better than yourself, and make yourself everybody’s slave after the manner of the Son of God who loved you and gave himself for you.  
… The phrase εν σαρκι [en sarki] … means, lit. [literally], in the flesh. Someday – Paul hoped it would be soon – this would be changed into a body like that of the risen Christ, which belonged to the realm of Spirit.” (Stamm, 1953, TIB X pp. 490-493)  
“Christ lives in me: The perfection of Christian life is expressed here … it reshapes human beings anew, supplying them with a new principle of activity on the ontological1 level of their very beings.” (Joseph A. Fitzmyer, 1990, TNJBC p. 785)  
-21. I do not nullify [מבטל, MeBahTayL] [את, ’ehTh (indicator of direct object; no English equivalent)] mercy [of] Gods;
is not if [it] is possible to become righteous upon hand of the Instruction, see, that the Anointed died to nothing [לשוא, LahShahVe’]?  
“It is not I, he says, who am nullifying the grace of God by abandoning the law which is his grace-gift to Israel, but those who insist on retaining that law in addition to the grace which he has now manifested in Christ.” (Stamm, 1953, TIB X p. 495)
  Footnotes   1 Ontological - relating to the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being  
An Amateur's Journey Through the Bible
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2023.06.02 17:53 Objective_Campaign82 Sins of the Father Ch34 (Hellworlder pirates 2)

An old Foe
Astarte observed the assassin, who matched the description Alice had given her of Rachel’s attacker to a T. That, and their brief clash told Astarte that she was heavily augmented with cybernetics. So heavily that it left the question of whether there was any human left in her.
Astarte wasn’t one to shy away from artificial augmentations. A good forty percent of her body mass had been replaced or enhanced with the fruits of the Toy man’s research. But ripping off entire limbs just to replace them with reinforced metal prosthetics didn’t sit right with her. It was why she had settled for the Toy mans unique brand of augmentation.
There was also the assassin’s supposed connection to Astarte’s past to consider. She had called her Daisey, and that above everything else unsettled her.
She had few friends who had known her as Daisey, and none of them still called her that. Kar had only known Daisey for a few months before she had become Astarte, so he adapted easily to the new name. Lucile, her biological mother, had just shrugged and said ‘Daisey’ was a dumb name anyway. Which had stung a bit, even if she agreed.
Her real mother, Saint Mary, the woman who had actually raised her had just smiled sadly and asked if she could call her Aster for short. Astarte had agreed, not knowing that Asteraceae was another word for Daisey. It was her mom’s subtle way of saying she would always be the same little Daisey to her.
Then there was Alwen, who had teased the name out of her and then promptly ignored it. She…she wasn’t sure how she felt about that.
It was a short list of friends who knew her by her original name, and the list of enemies was even shorter. Most, if not all, having died during the battle of Greyland when Astarte led her ship into battle against her old crew.
The assassin could be using info she had dug up second hand, but something about the way she said the name suggested otherwise. That, and the fact that Daisey had never had a birth certificate or any other official documents with her name on them.
Which left with absolutely no idea who this assassin was.
“Sorry you’ve got the wrong person, no Daisey’s here” Astarte said blandly, like the assassin had dialed the wrong number. Then turned her back on the assassin and began to stride away, like someone hadn’t just tried to take her head off.
Astarte got a good ten or twenty meters before the assassin got over the shock at being so blatantly ignored. The sound of rushing, heavy, footsteps soon grew uncomfortably close. Astarte had spotted a reflective bit of glass and had been waiting for the moment the assassin struck a second time. Going for her head once again, and once again completely overextending.
Astarte could have taken this chance to take the assassins arm and break it at the elbow. But something told Astarte that it wouldn’t be as effective as it would normally be. And besides, she also liked going for peoples heads. In one smooth motion she ducked below the assassin’s stab, sidestepped the slash from her other arm, and swung up with Tenken. She misjudged the assassin’s position from the reflection and was aiming a little higher than she had wanted, but a bisecting face slash was just as good as any decapitating chop.
Or, it should have been.
Her sword had a clear shot through the assassin’s guard and was pushed forward with all her not inconsiderable strength. Tenken’s edge cut straight into the assassin’s green bug mask and should have bit in the soft tissue of their flesh with ease. Instead the blade’s edge was stopped, and the assassin was thrown back with the brute kinetic force of the attack.
Astarte stared at the still breathing assassin with shock before glancing down at her blade. There, along the edge that had connected with her attacker, was a noticeable blunted section. Her eyes widened at the sight.
The literal edge of the blade folded back along its thinnest section. Astarte felt her blood boil and glowered at the assassin rising to her feet. “You thick headed bitch, do you know how many hours this will take to fix?” she spat with all the bile she could summon.
She took care of her blade. She had commissioned the most technologically superior blade money could buy and had taken its maintenance very seriously. Hours of sharpening and polishing set aside from her busy schedule. Sweaty sparing sessions in the ship’s gym to keep her skills sharp and worthy of such a fine blade. She even kept a cloth on her at all times to wipe the blood off, even though the metal used in its smithing literally couldn’t rust!
And this bitch just blunted a whole five inches of its blade.
Well better blunted than chipped.
No, wait, there was a chip!
The assassin had the gall to laugh. “I’m here to kill you, and your worried about your stupid sword? You’ve spent too much time with Mizuno.” The assassin spat.
Now that was an old name.
Mizuno-sensei had been a high-ranking member of Greyson’s crew aboard the Black Saint, Astarte’s first ship. He had taken pity on the hafu whore’s daughter from New Mombasa who knew nothing about her cultural heritage and had decided to mentor her. He had been one of the few people aboard the Black Saint who was kind and caring. He had taught her what he could of Japanese culture and had started training her in the ways of the sword and Bushido, though admittedly the lessons in bushido never fully took hold.
He had seen potential in her and had nurtured it.
And in return, when he refused to leave his ‘lord’ Greyson, she killed him.
The only thing that soothed that particular wound in her psyche was that she had the luxury of facing her mentor in one-on-one combat. It was what he had wanted.
The fact that this assassin knew that name meant she had ties with Astarte’s days with the Terran pirates. But that still left a huge question mark over who she was.
“Still don’t remember me?” the assassin growled. “I thought you might be pretending, but you really don’t recognize me.” The assassin said in disbelief.
“How could I recognize anyone behind a mask? The whole point of a mask is to hide your identity.” Astarte snarked. Whoever this woman was, she was prone to angry outbursts and reckless attacks. Better to keep her pissed off and reckless than calm and collected.
The assassin huffed a laugh and lifted a hand to the mask with a huge gash in it. she pulled it off her face and it came off with a hiss. Underneath Astarte saw the dark skin and slim rounded features of a shaved African women. And as someone born and raised in New Mombasa she easily saw the ethnic similarities between this woman and her own Kenyan mother.
But there were discrepancies in her face that triggered something primal in Astarte’s mind. Something that said her face was wrong. Human-like, but not fully human. Like a creepy too real android, or some oddly rendered 3d rendering of a human.
Skin that was just a little too shiny, and not expressive enough. Eyes just a little too wide with a higher reflective quality. And the dark brown coloring of her eye was too uniform. Like a single band of brown instead of the typical variations found in human eyes.
All that, along with the huge dent in her cheek from where her blade had impacted, told Astarte that nothing about this woman’s face was flesh and blood.
She allowed her one surprised blink before Astarte shifted her weight into a more relaxed stance. “So are you a cyborg or an android?”
Body modding was something that had emerged on Earth after first contact. Most however didn’t go full cyborg. Most people were very attached to their flesh and blood limbs, and didn’t want to get amputated for some cold metal replacement. Most people with metal prosthetics were victims of industrial accidents, or like her own men had lost them in combat. Some adapted well to the prosthetic, others couldn’t cope with the loss of the limbs and spent years saving up for a new limb to be cloned.
Only a few chose to go full cyborg. Those like the Toy man who had suffered greatly and then fell in love with their cold replacements.
The assassins eyes squinted in confusion, moving just a little to fast to be natural. Her features just shifting into new expressions with little in between. Which sent a chill down Aster’s spin from the creepiness of it.
“You still don’t recognize me? Really?” the assassin asked in disbelief. As if Astarte was failing to follow some sort of script she had planned for this meeting.
Aster shrugged “Nope, you sure they made your new face look like your old one?”
The assassin glowered, “you steal the love of my life, leave me a shredded bloody mess to rot in a Union prison, and you don’t even remember me? You ruined my life and you can’t be bothered to remember me?”
Again Aster shrugged “I ruin a lot of lives, you’ll have to be more specific.”
The assassin let out a frustrated growl, one that did trigger an old memory.
Aster frowned as she tried to recall where she had heard that growl before. She remembered a faint whiff of spoiled beer and piss, dim lights, and a stab to the back. The scar on her shoulder tingled at the memory. She had been young, sixteen in fact. She had been with Greyson for over a year and had finally started to prove herself in raids. She wasn’t considered cannon fodder anymore and had earned the right to claim some of the bounty to start buying better gear. It was the new Kevlar vest under the Haori from Mizuno-sensei that had saved her life that day.
Greyson had started to take an interest in her rise, and his second in command had taken offense at that.
They had called her the butcher because when she fought she left behind scenes from a slaughterhouse. She reveled in tearing apart weak xenos, literally. She made a game out of it, slowly ripping them like they were tissue paper. Limb by limb.
Seeing it had changed a lot of Astarte’s brash and more xenophobic opinions she had developed as a dipshit street kid.
The butcher would doll out discipline to the crew with cold hard brutality. She had once gotten pissed at one of the cannon fodder kids Greyson hired and began beating them until his face was unrecognizable and he was permanently incapable of walking without severe medical intervention. Daisey had then been ordered to dump the bloody mess of a boy on a station and leave him for the xeno rats. She had instead taken him to a hospital, paid for his treatment, and earned her own beating for not just dumping him in a gutter. Daisey had only been spared the worst because she kept trying to fight back and Mizuno had respected that.
He said it was brave to stand up and fight against hopeless odds. Daisey had just been trying to spite the women by actually fighting back.
That woman always got away with her violent behavior because she was warming Greyson’s bed, and was by all accounts madly in love with him. Emphasis on madly. Woman worshiped him like a god and was insanely jealous and insecure. It wasn’t Byron’s fault that he slept around, it was all the conniving harlots trying to steal him away from her. Or something like that.
And when the brat who had disobeyed her orders, fought back instead of cower, and had been training diligently under Mizuno-sensei’s, drew Grayson’s wandering eye. Well, it seemed only right to kill the girl. Only for Daisey to be the better fighter.
That butcher had never fought someone as strong as she was. She only knew how to bully the weak. And Daisey had learned from the best swordsman in the whole Terran pirate faction. That butcher had growled in frustration as Daisey showed her up and out maneuvered her. Side stepping all her reckless strikes. Just like this assassin who had slaughtered an entire office and tried to attack Astarte in the same sort of sneak attack.
“Zera?” Astarte asked out loud.
The woman, Zera, scowled. “That’s right, finally remembered me.”
“Vaguely. Truth be told I haven’t thought of you in years. How’d you even survive, I left you in a puddle of your own blood missing an arm? I’d be impressed if you weren’t such a crazy bitch.”
She drew in a sharp breath and let it out through her teeth.
She looked like she was about to say something, but Astarte cut her off and waved her hand. “Actually, I don’t care. I killed you once, and I’ll do it again.”
Zera the butcher laughed. “I’m not the same woman I was before.” She stood up straighter and let the big cloak fall off her shoulders. Revealing a body with no visible flesh whatsoever. She didn’t even wear anything under that cloak since there was nothing to hide or be ashamed of. Just the shiny chrome-like surface of a body that was all machine. The only part of her body still recognizably human was her face, and that ended at her neck. “I’ve stepped beyond human limitations, and into a realm you can’t match.”
Astarte snorted. “No, you replaced the malleable limits of deathworlder anatomy for the stagnant hard barrier of titanium.”
“The flesh is weak.” Zera snarled.
“No,” Aster shot back. “Just your convictions. Besides, you’re not the only one to indulge in transhumanism. And I’ll admit I’m a little curious to see whose is superior.”
She settled into a guarded combat stance and the vision in her eye flicked into infrared and then into ultraviolet, scanning her opponent for any weak points. But just as her appearance suggested there was no flesh left in her. The rest was solid metal, wires, and artificial blood.
Astarte looked into full cybernetic augmentation before, but found the mechanical limitations… limiting. She had instead decided to lean into the superiority of Deathworld biology and work with what she had. Much to the Toy man’s delight.
Her bones were reinforced with a crystalline lattice that took advantage of the already sturdy nature of collogen bones and enhanced their structural abilities to allow for stronger muscles. The crystalline lattice acting like the steel I-beams in skyscrapers, taking and redistributing the force of an impact or pressure. It wasn’t perfect, nor as strong as outright metal bones would have been, but by working within the natural healing process of the human body her bones were mostly capable of healing back stronger than before. So long as there weren’t too many fractures.
With the reinforced skeleton the Toy man had been capable of working wonders with the human musculature to better exert force. Most people only ever used a fraction of their strength to begin with, only fully utilizing their muscles in extreme circumstances and often breaking their own bones and ligaments in the process. Simply unlocking the full strength of human muscles would been a miracle in its own right. But such petty accomplishments were beneath the Toy mans considerable skill. He had instead crafted advanced biomechanical ligaments so advanced it wasn’t hard to imagine them arising naturally on a more intense world than Earth.
Those two things, along a hundred other smaller alterations to improve the flow of oxygen and nutrients within her blood gave a her significant boost to the speed, strength, and endurance that made her a menace in a melee. But that was when facing ordinary people and unenhanced deathworlders. She had never had the chance to test herself against a full on cyborg assassin. She wondered how well the Toy mans more biologically focused enhancements compared to hydraulics and titanium.
They stood there staring at each other for a long moment, each sizing the other up. Zera’s glass eyes had flicked to Astarte’s red eye and a brief look of confusion flashed across her expression. Then her eyes flicked across Astarte’s armor, looking for good gaps in its coverage to strike at. Astarte in turn tried to judge whether any of Zera’s limbs could slide open to reveal a nasty surprise. She saw a few places to be concerned of.
Time stretched on, and soon it was just a silent battle of wills to see who would strike first. Each scanning the other for an opening, while also on guard for any fake openings. Astarte had to give some credit to Zera, her patience to stand there and look for openings already hinted at the fact that she had received some much needed combat training and discipline. Something she was utterly lacking in their last fight.
But time was on Aster’s side, and Zera knew this.
A slight lurch forward turned into a powerful standing leap that ate up the meters in between her and Astarte. Astarte heard a hard crack as some sort of mechanism in Zera’s legs sent launched her forward. Maybe some sort of tension spring that was let loose, or maybe something else. She didn’t have a spare moment to glance at the cyborg assassin’s legs as the woman was in her face and cutting down towards her head.
The battle had begun. And the struggle between enhanced flesh and metal cybernetics was fought.
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2023.06.02 17:46 enginerd1209 Why does the Democratic party remain so centrist despite the popularity of many progressive policies?

It's one thing to run on a moderate agenda if moderate policies were actually popular. But there are many progressive policies which poll incredibly well. For instance:
Medicare for all
The vast majority of Americans, 70 percent, now support Medicare-for-all, otherwise known as single-payer health care, according to a new Reuters survey. That includes 85 percent of Democrats and 52 percent of Republicans. Only 20 percent of Americans say they outright oppose the idea.
Free college
Among US adults surveyed, 63 percent support tuition-free public colleges for local students, including 37 percent who strongly favour the proposal, found the Pew Research Center. Pew found Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents overwhelmingly favour making college tuition-free for all US students (83 percent support this); 60 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners oppose making college tuition-free, but 39 percent support this.
Minimum wage
Regardless of the ruling, the idea of raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2025 from its current $7.25 is broadly popular, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found. Some 59% of respondents said they supported the idea, with 34% opposing it.
Paid leave
For example, a YouGov poll from early April found 82 percent of Americans believe employees should be able to take paid maternity leave, and that 68 percent thought paid maternity and paternity leave ought to be offered.
Federal marijuana legalization
A strong majority of American voters—including most Republicans, Democrats and independents—support legalizing marijuana and the federal level, according to a new poll. And majorities also back policies meant to promote equity in the industry.
The survey from Data for Progress found that 65 percent of Americans are in favor of federally legalizing cannabis—a finding that’s consistent with numerous polls that have been conducted over recent years.
Not saying every progressive proposal is popular (reparations and UBI still poll poorly). But for the most part, progressive proposals poll pretty well. Given these polls, I think that the key for Democrats to win elections is to take a more FDR style route rather than try to appeal to "centrists".
https://www.citizen.org/news/progressive-policies-are-popular-policies/
When you get down to actual policies, Americans are not concerned with abstract notions of what constitutes “moderate” or “centrist” – and the policies that self-described moderates support are far less popular than what is labeled progressive. This is perhaps because regular people react to policy proposals based primarily on what they think is right and wrong, not on the political class’s obsession with defining a make-believe middle ground that brings everyone together.
Actually, it turns out that everyone can come together – around an agenda built on American values of fairness and justice and a healthy distrust of concentrated power. There is in America no popular constituency to speak of for the drug companies and health insurers, no advocates for Wall Street or extreme inequality. By contrast, there is very broad and strong support for the kinds of policies for which we at Public Citizen – all of us – advocate.
Policy analysts should spend a lot less time arguing about what’s popular and more about what’s right. But if the pundits are going to obsess about the polls, they should at least read them. Americans favor by overwhelming numbers the core of the progressive agenda.
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2023.06.02 17:42 thinkingstranger June 1, 2023

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-1-2023
Late tonight the Senate passed H.R. 3746, the Fiscal Responsibility Act, suspending the debt ceiling and cutting certain federal spending. President Joe Biden has promised to sign it tomorrow, preventing a government default. Forty-four Democrats and two Independents—Angus King (I-ME) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ)—voted yes, along with 17 Republicans. Four Democrats and Independent Bernie Sanders (I-VT) voted no, along with 31 Republicans. The final tally to pass the measure was 63 to 36.
“Democrats are feeling very good tonight,” Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said. “We’ve saved the country from the scourge of default.”
Republicans brought the nation to the brink of default with their insistence that they opposed runaway government spending, but their demands did not square with that argument. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said that the $21 billion cut in funding to the Internal Revenue Service, for example, will result in $40 billion in lost revenue, increasing the deficit by $19 billion.
In other economic news, the Biden administration today announced actions designed to address racial bias in the valuation of homes.
This sounds sort of in the weeds for administration action, I know, but it is actually an important move for addressing the nation’s wealth inequality. In 2019 a study from the Federal Reserve showed that white American families had a median net worth of $188,100, Hispanic or Latino families had a net worth of $36,200, and Black American families had a median net worth of $24,100.
Homeownership is the most important factor in creating generational wealth—that is, wealth that passes from one generation to the next—both because homeownership essentially forces savings as people pay mortgages, and because homes tend to appreciate in value.
But a 2021 study by the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, more popularly known as Freddie Mac, showed that real estate appraisers are twice as likely to undervalue minority-owned property relative to contract price for which the home sells, than they are to undervalue homes owned by white Americans.
The story of lower valuation came to popular attention after a Black couple living near San Francisco applied for a loan and received an initial valuation far too low for them to qualify for that loan. Shocked, since the same house had been appraised at almost a half a million dollars higher the year before, the couple removed all traces of their ownership of the house and asked a white friend to stand in as the owner before a new appraiser evaluated the worth of the property. That new appraisal came back a half a million dollars higher than the lowball one.
(The couple sued, and the case was settled in February 2022).
Two years ago, the Biden administration announced a sweeping effort to “root out racial and ethnic bias in home evaluations.” Today it bolstered those efforts to “ensure that every American who buys a home has the same opportunities to build generational wealth through homeownership.” They call for fixing algorithms to ensure that home values are accurately assessed, creating pathways for consumers to challenge low assessments, and increasing the numbers of trained appraisers.
There is a reason that the administration has centered its housing policies on June 1. This is the anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre, when in 1921 white gangs destroyed the prosperous Greenwood district of that city, which was home to more than 10,000 Black Americans. It wiped out 35 blocks with more than 1,200 homes and businesses and took hundreds of Black lives, robbing Black families of generational wealth and the opportunities that come with it.
In 1921, Greenwood, known as “Black Wall Street,” was estimated to be the richest Black community in the United States. The destruction of May 31 to June 1, 1921, changed all that. Residents of Greenwood filed $1.8 million in damage claims—more than $27 million in today’s dollars—against the city, but all but one of the claims were denied when the city was found not liable for damages caused by mobs. (A white pawnshop owner was compensated for the guns stolen from his store.) Insurance didn’t help, either: insurance companies claimed that damage caused by “riots” was not covered by their policies.
In a 2018 article in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Chris M. Messer, Thomas E. Shriver, and Alison E. Adams estimated that the destruction in Tulsa might well have amounted to more than $200 million in today’s dollars.
Greenwood’s Black residents nonetheless pooled their resources and rebuilt the district, despite the system of “redlining” by mortgage companies that deemed parts of Greenwood to be credit risks and made it impossible for residents to get mortgages. “Urban renewal” then destroyed the area again in the 1960s through the 1980s as white city planners rezoned the district, built highways through it, and took property through eminent domain.
Vice President Kamala Harris acknowledged the destruction of Greenwood today in a call with reporters. Noting that “[h]omeownership is one of the single most powerful engines of wealth-building available to American families,” she explained that ‘[m]illions rely on the equity in their homes to put their children through college, to fund a startup, to retire with dignity, to create intergenerational prosperity and wealth.” But “for generations, many people of color have been prevented from taking full advantage of the benefits of homeownership.”
The inequalities of the past have persisted in the home appraisal system, Harris said. “[B]ecause their homes are undervalued, Black and Latino people often pay more for their mortgage, receive less when they sell, and are less able to get access to home equity lines of credit—all of which widens the racial wealth gap and deepens longstanding financial inequities.”
“Today,” her Twitter account said, “our Administration is announcing new actions to root out racial bias in home valuations to ensure that all hardworking families can realize the true value of their investment and have a fair shot at the American dream.”
Jonathan Lemire, Adam Cancryn, and Jennifer Haberkorn of Politico reported today that White House officials urged allies to downplay their substantial victory on the debt ceiling crisis and the related budget negotiations, afraid of sparking Republican opposition and eager to be seen as the adults in the room.
But they needn’t have worried. Today, President Biden tripped over a sandbag left in his path as he was jogging away from the center stage of the U.S. Air Force Academy graduation in Colorado after giving the commencement address. He appeared fine after the fall, but it is dominating right-wing social media, the debt ceiling crisis already forgotten.
—
Notes:
https://twitter.com/ArthurDelaneyHP/status/1664395512382996483
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/06/01/senate-debt-ceiling-bill/
https://www.readynest.com/homebuyer-stories/what-role-does-homeownership-play-in-generational-wealth
https://www.freddiemac.com/research/insight/20210920-home-appraisals
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/09/1162103286/home-appraisal-racial-bias-black-homeowners-lawsuit
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/06/01/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-takes-sweeping-action-to-address-racial-bias-in-home-valuations/
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/kamala-harris-new-rule-will-tackle-racial-bias-home-valuations-rcna87313
https://www.okhistory.org/research/forms/freport.pdf
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ajes.12225
https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-true-costs-of-the-tulsa-race-massacre-100-years-late
https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/29/case-reparations-tulsa-oklahoma#_Toc41573965
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/06/01/remarks-by-vice-president-harris-in-a-press-call-on-addressing-racial-bias-in-home-appraisals/
https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf20.pdf
https://twitter.com/VP/status/1664358084125290497
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/01/just-dont-boast-how-biden-world-sought-to-ace-the-debt-ceiling-standoff-00099671
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/01/politics/biden-us-air-force-academy-trip/index.html
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2023.06.02 17:41 bikingfencer Galatians - introductions through chapter 2

Galatians  
The Gospel of Paul  
Paul can be forgiven for equating the destruction of Israel with the end of the world. Everyone who loves Israel wants to save her, the controversy between the Judaizers and Paul was over how to do it.  
From The Interpreters’ Bible:  
"Introduction  
-1. Occasion and Purpose  
Conservative preachers were persuading the Galatians that faith was not enough to make sure of God’s kingdom. Besides believing that Jesus was the Messiah, one must join the Jewish nation, observe the laws and customs of Moses, and refuse to eat with the Gentiles (2:11-14, 4:10). One must have Christ and Moses, faith and law. Paul insisted that it must be either Moses or Christ. (5:2-6). [Mind you, the congregations were literally segregated at meals according to whether the male members’ foreskins were circumcised; compare with the trouble regarding the allocations between the two groups of widows reported in Acts.]  
Not content with raising doubts concerning the sufficiency of Christ, the Judaizers attacked Paul’s credentials. They said that he had not been one of the original apostles, and that he was distorting the gospel which Peter and John and James the Lord’s brother were preaching. They declared that his proposal to abandon the law of Moses was contrary to the teaching of Jesus, and they insinuated that he had taken this radical step to please men with the specious promise of cheap admission to God’s kingdom (1:10). If he were allowed to have his way, men would believe and be baptized but keep on sinning, deluding themselves that the Christian sacraments would save them. Claiming to rise above Moses and the prophets, they would debase faith into magic, liberty into license, making Christ the abettor of sin (2:17). The Judaizers were alarmed lest Paul bring down God’s wrath and delay the kingdom. They had not shared the emotion of a catastrophic conversion like Paul’s, and they found it hard to understand when he talked about a new power which overcame sin and brought righteousness better than the best that the law could produce.  
Another party attacked Paul from the opposite side. Influenced by the pagan notion that religion transcends ethics and is separable from morality, they wanted to abandon the Old Testament and its prophetic insights. They could not see how Paul’s demand to crucify one’s old sinful nature and produce the fruit of the Spirit could be anything but a new form of slavery to law (2:19-20, 5:14, 2-24). They accused him of rebuilding the old legalism, and some said that he was still preaching circumcision (2:18; 5:11). Whereas the Judaizers rejected Paul’s gospel because they believed it contrary to the teaching of the original apostles, these antilegalists felt that he was so subservient to the apostles as to endanger the freedom of the Christian Movement.  
Actually Paul had risen above both legalism and sacramentarianism ... his faith was qualitatively different from mere assent to a creed (5:6). He was living on the plateau of the Spirit, where life was so free that men needed no law to say ‘Thou shalt’ and ‘Thou shalt not’ (5:22-24). But this rarefied atmosphere was hard to breathe, and neither side could understand him. The conservatives were watching for moral lapses… and the radicals blamed him for slowing the progress of Christianity by refusing to cut it loose from Judaism and its nationalistic religious imperialism.” (Stamm, TIB 1953, vol. X pp. 430)  
Paul’s defense of his gospel and apostleship was the more difficult because he had to maintain his right to go directly to Christ without the mediation of Peter and the rest, but had to do it in such a way as not to split the church and break the continuity of his gospel with the Old Testament and the apostolic traditions about Jesus and his teaching. …  
To this end Paul gave an account of his relations with the Jerusalem church during the seventeen years that followed his conversion (1:11-2:14). Instead of going to Jerusalem he went to Arabia, presumably to preach (1:17). After a time he returned to Damascus, and only three years later did he go to see Peter. Even then he stayed only fifteen days and saw no other apostle except James the Lord’s brother (1:18-20). Then he left for Syria and Cilicia, and not until another fourteen years had passed did he visit Jerusalem again. This time it was in response to a revelation from his Lord, and not to a summons by the authorities in the Hoy City.  
Paul emphasizes that neither visit implied an admission that his gospel needed the apostolic stamp to make it valid. His purpose was to get the apostles to treat the uncircumcised Gentile Christians as their equals in the church (2:2). Making a test case of Titus, he won his point (2:3-5). The apostles agreed that a Gentile could join the church by faith without first becoming a member of the synagogue by circumcision. … They … recognize[d] that his mission to the Gentiles was on the same footing as theirs to the Jews – only he was to remember the poor (2:7-10). So far was Paul from being subordinated that when Peter came to Antioch and wavered on eating with the Gentile Christians, Paul did not hesitate to rebuke him in public (2:11-14). (Stamm, 1953, TIB vol. X pp. 430-431)  
Paul’s defense of his apostolic commission involved the question: What is the seat of authority in religion? A Jewish rabbi debating the application of the kosher laws would quote the authority of Moses and the fathers in support of his view. Jewish tradition declared that God delivered the law to Moses, and Moses to Joshua, and Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the men of the Great Synagogue, and that they had handed it down through an unbroken rabbinical succession to the present. If Paul had been a Christian rabbi, he could have treated the Sermon on the Mount as a new law from a new Sinai, which God had delivered to Jesus, and Jesus to Peter, and Peter to Paul, and Paul to Timothy and Titus, and so on through an unbroken apostolic succession until the second coming of Christ. Instead of taking his problems directly to this Lord in prayer, he would ask, ‘What does Peter say that Jesus did and said about it?’ And if Peter or the other apostles happened not to have a pronouncement from Jesus on a given subject, they would need to apply some other saying to his by reasoning from analogy. This would turn the gospel into a system of legalism, with casuistry for its guide, making Jesus a second Moses – a prophet who lived and died in a dim and distant past and left only a written code to guide the future. Jesus would not have been the living Lord, personally present in his church in every age as the daily companion of his members. That is why Paul insisted that Christ must not be confused or combined with Moses, but must be all in all.  
The Judaizers assumed that God had revealed to Moses all of his will, and nothing but this will, for all time, changeless and unchangeable; and that death was the penalty for tampering with it. The rest of the scriptures and the oral tradition which developed and applied them were believed to be implicit in the Pentateuch as an oak in an acorn. The first duty of the teacher was to transmit the Torah exactly as he had received it from the men of old. Only then might he give his own opinion, which must never contradict but always be validated by the authority of the past. When authorities differed, the teacher must labor to reconcile them. Elaborate rules of interpretation were devised to help decide cases not covered by specific provision in the scripture. These rules made it possible to apply a changeless revelation to changing conditions, but they also presented a dilemma. The interpreter might modernize by reading into his Bible ideas that were not in the minds of its writers, or he might quench his own creative insights by fearing to go beyond what was written. Those who modernized the Old Testament were beset with the perils of incipient Gnosticism, while those who, like the Sadducees, accepted nothing but the written Torah could misuse it to obstruct social and religious progress. (Stamm, 1953, TIB X pp. 431-432)  
To submit to circumcision would have betrayed the truth of the gospel because it contradicted the principle that all is of grace and grace is for all (2:5). Perpetuated in the church of Christ, the kosher code and other Jewish customs would have destroyed the fellowship. Few things could have hurt the feelings and heaped more indignity upon the Gentiles than the spiritual snobbery of refusing to eat with them.  
The tragedy of division was proportional to the sincerity of men’s scruples. The Jews were brought up to believe that eating with Gentiles was a flagrant violation of God’s revealed will which would bring down his terrible wrath. How strongly both sides felt appears in Paul’s account of the stormy conference at Jerusalem and the angry dispute that followed it at Antioch (2:1-14). Paul claimed that refusal to eat with a Gentile brother would deny that the grace of Christ was sufficient to make him worthy of the kingdom. If all men were sons of God through Christ, there could be no classes of Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female (3:26-28). What mattered was neither circumcision not uncircumcision, but only faith and a new act of creation by the Spirit (5:6; 6”15). (Stamm, 1953, TIB X p. 433)  
Church unity was essential to the success of Christian missions. Friction between Aramaic and Greek-speaking Jewish Christians in Palestine had to be eliminated (Acts 6:1). The death of Stephen and a special vision to Peter were required to convince the conservatives of the propriety of admitting the Gentiles on an equality with the Jews; and even Peter was amazed that God had given them the same gift of the Spirit (Act 11: 1-18). This hesitation was potentially fatal to the spread of Christianity beyond Palestine. Many Gentiles had been attracted by the pure monotheism and high morality of Judaism but were not willing to break with their native culture by submitting to the painful initiatory rite and social stigma of being a Jew…. Had the church kept circumcision as a requirement for membership, it could not have freed itself from Jewish nationalism.” (Stamm, 1953, TIB X p. 433)  
III. Some Characteristics of Paul’s Thinking  
… “the law” of which Paul is speaking does not coincide with “law” in a twentieth-century state with representative government. His Greek word was νομος [nomos], an inadequate translation of the Hebrew “Torah,” which included much more than “law” as we use the term. [When “תורה ThORaH” appears in the text I translate it as “Instruction” – its literal definition - capitalized.] Torah was teaching on any subject concerning the will of God as revealed in the Scriptures. Since the Jews did not divide life into two compartments labeled “religious” and “secular,” their law covered both their spiritual and their civil life. Nor did Paul and his fellow Jews think in terms of “nature” and the “natural law.” They believed that everything that happened was God’s doing, directly or by his permission. The messiah was expected to restore the ancient theocracy with its power over both civil and religious affairs.  
The Gentiles too were accustomed to state regulation of religion and priestly control of civil affairs. The Greek city-states had always managed the relations of their citizens with the gods, and Alexander the Great prepared the way for religious imperialism. When he invaded Asia, he consolidated his power by the ancient Oriental idea that the ruler was a god or a son of God. His successors, in their endless wars over the fragments of his empire, adopted the same device. Posing as “savior-gods,” they liberated their victims by enslaving them. The Romans did likewise, believing that the safety of their empire depended upon correct legal relations with the gods who had founded it. … Each city had its temple dedicated to the emperor, and its patriotic priests to see that everyone burned incense before his statue. Having done this, the worshiper was free under Roman ‘tolerance’ to adopt any other legal religion. … Whether salvation was offered in the name of the ancient gods of the Orient, or of Greece, or of the emperor of Rome, or of Yahweh the theocratic king of the Jews, the favor of the deity was thought to depend upon obedience to his law.  
One did not therefore have to be a Jew to be a legalist in religion. … Since Paul’s first converts were drawn from Gentiles who had been attending the synagogues, it is easy to see how Gentile Christians could be a zealous to add Moses to Christ as the most conservative Jew.  
This is what gave the Judaizers their hold in Galatia. The rivalry between the synagogue, which was engaged in winning men to worship the God of Moses, and the church, which was preaching the God who had revealed himself in Christ Jesus, was bound to raise the issue of legalism and stir up doubts about the sufficiency of Christ.  
Gentile and Jewish Christians alike would regard Paul’s preaching of salvation apart from the merit acquired by obedience to law as a violently revolutionary doctrine. Fidelity to his declaration of religious independence from all mediating rulers and priesthoods required a spiritual maturity of which most who heard his preaching were not yet capable. … Paul’s gospel has always been in danger of being stifled by those who would treat the teachings of Jesus as laws to be enforced by a hierarchy. (Stamm, TIB 1953, X pp. 434-435)  
V. Environment of Paul’s Churches in Galatia  
The conclusion concerning the destination of the epistle does not involve the essentials of its religious message, but it does affect our understanding of certain passages, such as 3:1 and 41:12, 20.  
From the earliest times that part of the world had been swept by the cross tides of migration and struggle for empire. The third millennium found the Hittites in possession. In the second millennium the Greeks and Phrygians came spilling over from Europe, and in the first millennium the remaining power of the Hittites was swept away by Babylon and Persia. Then came the turn of the Asiatic tide into Europe, only to be swept back again by Alexander the Great. But the Greek cities with which he and his successors dotted the map of Asia were like anthills destined to be leveled by Oriental reaction.  
About 278 B.C. new turmoil came with the Gauls, who were shunted from Greece and crossed into Asia to overrun Phrygia. Gradually the Greek kings succeeded in pushing them up into the central highlands, where they established themselves in the region of Ancyra. Thus located, they constituted a perpetually disturbing element, raiding the Greek cities and furnishing soldiers now to one, and now to another of the rival kings. Then in 121 B.C. came the Romans to 'set free' Galatia by making it a part of their own Empire. By 40 B.C. there were three kingdoms, with capitals at Ancyra, Pisidian Antioch, and Iconium. Four years later Lycaonia and Galatia were given to Amyntas the king of Pisidia. He added Pamphylia and part of Cilicia to his kingdom. But he was killed in 25 B.C., and the Romans made his dominion into the province of Galatia, which was thus much larger than the territory inhabited by the Gauls. (Stamm, 1953, TIB X pp. 437-438)  
War and slavery, poverty, disease, and famine made life hard and uncertain. In religion and philosophy men were confused by this meeting of East and West. But man’s extremity was Paul’s opportunity. The soil of the centuries had been plowed and harrowed for his new, revolutionary gospel of grace and freedom.  
Not all, however, were ready for this freedom. The old religions with prestige and authority seemed safer. Most Jews preferred Moses, and among the Gentiles the hold of the Great Mother Cybele of Phrygia was not easily shaken. Paul’s converts, bringing their former ideas and customs with them, were all too ready to reshape his gospel into a combination of Christ with their ancient laws and rituals. The old religions were especially tenacious in the small villages, whose inhabitants spoke the native languages and were inaccessible to the Greek-speaking Paul. To this gravitational attraction of the indigenous cults was added the more sophisticated syncretism of the city dwellers, pulling Paul’s churches away from his gospel when the moral demands of his faith and the responsibilities of his freedom became irksome. This was the root of the trouble in Galatia. (Stamm, 1953, TIB X p. 438)  
VI. Date and Place of Writing  
Some consider it the earliest of Paul’s extant letters and place it in 49 … In support of this date it is said that Paul, who had come from Perga by boat, was met by messengers from Galatia, who had taken the shorter route by land. They reported the disturbance which had arisen in his churches soon after his departure. He could not go back immediately to straighten things out in person, because he saw that he would have to settle the matter first in Jerusalem, whence the troublemakers had come. So he wrote a letter.  
But … [w]e do not know that the trouble in Galatia was stirred up by emissaries from the church in Jerusalem … Moreover, this solution overlooks the crux of the issue between Paul and the legalists. His contention was that neither circumcision nor the observance of any other law was the basis of salvation, but only faith in God’s grace through Christ. … On the matter of kosher customs, as on every other question, he directed men to the mind and Spirit of Christ, and not to law, either Mosaic or apostolic. That mind was a Spirit of edification which abstained voluntarily from all that defiled or offended.  
We may say that the situation [in Galatia] was different – that in Macedonia it was persecution from outside by Jews who were trying to prevent Paul’s preaching, whereas in Galatia it was trouble inside the church created by legalistic Christians who were proposing to change his teaching; that in one case the issue was justification by faith, and in the other faithfulness while waiting for the day of the Lord.  
The letter to the Romans, written during the three months in Greece mentioned in Acts 20:2-3, is our earliest commentary on Galatians. In it the relation between the law and the gospel is set forth in the perspective of Paul’s further experience. The brevity and storminess of Galatians gives way to a more complete and calmly reasoned presentation of his gospel. (Stamm, 1953, TIB X pp. 438 - 439)  
At Corinth, as in Galatia, Paul had to defend his right to be an apostle against opponents heartless enough to turn against him the cruel belief that physical illness was a sign of God’s disfavor … and they charged him with being a crafty man-pleaser … He exhorts his converts to put away childish things and grow up in faith, hope and love…  
Most childish of all were the factions incipient in Galatia, and actual in Corinth … He abandoned the kosher customs and all other artificial distinctions between Jews and Gentiles and laid the emphasis where it belonged – upon the necessity for God’s people to establish and maintain a higher morality and spiritual life… He substituted a catholic spirit for partisan loyalties ... (Stamm, 1953, TIB X pp. 440-441)  
VII. Authorship and Attestation  
If Paul wrote anything that goes under his name, it was Galatians, Romans, and the letters to Corinth. … F.C. Baur and his followers tried to show that the letters ascribed to Paul were the product of a second-century conflict between a Judaist party and the liberals in the church, and that they were written by Paulinists who used his name and authority to promote their own ideas.  
[But] the earliest mention of the epistle by name occurs in the canon of the Gnostic heretic Marcion (ca. [approximately] 144). He put it first in his list of ten letters of Paul. A generation later the orthodox Muratorian canon (ca. 185) listed it as the sixth of Paul’s letters. … While the first explicit reference to Galatians as a letter of Paul is as late as the middle of the second century … the authors of Ephesians and the Gospel of John knew it; and Polycarp in his letter to the Philippians quoted it. Revelation, I Peter, Hebrew, I Clement, and Ignatius show acquaintance with it; and there is evidence that the writer of the Epistle of James knew Galatians, as did the authors of II Peter and the Pastoral epistle, and Justin Martyr and Athenagoras. (Stamm, 1953, TIB X pp. 441-442)  
VIII. Text and Transmission  
Although the epistle was composed neither carelessly nor hastily, the anxiety and emotional stress under which Paul dictated his cascading thoughts have produced some involved and obscure sentences … and a number of abrupt transitions… These have been a standing invitation to scribal clarification. … Paul’s debate with his critics takes the form of a diatribe, which is characterized by quotations from past or anticipated objectors and rapid-fire answers to them. Paul did not use quotation marks, and this accounts for the difficulty in 2:14-15 of deciding where his speech to Peter ends. The numerous allusions to person and places, events and teachings, with which Paul assumed his readers to be acquainted, are another source of difficulty. All theses factors operated to produce the numerous variations in the text of Galatians." (Stamm, 1953, TIB p. 442)  
From Adam Clarke’s Commentaryi :  
"The authenticity of this epistle is ably vindicated by Dr. Paley: the principal part of his arguments I shall here introduce …  
'Section I.  
As Judea was the scene of the Christian history; as the author and preachers of Christianity were Jews; as the religion itself acknowledged and was founded upon the Jewish religion, in contra distinction to every other religion, then professed among mankind: it was not to be wondered at, that some its teachers should carry it out in the world rather as a sect and modification of Judaism, than as a separate original revelation; or that they should invite their proselytes to those observances in which they lived themselves. ... I … think that those pretensions of Judaism were much more likely to be insisted upon, whilst the Jews continued a nation, than after their fall and dispersion; while Jerusalem and the temple stood, than after the destruction brought upon them by the Roman arms, the fatal cessation of the sacrifice and the priesthood, the humiliating loss of their country, and, with it, of the great rites and symbols of their institution. It should seem, therefore, from the nature of the subject and the situation of the parties, that this controversy was carried on in the interval between the preaching of Christianity to the Gentiles, and the invasion of Titus: and that our present epistle ... must be referred to the same period.  
… the epistle supposes that certain designing adherents of the Jewish law had crept into the churches of Galatia; and had been endeavouring, and but too successfully, to persuade the Galatic converts, that they had been taught the new religion imperfectly, and at second hand; that the founder of their church himself possessed only an inferior and disputed commission, the seat of truth and authority being in the apostles and elders of Jerusalem; moreover, that whatever he might profess among them, he had himself, at other times and in other places, given way to the doctrine of circumcision. The epistle is unintelligible without supposing all this. (Clarke, 1831, vol. II p. 361)  
Section VII.  
This epistle goes farther than any of St. Paul’s epistles; for it avows in direct terms the supersession of the Jewish law, as an instrument of salvation, even to the Jews themselves. Not only were the Gentiles exempt from its authority, but even the Jews were no longer either to place any dependency upon it, or consider themselves as subject to it on a religious account. "Before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto faith which should afterward be revealed: wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith; but, after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster." (Chap. [chapter] iii. 23-25) This was undoubtedly spoken of Jews, and to Jews. … What then should be the conduct of a Jew (for such St. Paul was) who preached this doctrine? To be consistent with himself, either he would no longer comply, in his own person, with the directions of the law; or, if he did comply, it would be some other reason than any confidence which he placed in its efficacy, as a religious institution. (Clarke, 1831, vol. II pp. 366-367)  
Preface  
The religion of the ancient Galatae was extremely corrupt and superstitious: and they are said to have worshipped the mother of the gods, under the name of Agdistis; and to have offered human sacrifices of the prisoners they took in war.  
They are mentioned by historians as a tall and valiant people, who went nearly naked; and used for arms only a sword and buckler. The impetuosity of their attack is stated to have been irresistible…’” (Clarke, 1831, vol. II p. 369)  
From The New Jerome Biblical Commentaryii  
"Introduction  
The Galatai, originally an Indo-Aryan tribe of Asia, were related to the Celts or Gauls (“who in their own language are called Keltae, but in ours Galli”) ... About 279 BC some of them invaded the lower Danube area and Macedonia, descending even into the Gk [Greek] peninsula. After they were stopped by the Aetolians in 278, a remnant fled across the Hellespont into Asia Minor …  
Occasion and Purpose  
… He … stoutly maintained that the gospel he had preached, without the observance of the Mosaic practices, was the only correct view of Christianity … Gal [Galatians] thus became the first expose` of Paul’s teaching about justification by grace through faith apart from deeds prescribed by the law; it is Paul’s manifesto about Christian freedom.  
... Who were the agitators in Galatia? … they are best identified as Jewish Christians of Palestine, of an even stricter Jewish background than Peter, Paul, or James, or even of the ‘false brethren' (2:4) of Jerusalem, whom Paul had encountered there. (The account in Acts 15:5 would identify the latter as ‘believers who had belonged to the sect of the Pharisees.’) … The agitators in Galatia were Judaizers, who insisted not on the observance of the whole Mosaic law, but at least on circumcision and the observance of some other Jewish practices. Paul for this reason warned the Gentile Christians of Galatia that their fascination with ‘circumcision’ would oblige them to keep ‘the whole law’ (5:3). The agitators may have been syncretists of some sort: Christians of Jewish perhaps Essene, background, affected by some Anatolian influences. … (Joseph A. Fitzmyer, 1990, TNJBC pp. 780-781)   END NOTES
i The New Testament of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. The text carefully printed from the most correct copies of the present Authorized Version. Including the marginal readings and parallel texts. With a Commentary and Critical Notes. Designed as a help to a better understanding of the sacred writings. By Adam Clarke, LL.D. F.S.A. M.R.I.A. With a complete alphabetical index. Royal Octavo Stereotype Edition. Vol. II. [Vol. VI together with the O.T.] New York, Published by J. Emory and B. Waugh, for the Methodist Episcopal Church, at the conference office, 13 Crosby-Street. J. Collord, Printer. 1831.  
ii The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, Edited by Raymond E. Brown, S.S., Union Theological Seminary, New York; NY, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J. (emeritus) Catholic University of America, Washington, DC; Roland E. Murphy, O.Carm. (emeritus) The Divinity School, Duke University, Durham, NC, with a foreword by His Eminence Carlo Maria Cardinal Martini, S.J.; Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1990  
  Chapter One  
…  
Tiding of [בשורת, BeSOoRahTh, Gospel] one
[verses 6-10]  
…  
…………………………………………  
How [כיצד, KaYTsahD] was [היה, HahYaH] Shah`OoL [“Lender”, Saul, Paul] to become a Sent Forth [Apostle]
[verses 11 to end of chapter]  
…  
Chapter Two  
Sending forth of Shah’OoL required upon hands of the Sent Forth
[verses 1-10]  
…  
…………………………………………  
The YeHOo-DeeYM [“YHVH-ites”, Judeans] and the nations, righteous from inside belief
[verses 11 to end of chapter]  
...
-16. And since [וכיון, VeKhayVahN] that know, we, that [כי, KeeY] the ’ahDahM [“man”, Adam] is not made righteous in realizing commandments [of] the Instruction [Torah, law],
rather in belief of the Anointed [המשיח, HahMahSheeY-ahH, the Messiah, the Christ] YayShOo`ah [“Savior”, Jesus],
believe, also we, in Anointed YayShOo`ah,
to sake we are made righteous from inside belief in Anointed,
and not in realizing commandments [of] the Instruction,
that yes, in realizing commandments [of] the Instruction is not made righteous any [כל, KahL] flesh.  
“As a Pharisee, Paul had been taught that works of law were deeds done in obedience to the Torah, contrasted with things done according to one’s own will. The object of this obedience was to render oneself acceptable to God – to ‘justify’ oneself. Having found this impossible, Paul reinforced the evidence from his own experience by Ps. [Psalm] 143:2, where the sinner prays God not to enter into judgment with him because in God’s sight no man living is righteous. Into this passage from the LXX [The Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible] Paul inserted ‘by works of law,’ and wrote σαρξ [sarx], ‘flesh,’ instead of ζων [zon], ‘one living.’ This quotation warns us against setting Paul’s salvation by grace over against Judaism in such a way as to obscure the fact that the Jews depended also upon God’s lovingkindness and tender mercies (I Kings 8:46; Job 10:14-15; 14:3-4; Prov. [Proverbs] 20:9; Eccl. [Ecclesiasticus] 7:20; Mal. [Malachi] 3:2; Dan. [Daniel] 9:18).” (Stamm, 1953, TIB X p. 483)  
“Justified is a metaphor from the law court. The Greek verb is δικαιοω [dikaioo], the noun δικαιοσουνη [dikaiosoune’], the adjective δικαιος [dikaios]. The common root is δικ [dik] as in δεικνυμι [deiknumi], ‘point out,’ ‘show.’ The words formed on this root point to a norm or standard to which persons and things must conform in order to be ‘right.’ The English ‘right’ expresses the same idea, being derived from the Anglo-Saxon ‘richt,’ which means ‘straight,’ not crooked, ‘upright,’ not oblique. The verb δικαιοω means ‘I think it right.’ A man is δικαιος, ‘right’ when he conforms to the standard of acceptable character and conduct, and δικαιοσυνη, ‘righteousness,’ ‘justice,’ is the state or quality of this conformity. In the LXX these Greek words translate a group of Hebrew words formed on the root צדק [TsehDehQ], and in Latin the corresponding terms are justifico, justus, and justificatio. In all four languages the common idea is the norm by which persons and things are to be tested. Thus in Hebrew a wall is ‘righteous’ when it conforms to the plumb line, a man when he does God’s will.  
From earliest boyhood Paul had tried to be righteous. But there came a terrible day when he said ‘I will covet’ to the law’s ‘Thou shalt not,’ and in that defiance he had fallen out of right relation to God and into the ‘wrath,’ where he ‘died’ spiritually… Thenceforth all his efforts, however strenuous, to get ‘right’ with God were thwarted by the weakness of his sinful human nature, the ‘flesh’ (σαρξ) [sarx]. That experience of futility led him to say that a man is not justified by works ‘of law.’” (Stamm, 1953, TIB X p. 483)  
[Actually Paul changed his point of view as a result of his encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus, not as a result of intellectual contemplation. His many failures hitherto had not led him to this conclusion. The description of Paul in the preceding paragraph is a fiction.]  
“In the eyes of the psalmists and rabbis this was blasphemously revolutionary. Resting on God’s covenant with Abraham, they held it axiomatic that the ‘righteous’ man who had conscientiously done his part deserved to be vindicated before a wicked world; otherwise God could not be righteous. … In Judaism God was thought of as forgiving only repentant sinners who followed their repentance with right living …  
The theological expression for this conception of salvation is ‘justification by faith.’ Unfortunately this Latin word does not make plain Paul’s underlying religious experience, which was a change of status through faith from a wrong to a ‘right’ relationship with God… It conceals from the English reader the fact that the Greek word also means ‘righteousness.’ … (observe the ASV [American Standard Version] mg. [marginal note], ‘accounted righteous’).  
But ‘reckoned’ and ‘accounted’ expose Paul’s thought to misinterpretation by suggesting a legal fiction which God adopted to escape the contradiction between his acceptance of sinners and his own righteousness and justice.  
On the other hand, Paul’s term, in the passive, cannot be translated by ‘made righteous’ without misrepresenting him. In baptism he had ‘died with Christ’ to sin. By this definition the Christian is a person who does not sin! And yet Paul does not say that he is sinless, but that he must not sin. … This laid him open to a charge of self contradiction; sinless and yet not sinless, righteous and unrighteous, just and unjust at the same time. Some interpreters have labeled it ‘paradox,’ but such a superficial dismissal of the problem is religiously barren and worse than useless.  
The extreme difficulty of understanding Paul on this matter has led to a distinction between ‘justification’ and ‘sanctification,’ which obscures Paul’s urgency to be now, at this very moment, what God in accepting him says he is: a righteous man in Christ Jesus. Justification is reduced to a forensic declaration by which God acquits and accepts the guilty criminal, and sanctification is viewed as a leisurely process of becoming the kind of person posited by that declaration. This makes perfection seem far less urgent than Paul conceived it, and permits the spiritual inertia of human nature to continue its habit of separating religion from ethics. To prevent this misunderstanding it is necessary to keep in mind the root meaning of ‘righteousness’ in δικαιοω and its cognates.” (Stamm, 1953, TIB X pp. 484-485)  
-19. I died according to [לגבי, LeGahBaY] the Instruction, because of [בגלל, BeeGLahL] the Instruction, in order [כדי, KeDaY] that I will live to God.  
“… The Pharisees taught that the Torah was the life element of the Jews; all who obeyed would live, those who did not would die (Deut. [Deuteronomy] 30:11-20).” (Stamm, 1953, TIB X pp. 488-489)  
-20. With the Anointed I was crucified, and no more I live, rather the Anointed lives in me.
The life that I live now in flesh, I live them in the belief of Son [of] the Gods that loved me and delivered up [ומסר, OoMahÇahR] himself in my behalf [בעדי, Bah`ahDeeY].  
“The danger was that Paul’s Gentile converts might claim freedom in Christ but reject the cross-bearing that made it possible. Lacking the momentum of moral discipline under Moses, which prepared Paul to make right use of his freedom, they might imagine that his dying and rising with Christ was a magical way of immortalizing themselves by sacramental absorption of Christ’s divine substance in baptism and the Lord’s Supper. The church has always been tempted to take Paul’s crucifixion with Christ in a symbolic sense only, or as an experience at baptism which is sacramentally automatic. It has also been tempted to reduce Paul’s ‘faith’ to bare belief and assent to his doctrine, and to equate his ‘righteousness’ with a fictitious imputation by a Judge made lenient by Christ’s death.  
Against these caricatures of ‘justification by faith,’ Paul’s whole life and all his letters are a standing protest. He never allows us to forget that to be crucified with Christ is to share the motives, the purposes, and the way of life that led Jesus to the Cross; to take up vicariously the burden of the sins of others, forgiving and loving instead of condemning them; to make oneself the slave of every man; to create unity and harmony by reconciling man to God and man to his fellow men; to pray without ceasing ‘Thy will be done’; to consign one’s life to God, walking by faith where one cannot see; and finally to leave this earth with the prayer ‘Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.’  
… When Christ the Spirit came to live in Paul … Paul was guided at each step, in each new circumstance, to answer for himself the question: What would Jesus have me do? And the answer was always this: Rely solely on God’s grace through Christ, count others better than yourself, and make yourself everybody’s slave after the manner of the Son of God who loved you and gave himself for you.  
… The phrase εν σαρκι [en sarki] … means, lit. [literally], in the flesh. Someday – Paul hoped it would be soon – this would be changed into a body like that of the risen Christ, which belonged to the realm of Spirit.” (Stamm, 1953, TIB X pp. 490-493)  
“Christ lives in me: The perfection of Christian life is expressed here … it reshapes human beings anew, supplying them with a new principle of activity on the ontological1 level of their very beings.” (Joseph A. Fitzmyer, 1990, TNJBC p. 785)  
-21. I do not nullify [מבטל, MeBahTayL] [את, ’ehTh (indicator of direct object; no English equivalent)] mercy [of] Gods;
is not if [it] is possible to become righteous upon hand of the Instruction, see, that the Anointed died to nothing [לשוא, LahShahVe’]?  
“It is not I, he says, who am nullifying the grace of God by abandoning the law which is his grace-gift to Israel, but those who insist on retaining that law in addition to the grace which he has now manifested in Christ.” (Stamm, 1953, TIB X p. 495)
  Footnotes   1 Ontological - relating to the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being  
An Amateur's Journey Through the Bible
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2023.06.02 17:36 triptriptricky Young-ish Professional, Wanting to Travel More

Hi, everyone! First off, I want to apologize for posting yet another travel credit card recommendation request... I have been trying to do my research and compare cards, but I still have no idea which one to choose.
Some background:
*30's, single, doesn't currently travel much (maybe 1-2x per year, domestically), but wants to travel more. My goal is to travel at least 2x per year, both domestically and internationally. *I live near BWI, so that will be my main depature airport. *I am open to the higher AF cards, as long as the fee is easily recouped (I already have TSA PreCheck through my employer, but I'd be interested in Global Entry). *I may be purchasing tour packages through tour companies for my international travel, if that makes a difference in what a company consideres a form of travel for points accural. I should be purchasing the airline ticket myself, though.
Thank you for your help!!!
CREDIT PROFILE
* Current credit cards you are the primary account holder of: Discover It $29,500 limit, 08/2015, $0 balance // Tower Federal Credit Union Gold Mastercard, $6,000 limit, 09/2014. This is my oldest credit card, and it is not currently in use. // Never missed a payment and never carried a balance.
*FICO Score: 820 TransUnion per Discover, 813 TransUnion and 817 Equifax per CreditKarma
* Number of personal credit cards approved for in the past 6 months: 0
* Number of personal credit cards approved for in the past 12 months: 0
* Number of personal credit cards approved for in the past 24 months: 0
* Annual income: $115,000
CATEGORIES
* OK with category-specific cards?: Yes, if able to transfer in order to maximize travel benefits/points.
* OK with rotating category cards?: Yes
* Estimate average monthly spend in the categories below: * Dining: $125
* Groceries: $300-$400 exclusively via Walmart online grocery delivery/pickup.
* Gas: $25
* Travel: I would say $0 really, but maybe $60 (~$1,450 total over the last 24 months - $1,160 on flights, ~$100 on UbeLyft. No car rentals or hotels.)
* Do you plan on using this card abroad for a significant length of time (study abroad, digital nomad, expat, extended travel)?: No, not a significant amount of time, but would prefer a card that is accepted while traveling abroad in order to maximize travel points. * Any other categories
-Phone: $55
-Car Insurance: $41 (paid semiannually) -Spotify: $14
-Hulu: $16
* Any other significant, regular credit card spend you didn't include above?: No
* Can you pay rent by credit card? No
MEMBERSHIPS & SUBSCRIPTIONS
* Current member of Amazon Prime?: Yes, $140 paid annually
* Current Verizon postpaid customer?: No
* Current member of Costco or Sam's Club? No
* Currently paying $13.99/month or more for Disney Bundle (Disney+ / Hulu / EPSN+) or other Hulu services? Yes, Hulu only
* Current member of Chase, US Bank or any other big bank?: No
* Active US military?: No
* Are you open to Business Cards?: No
PURPOSE
* What's the purpose of your next card (choose ONE)?: Travel Rewards
* If you answered "travel rewards", do you have a preferred airline and/or hotel chain? No preferred hotels, and no preferred airline really, but I do exclusively travel out of BWI.
* Do you have any cards you've been looking at? The usual travel cards that are frequently recommended here. Chase Sapphire lines, Capitol One, etc. I'm a bit apprehensive regarding Amex, since I hear they are not widely accepted abroad.
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2023.06.02 17:36 PritchettRobert506 [HIRING] 25 Jobs in NE Hiring Now!

Company Name Title City
Empowerme Wellness Physical Therapist (PT) $5,000 Sign On Bonus Grand Island
Petco Hospital Veterinary Technician Lincoln
2020Companies HP Territory Retail Sales Representative Bellevue
Mid-American Research Chemical Sales Representative Broken Bow
Alpha Consulting Corp. Laboratory Technician Elkhorn
The Retail Odyssey Company Travel Store Merchandiser Fremont
Copart Tow Truck 2-Car Driver Greenwood
Eye Care Specialties-Superior Optometrist Lincoln
Coda Search LLC Electronics Technician Lincoln
Region V Services Medical Services Associate - Full-time Lincoln
Cargill Senior Maintenance Nebraska City
Zurich Insurance Company Ltd. RCIS Crop Senior CAT Claims Specialist Norfolk
Mid-American Research Chemical Sales Representative Norfolk
EMCOR Group Commercial Maintenance Technician Omaha
2020Companies Shoe Salesperson Omaha
Four Points Federal Credit Union Executive Assistant Omaha
Physicians Mutual Director, Compliance Omaha
Malbar Vision-Maple Optometric Technician Omaha
Apex Staffing Storeman Omaha
DispatchHealth Management Field Based Radiologic Technologist (Omaha, NE) Omaha
Cargill Batcher Schuyler
Cargill Production Worker Schuyler
Cargill General Production Schuyler
Cargill Senior Maintenance Syracuse
Axon Account Executive, Education (Northwest) Nebraska City
Hey guys, here are some recent job openings in ne. Feel free to comment here or send me a private message if you have any questions, I'm at the community's disposal! If you encounter any problems with any of these job openings please let me know that I will modify the table accordingly. Thanks!
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2023.06.02 17:10 r3dsca Obscure subreddit posting - The Branding Issue of Democrats from the 90s to Now

This was posted in the AngryObservation subreddit (that I stumbled on two seconds ago)
Essay posted by u/dcmetro7
https://www.reddit.com/usedcmetro7/
Democrats have a branding problem : AngryObservation (reddit.com)

Democrats have a branding problem

😴 Long Observation 😴
I was inspired by u/Randomuser1520 's post about the Democratic Party's seemingly weak bench of future potential presidential nominees.
A lot of the problems trace back to 2016, but I'd argue the Democrats' branding woes go back even further. Think all the way back to the last time the Democrats had a consistently strong electoral record as a party -- the 90s, where the only truly bad year for Ds was 1994. Bill Clinton had successfully rebranded the party under the 'Third Way' label that Dems at any level could embrace and benefit from, and he had a clear successor in Al Gore. But Gore loses narrowly in 2000, and the problems for the Dems' brand begin.
'Yes We Can'
After 9/11, the electorate supports Bush and they support war. Dems' brand takes a hit and they lose the 2002 midterms. In 2004, John Kerry is successfully painted as an out-of-touch Ivy League liberal, disengaged from 'real America.' Dems lose and their brand suffers further.
But by the end of Bush's term, most Americans are disillusioned with Dubyaism. They wanted change, and one man promises to lead them to it with posters that proclaim 'HOPE' and cries of 'Yes We Can,' heralding in a new age of politics. Barack Obama and the Democrats are swept into a trifecta in Washington.
And we certainly got a new age of politics. When Obama was inaugurated, pundits speculated about the 'emerging Democratic majority', and how the GOP may literally go extinct in ten years. By the end of Obama's second term, those same pundits are surveying the absolutely decimated state of the Democratic party at all levels of power. Dems had lost the Senate, the House, most governorships, and most state legislatures. Control of the state legislatures makes the GOP's hold on the House even stronger. Control of the Senate effectively leads to control of the Supreme Court.
While Obama certainly can't be blamed for everything the GOP threw at him, I feel like it's safe to say his rebranding of the Democratic party failed in the long run. The 'Party of Hope' was sunk into the quagmire of a slow economic recovery, some of the most cynical politicking ever, and some of the most dysfunctional White House-Congress relationships in the history of the country. Obama's signature healthcare legislation would languish in the 30s approval-wise until after he left office. By 2015, no one was talking about the Democrats as the Party of Hope anymore. Even the guy who designed the original 'Hope' poster said he was frustrated by the lack of progress under the Obama admin. I'd argue that the Republicans were responsible for the clear majority of this dysfunction, but if their goal was to muddy the waters between the parties, they succeeded. And with the Tea Party, they were better at rebranding themselves even when they were in the opposition.
And none of this was helped by the face that Obama seemed extremely reluctant, even uninterested, in stepping into the role of party leader. Congressional Democrats were frustrated at the way he kept his distance from them, making it hard to solidify the policy goals they'd implemented in his first term. This article (https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/19/us/aloof-obama-is-frustrating-his-own-party.html) sums it up well, with this prescient quote sticking out:
In interviews, nearly two dozen Democratic lawmakers and senior congressional aides suggested that Mr. Obama’s approach has left him with few loyalists to effectively manage the issues erupting abroad and at home and could imperil his efforts to leave a legacy in his final stretch in office.
And sure enough, Obama's legacy was in peril before he even left office.
'Stronger Together'
In 2016, Democrats didn't plan for a primary, they planned for a coronation. Hillary Clinton had been locking up all the support she could get from the Democratic establishment while Obama was serving his second term. Biden would seem like the clear establishment successor, but by the time he was able to turn his attention from VP duties to the primary he realized Hillary had completely boxed him out. She had already corralled all the big donors, operatives, and endorsements into her corner, and Joe was checkmated before he even sat down to the board. Thus, he turned down the opportunity, likely burying his long-nurtured presidential ambitions.
But then the coronation gets bumpy. Sanders challenges her from the outside, and immediately begins putting her on the spot as to why she's running. In other words, what does she envision for the Democratic brand? Hillary herself doesn't know. Is it a third term of Bill (whose star was starting to fade among everyone whose name doesn't rhyme with Shames Scarville), a third term of Obama (whose Hope posters have since become landfill), or an all-new thing?
To Hillary's credit, she couldn't portray herself as a total break from the past, both because she had been was strongly anchored to the national political landscape for the last thirty years, and because she could hardly attack Obama's record too harshly. In the end, she also struggled to brand both herself and the party. Consider the slogans most associated with her campaign; 'Forward Together' and 'Stronger Together' sound like the slogans of a centrist third party with no concrete policy ideas. They just attempted to project a feeling of unity onto a people who were united only, if the candidacies of Sanders and Trump meant anything, in the feeling that 'establishment' politicians like HRC had failed. And, of course, 'I'm with Her' was barely a rebrand at all, simply associating the party with its uncharismatic yet seemingly unstoppable frontrunner.
In the meantime, Trump had done the opposite, rebranding himself and the GOP as the party of 'America First populism.' What that meant exactly in terms of policy seemed to change from day to day But as a brand, as a forceful statement of intent, it worked, especially when contrasted with a seemingly rudderless HRC campaign that failed to answer the age-old question: 'Why are you running for president?'
'For the People'
After the 2016 fiasco, the Democrats were decimated and leaderless. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had passed his leadership position to Chuck Schumer and passed on soon after Trump took office. Tim Ryan led a mutiny against Nancy Pelosi, blaming her in part for the party's plunge from ascendance to irrelevance in the House. Hillary Clinton disappeared into the woods of Chappaqua. Obama started making a docu-series for Netflix. Joe Biden entered semi-retirement and wrote a book.
But in all of this, they found something they had been lacking. A brand.
Not the one they would have preferred, but one that would work nonetheless for winning elections. House Dems would embrace the (once-again) vague slogan of 'For the People' ahead of the 2018 midterms, but the aim was clear. The Democrats were now the Opposition; the Anti-Trump party.
Trump's approval rating was not just low, but incredibly sticky. People tended to have very firm opinions on him, and so his approval rating barely escaped the 35-45% range, with him almost hitting 50% before the pandemic hit. Thus, running on opposition to Trump would be fine electorally. In 2018, the Democrats had a blue wave year based mostly on opposition to Trump, retaking the house. Ironically, a big policy motivator for voters was backlash against the GOP's effort to repeal and replace Obamacare -- a promise that had driven Republican electoral gains since the bill was passed into law. Republican branding and messaging had been so successful that, for the better part of the decade, people trusted them to 'fix' the ACA until the very last minute before the replacement was signed.
'Battle for the Soul of the Nation'
But the problem remained for 2020 -- who would lead them? This was a difficult decision even before the pandemic. And Democratic primary voters were treated to a veritable buffet on angles on how to rebrand the party to beat Trump.
Should the party embrace democratic socialism under Sanders, or heavy consumer advocacy under Warren? Should it embrace a young, charismatic up-and-comer like Harris, Buttigieg, or O'Rourke or someone just as 'establishment' as Hillary, like Michael Bloomberg? Old-school liberalism with the Klob? Whatever Andrew Yang was doing?
But as the polls drew near, the Democrats seemed to conclude that beating Trump was simply more important than charting a new course for the party. If they could get elected or rebrand, they'd choose the former. And so all the other more moderate candidates dropped out to consolidate the vote around Biden, as the safe, expected pick who could stay the course. Biden and his surrogates began adopting the slogan 'Battle for the Soul of the Nation,' an epic and apocalyptic phrase that is still fundamentally reactive in tone, implying that the biggest motivator to vote for Democrats that fall was not to pass any specific agenda, but to put a stop to the GOP's plans.
Biden wouldn't govern in this way, but he would campaign this way -- as the normal, capable candidate who could lead the country's post-covid recovery in opposition to Trump's perceived incompetence. Biden won, but Democrats didn't get nearly the boost they wanted from covid, and House candidates underperformed Biden nationally, leading to a surprising loss of seats in the House. And after the effort to throw out the election failed, Trump left office with severely damaged standing with independents. The anti-Trump brand had delivered Dems a trifecta; now it was time to use it; hopefully to establish a new brand for a new decade.
'Building Back Better'
Upon taking office, Biden and the Dems lay out their agenda; the 'Build Back Better' plan, which centers on a three-pronged approach; a pandemic relief bill, an infrastructure bill, and a social policy bill. Passing such plans will involve all 50 Senate D's on board in some cases, and a bipartisan filibuster-proof majority of 60 senators in other cases.
People laugh, think back to 2010, and begin arguing whether a prediction that the GOP will control 55 Senate seats by 2023 is too conservative. Nancy Pelosi is trying to manage a mere five-seat majority in the house. Mitch McConnell, who once feasted on the Democrats' lost hopes the way a hungry turtle devours a plate of juicy strawberries, still held enough sway in the Senate to hold up any significant policy not related to budget reconciliation. Even then, Schumer must wrangle mavericks like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Dramatic divisions still rip across the fabric of American society. But then, something truly strange happens.
The 117th Congress ends up being one of the most productive sessions ever.
Whether or not you think any or all of the 117th's acts were good policy, it's undeniable that this was an unusually politically efficient session, especially considering the last decade of hardball politics. Bipartisan majorities drive the infrastructure act, a gun control act, a tech-manufacturing promotion act, and even a somewhat-legalization of same-sex marriage nationwide. Plus, Schumer and Pelosi navigate their tiny majorities toward passing partisan priorities, like the pandemic relief act and the scaled-down Build Back Better social policy bill, rebranded as the Inflation Reduction Act or IRA. McConnell drops his trademark stonewalling and collaborates with Biden on the bipartisan bills, and 'Yea' votes roll in even from deep red states -- Republican senators from Mississippi, West Virginia, and North Dakota get these bills over the line. Bipartisanship returns to Congress in fleeting glances -- something that I feel confident in arguing absolutely no one expected Biden or the Dem leaders to be able to do.
Of course, no one has forgotten 2010, and 2022 looks to be another rough year. Inflation soars, and Biden's approval rating drops. Dems brace for impact. The Dobbs ruling happens, but polls repeatedly suggest that the economy is the top issue on voters' minds, and they don't like Biden's handling of it.
But while these things are true, they ignore a crucial factor -- the GOP is embroiled in an identity crisis of its own. The leader of the party is claiming to be the legitimate president of the United States, which is a bit of a hard issue to ignore. Trump loyalists beat out 'establishment' Republicans in the primaries, and bring their hard promotion of the MAGA brand to the general elections. And they lose.
I think it's fair to say that the GOP lost most of the key races of the 2022 midterms, rather than Democrats winning them. Swing state Republican parties chose candidates who adhered so closely to a brand so toxic that independents still chose the Democrats, even in some cases where they were dissatisfied with the party. Republicans who have managed to establish a brand for themselves -- DeSantis, Kemp, and DeWine among them -- soar, while the Trumpiest candidates fall flat. McConnell remains in the minority, and McCarthy becomes the head of a very, very dysfunctional family.
Will Brandon's Rebrand Stand?
So, coming off an unusually strong midterm, where does the party go in 2024? Probably, as u/Randomuser1520 said, back to Biden. When your party wins one of the most fiercely contested elections in American history, has a productive legislative session, and then massively overperforms in the midterm, you don't usually change horses regardless of what approval polling says. If Biden were just 10 years younger and the health concerns were off the table, there would be no question in anyone's mind who to nominate.
The establishment and progressive wings of the party seem to be behind him if he runs, meaning challenges will only come from real outsiders like Marianne Williamson and Robert Kennedy Jr. The DNC will probably work to make those challenges as unviable as possible.
2024 is tricky to predict. Trump is favored on the Republican side, and as said before, his brand is so toxic that Biden can probably glide to reelection barring any massive economic downturns or serious health problems. I won't get too much into 2024, because it seems pretty clearly on the path to becoming another referendum on the GOP's brand, not the Democrats'. Biden's second term (and the rest of his first term) may be defined as much by implementation of the legislation they passed during the 117th as much as by new legislation, if not more.
So the question becomes this -- where does the party go in 2028? Or, in other words, what will Democrats take away from the Biden presidency, and how will Biden shape the party's brand going forward? Who they choose to lead the party next will tell, and Biden's presidency may already be laying out a blueprint.
In his 1996 State of the Union address, Bill Clinton declared 'the era of big government is over,' essentially conceding that Reagan and his vision of a small role for the federal government in domestic affairs had won out for the time, and that Democrats would need to work within that political reality in order to win elections. Obama's efforts to change that status quo resulted in an avalanche of backlash from Tea Partiers, self-proclaimed champions of fiscal conservatism. Hillary Clinton's failed campaign strategy arguably rested more on that understanding of the political climate than anything else, causing her to miss a series of growing frustrations with Reaganism at times channelled by Sanders and, at times, Trump -- at decimation of the manufacturing sector, at the growing gap between rich and poor, at China's seemingly unstoppable three-decade rise at the expense of the U.S.
Biden's approach to American industry and government is a strong repudiation of Reaganism, based around the idea that it is the government's job to fortify and guide the economy in ways that are necessary where the free market has little incentive to. It argues that the issues of infrastructural decay, manufacturing decline, and the growing need for green energy in the face of climate change will only be solved if the government directs the power of the private sector towards those goals at great upfront cost. And free trade, long held as the unassailable source of America's prosperity, must now only be employed in moderation -- if the U.S. has to arguably break international law to lure foreign investment into the U.S. through generous subsidies, it will be worth it, even if it earns the fury of our economic partners. This may be the groundwork of Bidenism.
These plans may fail. The money may be wasted by incompetent or corrupt administrators and the American people may become even more jaded at the thought of big government. But movement within the GOP may suggest a broader shift in the American mind towards this kind of economic interventionism is already in progress. Promising to reverse the decline of manufacturing through tariffs and other measures would have been political anathema twenty years ago, but it has become a core Republican plank. Florida Republicans' punitive measures towards Disney and the GOP's growing support for government action against Big Tech companies suggests openness towards not just using state power to guide the economy, but also to reshape the social landscape by manipulating the private sector. It may well be that the era of small government is over.
I've sorted some potential 'brands' and some of the people who might be nominated in 2028 / become party standard-bearers should the Democrats go in that direction. These lists aren't exhaustive; I'm just trying to establish a general vibe.
The 'Biden Blueprint': Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Gina Raimondo
These are members of the Biden admin who have been given great power (and great piles of money) to enact the legislation of the 117th. If American sentiment towards big government changes as quickly as I think it could, a Cabinet secretary could have a decent shot in 2028. Harris would be the natural successor as the VP, but Transportation Sec Buttigieg and Commerce Sec Raimondo, who were empowered to implement much of the Infrastructure Act and the CHIPS Act respectively, could become standard-bearers for this new vision of technocratic governance if they administer these programs well (and in a way that makes headlines). If Energy Sec Granholm were a natural-born citizen, she would definitely fit here as well, considering how much power the IRA gave her department.
The 'New New Deal': Amy Klobuchar, Catherine Cortez Masto, Mark Kelly, Tammy Duckworth, Raphael Warnock
Liberal senators who are capable of working across the aisle to achieve compromise could be a strong bet if Democrats want to recreate the success of the 117th Congress in the future. There's always an argument that effective legislators won't necessarily make for effective executives, but these choices would help with Democrats' goal of rebranding the Democratic party as the party you vote for if you want Washington to function properly and anticipate constituents' needs. Such a ticket could brand itself as the path to bipartisan yet assertive solutions on familiar and emerging issues like immigration reform, federal protection for abortion, the housing shortage, and the drug crisis.
The 'Bulwark': Roy Cooper, Laura Kelly, Andy Beshear
I'll admit that when I began writing this post, I had a more favorable opinion of the above three governors and politicians like them as presidential nominees and the potential 'future of the party.' I no longer feel as strongly about them, however, because I don't believe they do enough to change the brand of the Democrats and the political environment as a whole. These governors are best known for winning races in red states; for holding the line against the most conservative policies while finding areas of compromise, especially on kitchen-table issues.
But this brand of Democrat is fundamentally reactive, even defensive -- it assumes that most of the job will be obstructing right-wing legislation from a red legislature. In other words, it is a kind of strategy you use when you're trying to hold ground, not gain it. It works well when your opponent's brand is toxic (as the GOP's has been since 2016), but this I suspect this brand of 'competent normality' will struggle if the opposition ceases to actively repel voters. If Trump and his acolytes continue to hold a strong grip on the party through 2024 and beyond, this brand may not be a bad bet short-term, but long-term Democrats want to be the ones establishing the rules of the game, not just beating your opponent at theirs. That's what a successful political brand does. While Dems in similar situation should definitely look to these governors for guidance in running their campaigns (and hopefully, their administrations), I would caution at this point against basing the national party's brand on their model.
I think somewhere between these three groups lies a successful path forward for the Democrats that towards becoming the dominant party in U.S. politics at the federal level. There are some other interesting currents in the party; like how Democratic governors like Whitmer, Evers, and Walz have rebuilt D strength the Midwest after a rough 2010s, and how Western Dems like Jared Polis, Mary Peltola, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez have found unexpected electoral stength by embracing a form of libertarianism. However, these currents may be regional, and Democrats shouldn't necessarily try to nationalize every idea that works in one part of the country. Creating different regional 'flavors' of Democrat would be necessary to keep the party relevant in all parts of the country.
Regarding the 2020 primary runners-up, I don't think most of the visions laid out then work post-2024, and for this reason I tend not to give too much weight to current Democratic primary polling, because it assumes these same people would be running again.
Assuming Biden ends his term without catastrophe, I don't think the party needs to place all their faith in a young, charismatic Obama wannabe like O'Rourke or Swalwell, nor does it need to drastically pivot to the center, nor does it need to proclaim itself the party of 'outsiders,' nor does it need to give the reins to the progressive wing. If everything goes right, they can remain ideologically where they are now (roughly) and establish a solid brand for the first time in a generation.
The Democrats been losing the branding war since the days of Nixon. They may currently have all the tools they need right now to change that, and set the expectations for the next fifty years of politics. Let's see how they do.
This is my first big write-up, so I almost certainly missed some stuff and made some assumptions. Let me know what you think.
submitted by r3dsca to redscarepod [link] [comments]

2023.06.02 15:46 Dismal-Jellyfish Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) seeks public comment on the Risk Management Program Requirements for Swap Dealers and Futures Commission Merchants. Regulation 23.600 does not explicitly require an SD’s RMP to include written policies and procedures to safeguard counterparty collateral.

Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) seeks public comment on the Risk Management Program Requirements for Swap Dealers and Futures Commission Merchants. Regulation 23.600 does not explicitly require an SD’s RMP to include written policies and procedures to safeguard counterparty collateral.
https://www.cftc.gov/media/8671/federalregister06012023/download

From a Press Release:

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission today published an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPRM) seeking public comment on potential amendments to the Risk Management Program (RMP) requirements in CFTC Regulations 23.600 and 1.11 (collectively, RMP Regulations) applicable to swap dealers and futures commission merchants.
The ANPRM seeks information and public comment on several areas of the RMP regulations, including governance and structure, the enumerated risks RMPs must monitor and manage, and the specific risk considerations RMPs must take into account. In addition, the ANPRM seeks feedback on how the risk exposure report requirement under the RMP regulations could be improved or modified.
The Commission intends to use the information and comments received to inform potential future agency action, such as a rulemaking, with respect to the RMP Regulations.
Comments must be in writing and received within 60 days of the ANPRM’s publication in the Federal Register. Comments may be submitted via the CFTC Comments Portal at: https://comments.cftc.gov.

Background:

Title VII of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (DoddFrank Act) amended the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA)2 to establish a comprehensive regulatory framework to reduce risk, increase transparency, and promote market integrity within the financial system by, among other things, providing for the registration and comprehensive regulation of swap dealers (SDs) and major swap participants (MSPs), 4 and enhancing the rulemaking and enforcement authorities of the CFTC with respect to all registered entities and intermediaries subject to its oversight, including, among others, futures commission merchants (FCMs). Added by the Dodd-Frank Act, CEA section 4s(j) outlines the duties with which SDs must comply. Specifically, CEA section 4s(j)(2) requires SDs to “establish robust and professional risk management systems adequate for managing the day-to-day business of the [registrant].” CEA section 4s(j)(7) directs the Commission to prescribe rules governing the duties of SDs, including the duty to establish risk management procedures. In April 2012, the Commission adopted Regulation 23.600, which established requirements for the development, approval, implementation, and operation of SD risk management programs (RMPs).
Following two FCM insolvencies involving the misuse of customer funds in 2011 and 2012, the Commission proposed and adopted a series of regulatory amendments designed to enhance the protection of customers and customer funds held by FCMs. The Commission adopted Regulation 1.11 in 2013 to establish risk management requirements for those FCMs that accept customer funds. Regulation 1.11 is largely aligned with the SD risk management requirements in Regulation 23.600 (together with Regulation 1.11, the RMP Regulations). The Commission concluded at that time that it could mitigate the risks of misconduct and an FCM’s failure to maintain required funds in segregation with more robust risk management systems and controls. The Commission is issuing this ANPRM for several reasons. After Regulation 23.600 was initially adopted in 2012, the Commission received a number of questions from SDs concerning compliance with these requirements, particularly those concerning governance (for example, questions regarding who is properly designated as “senior management,” as well as issues relating to the reporting lines within the risk management unit). The intervening decade of examination findings and ongoing requests for staff guidance from SDs with respect to Regulation 23.600 warrant consideration of the Commission’s rules and additional public discourse on this topic.
The Commission has further identified the enumerated areas of risk that RMPs are required to take into account, and the quarterly risk exposure reports (RERs), as other areas of potential confusion and inconsistency in the RMP Regulations for SDs and FCMs. Commission staff has observed significant variance among SD and FCM RERs with respect to how they define and report on the enumerated areas of risk (e.g., market risk, credit risk, liquidity risk, etc.), making it difficult for the Commission to gain a clear understanding of how specific risk exposures are being monitored and managed by individual SDs and FCMs over time, as well as across SDs and FCMs during a specified time period. Furthermore, the Commission’s implementation experiences and certain market events over the last decade indicate that it may be appropriate to consider whether to include additional enumerated areas of risk in the RMP Regulations. The Commission has observed inefficiencies with respect to the RER requirements in the RMP Regulations. Currently, Regulations 23.600(c)(2) and 1.11(e)(2) prescribe neither the format of the RER nor its exact filing schedule. As a result, the Commission frequently receives RERs in inconsistent formats containing stale information, in some cases data that is at least 90 days out-of-date. Furthermore, a number of SDs have indicated that the quarterly RERs are not relied upon for their internal risk management purposes, but rather, they are created solely to comply with Regulation 23.600, indicating to the Commission that additional consideration of the RER requirement is warranted.
Finally, the Commission also reminds SDs and FCMs that their RMPs may require periodic updates to reflect and keep pace with technological innovations that have developed or evolved since the Commission first promulgated the RMP Regulations. The Commission is seeking information regarding any risk areas that may exist in the RMP Regulations that the Commission should consider with respect to notable product or technological developments. Therefore, the Commission is issuing this Notice to seek industry and public comment on these aforementioned specific aspects of the existing RMP Regulations, as discussed further below.

Wut mean? (I think):

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was introduced to provide comprehensive regulation of the financial system. It required the creation of robust risk management systems by Swap Dealers (SDs) and Major Swap Participants (MSPs). In 2012, Regulation 23.600 was established, outlining the risk management program (RMP) requirements for these entities. After several insolvencies involving misuse of customer funds in 2011-2012, additional risk management rules were established in 2013 for Futures Commission Merchants (FCMs).
Despite these measures, there were ongoing queries from SDs about compliance, particularly regarding governance, suggesting further clarifications necessary. There were also significant variances observed in the risk exposure reports (RERs) of SDs and FCMs, which affected the ability of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to understand how risks were being monitored and managed.
There are also concerns that the current reporting schedule and lack of a specific format result in inconsistent reports with outdated information. Many SDs reported that these RERs were only created for compliance purposes, not for internal risk management, suggesting a review of this requirement is needed.
Lastly, there is recognition that risk management programs might need to be updated to reflect technological innovations. Therefore, the Commission is seeking industry and public comments on these issues related to the existing RMP regulations.

Periodic Risk Exposure Reporting by Swap Dealers and Futures Commission Merchants:

In accordance with Regulation 23.600(c)(2), an SD must provide to its senior management and governing body a quarterly RER containing specific information on the SD’s risk exposures and the current state of its RMP; the RER shall also be provided to the SD’s senior management and governing body immediately upon the detection of any material change in the risk exposure of the SD.48 SDs are required to furnish copies of all RERs to the Commission within five (5) business days of providing such RERs on a quarterly basis to their senior management.49 Likewise, Regulation 1.11(e)(2) has an identical RER requirement for FCMs.50 This Notice seeks comment generally on how the current RER regime for SDs and FCMs could be improved, as well as specific responses to the questions listed below:
  1. At what frequency should the Commission require SDs and FCMs to furnish copies of their RERs to the Commission?
  2. Should the Commission consider changing the RER filing requirements to require filing with the Commission by a certain day (e.g., a week, month, or other specific timeframe after the quarter-end), rather than tying the filing requirement to when the RER is furnished to senior management?
  3. Should the Commission consider harmonizing or aligning, in whole or in part, the RER content requirements in the RMP Regulations with those of the National Futures Association (NFA)’s SD monthly risk data filings?
    1. If so, should the Commission consider any changes or additions to the data metrics currently collected by NFA as could be required in the RMP Regulations?
    2. For FCMs who are not currently required to file monthly risk data filings with NFA, were the Commission to adopt a monthly risk exposure reporting requirement, are there different risk data metrics for FCMs that it should consider including? If so, what are they?
  4. Are there additional SD or FCM-specific data metrics or risk management issues that the Commission should consider adding to the content requirements of the RER?
  5. Should the Commission consider prescribing the format of the RERs? For instance, should the Commission consider requiring the RER to be a template or form that SDs and FCMs fill out?
  6. In furtherance of the RER filing requirement, should the Commission consider allowing SDs and FCMs to furnish to the Commission the internal risk reporting they already create, maintain, and/or use for their risk management program?
    1. If so, how often should these reports be required to be filed with the Commission?
    2. If the Commission allowed an SD or FCM to provide the Commission with its own risk reporting, should the Commission prescribe certain minimum content and/or format requirements?
  7. Should the Commission consider prescribing the standard SDs and FCMs use when determining whether they have experienced a material change in risk exposure, pursuant to Regulations 23.600(c)(2)(i) and 1.11(e)(2)(i)? Alternatively, should the Commission continue to allow SDs and FCMs to use their own internally-developed standards for determining when such a material change in risk exposure has occurred?
  8. Should the Commission clarify the requirements in Regulations 23.600(c)(2)(i) and 1.11(e)(2)(i) that RERs “shall be provided to the senior management and the governing body immediately upon detection of any material change in the risk exposure” of the SD or FCM?
  9. Should the Commission consider setting a deadline for when an SD or FCM must notify the Commission of any material changes in risk exposure? If so, what should be the deadline?
  10. Should the Commission consider additional governance requirements in connection with the provision of the quarterly RER to the senior management and the governing body of a SD, or of an FCM, respectively?
  11. Should the Commission require the RERs to report on risk at the registrant level, the enterprise level (in cases where the registrant is a subsidiary of, affiliated with, or guaranteed by a corporate family), or both? What data metrics are relevant for each level?
  12. Should the Commission require that RERs contain information related to any breach of risk tolerance limits described in Regulations 23.600(c)(1)(i) and 1.11(e)(1)(i)? Alternatively, should the Commission require prompt notice, outside of the RER requirement, of any breaches of the risk tolerance limits that were approved by an SD’s or FCM’s senior management and governing body? Should there be a materiality standard for inclusion of breaches in RERs or requiring notice to the Commission?
  13. Should the Commission require that RERs contain information related to material violations of the RMP policies or procedures required in Regulations 23.600(b)(1) and 1.11(c)(1)?
  14. Should the Commission require that RERs additionally discuss any known issues, defects, or gaps in the risk management controls that SDs and FCMs employ to monitor and manage the specific risk considerations under Regulations 23.600(c)(4) and 1.11(e)(3), as well as including a discussion of their progress toward mitigation and remediation?

Potential Risks Related to the Segregation of Customer Funds and Safeguarding Counterparty Collateral:

The segregation of customer funds and safeguarding of counterparty collateral are cornerstones of the Commission’s FCM and SD regulatory regimes, respectively. Currently, the existing RMP Regulations address the management of segregation risk and the safeguarding of counterparty collateral in different ways, given the differing business models between FCMs and SDs. Regulation 1.11(e)(3)(i) requires an FCM’s RMP to include written policies and procedures “reasonably designed to ensure segregated funds are separately accounted for and segregated or secured as belonging to customers. This requirement further lists several subjects that must, “at a minimum,” be addressed by an FCM’s RMP policies and procedures, including the evaluation and monitoring process for approved depositories, the treatment of related residual interest, transfers, and withdrawals, and permissible investments.
Although Regulation 23.600(c)(6) of the SD RMP Regulations requires compliance with all capital and margin requirements, Regulation 23.600 does not explicitly require an SD’s RMP to include written policies and procedures to safeguard counterparty collateral. Rather, the Commission chose to adopt Regulations 23.701 through 23.703 for the purpose of establishing a separate framework for the elected segregation of assets held as collateral in uncleared swap transactions. 53 Additionally, the Commission requires certain initial margin to be held through custodial arrangements in accordance with Regulation 23.157.
The Commission seeks comment generally on the risks attendant to the segregation of customer funds and the safeguarding of counterparty collateral. In addition, commenters should seek to address the following questions:
  1. Do the current RMP Regulations for FCMs adequately and comprehensively require them to identify, monitor, and manage the risks associated with the segregation of customer funds and the protection of customer property? Are there other Commission regulations that address these risks for FCMs?
  2. Currently, the Commission understands that no FCM holds customer property in the form of virtual currencies or other digital assets such as stablecoins. To the extent that FCMs may consider engaging in this activity in the future, would the current RMP Regulations for FCMs adequately and comprehensively require them to identify, monitor, and manage the risks associated with that activity, including custody with a third-party entity?
  3. Do the current RMP Regulations for SDs adequately and comprehensively require them to identify, monitor, and manage all of the risks associated with the collection, posting, and custody of counterparty collateral and the protection of such assets? Are there any other risks that should be addressed by the RMP Regulations for SDs related to the collection, posting, and custody of counterparty collateral?
  4. Do the Commission’s RMP Regulations adequately address risks to customer funds or counterparty collateral that may be associated with SDs and FCMs that have multiple business lines and registrations? Although the Commission understands that SDs and FCMs currently engage in limited activities with respect to digital assets, should the Commission consider additional RMP requirements applicable to SDs and FCMs that are or may become involved in, or affiliated with, the provision of digital asset financial services or products (e.g., digital asset lending arrangements or derivatives)?

Potential Risks Posed by Affiliates, Lines of Business, and All Other Trading Activity:

In light of increasing market volatility and recent market disruptions, as well as the growth of digital asset markets, the Commission generally seeks comment on the risks posed by SDs’ and FCMs’ affiliates and related trading activity. Generally, the RMP Regulations require SD and FCM RMPs to take into account risks posed by affiliates and related trading activity. Specifically, Regulation 23.600(c)(1)(ii) requires an SD’s RMP to take into account “risks posed by affiliates” with the RMP integrated into risk management functions at the “consolidated entity level.” Similarly, Regulation 1.11(e)(1)(ii) requires an FCM’s RMP to take into account risks “posed by affiliates, all lines of business of the [FCM], and all other trading activity engaged in by the [FCM].”
Some SDs and FCMs are subject to regulatory requirements designed to mitigate certain risks arising from certain affiliate activities. For example, SDs and FCMs that are affiliates or subsidiaries of a banking entity may have to comply with certain restrictions and requirements on inter-affiliate activities. Further, those SDs and FCMs that are subject to the Volcker Rule, codified and implemented in part 75 of the Commission’s regulations, and incorporated into other requirements, such as Regulation 3.3, are subject to the Volcker Rule’s risk management program and compliance program requirements.
The Commission seeks comment generally on the requirements related to risks posed by affiliates and related trading activity found within the RMP Regulations for SDs and FCMs, including non-bank affiliated SDs or non-bank affiliated FCMs. In addition, commenters should seek to address the following questions:
  1. What risks do affiliates (including, but not limited to, parents and subsidiaries) pose to SDs and FCMs? Are there risks posed by an affiliate trading in physical commodity markets, trading in digital asset markets, or relying on affiliated parties to meet regulatory requirements or obligations? Are there contagion risks posed by the credit exposures of affiliates? Are there risks posed by other lines of business of an SD, or of an FCM, respectively, that are not adequately or comprehensively addressed by the Commission’s regulations, including, as applicable, the Volcker Rule regulations found in 17 CFR part 75?
  2. Do the current RMP Regulations adequately and comprehensively address the risks associated with the activities of affiliates (whether such affiliates are unregulated, less regulated, or subject to alternative regulatory regimes), or of other lines of business, of an SD or of an FCM, respectively, that could affect SD or FCM operations? Alternatively, to what extent are the risks posed by affiliates discussed in this section adequately addressed through other regulatory requirements (for example, the Volcker Rule or other prudential regulations, or applicable non-U.S. laws, regulations, or standards)?
  3. Should the Commission further expand on how SD and FCM RMPs should address risks posed by affiliates in the RMP Regulations, including any specific risks? Should the Commission consider enumerating any specific risks posed by affiliates or related trading activities within the RMP Regulations, either as a separate enumerated risk, or as a subset of an existing enumerated area of risk (e.g., operational risk, credit risk, etc.)?

How to comment:

You may submit comments, identified by RIN 3038-AE59, by any of the following methods:
  • CFTC Comments Portal: https://comments.cftc.gov. Select the “Submit Comments” link for this rulemaking and follow the instructions on the Public Comment Form.
  • Mail: Send to Christopher Kirkpatrick, Secretary of the Commission, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Three Lafayette Centre, 1155 21st Street NW, Washington, DC 20581.
  • You should submit only information that you wish to make available publicly

TLDRS:

  • Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) seeks public comment on the Risk Management Program Requirements for Swap Dealers and Futures Commission Merchants.
  • Regulation 23.600 does not explicitly require an SD’s RMP to include written policies and procedures to safeguard counterparty collateral.
https://preview.redd.it/rhphnxsxzl3b1.png?width=610&format=png&auto=webp&s=317a210a9a81e63b159017d6a1482379a0840bec
submitted by Dismal-Jellyfish to Superstonk [link] [comments]

2023.06.02 15:31 itsdirector The New Species 41

Previous First
Wiki ​ ​
Chapter 41
Subject: Ship-Head Uleena
Species: Urakari
Description: Reptilian humanoid, no tail. 5'3" (1.6 m) avg height. 135 lbs (61 kg) avg weight. 105 year life expectancy.
Ship: RSV Lowelana {Fights with Honor}
Location: Sol
​
"It's been more than three hours, ship-head. When can we stand down?" asked Kriin.
"We'll be able to stand down when they tell us to stand down, sister," replied Kraan in my stead.
Kriin made a face and hissed softly at him. This playful exchange did a lot to ease the tension that had settled over the bridge as time had dragged on. It even got a smile out of Liwna.
It was still unnerving to be on standby so long after the battle had ended, though. I'd asked for an explanation but received no response, which indicated something was happening or had happened. The OU had consistently increased their numbers with each wave, so I desperately hoped it wasn't going to be another attack. Maybe we'd received orders from the Republic to go home. One could dream.
A soft bing from my terminal nearly made me jump. All heads turned to me as I opened the message, desperate to know if we were in the clear. I nibbled my tongue as I softly pressed the notification to open the message.
--
Ship-Head Uleena
RSV Lowelana and her crew are to stand down but remain in a state of readiness. You are summoned to meet with Admiral Heckett and myself. A guide will meet you in the bay.
Fleet Leader Onaya
--
I looked around at the faces of my bridge crew. They were all hoping I would be giving the order to stand down, to tell them we were in the clear. The anticipation was brutal, and I found myself considering a little prank. If I were to simply say that the message was nothing, the looks of disappointment would be pretty great. Although, the fleet leader wouldn't appreciate waiting...
"Stand down, but stay ready," I said and then sighed audibly, "I'm off to meet with command."
"You have my sympathies, sir," Liwna said.
"I'm sure it won't be that bad, ship-head. Maybe they want to give you a medal," Kraan said cheerily.
"Don't get your hopes up, sir. We didn't really do anything medal-worthy. But maybe we'll get to see one of the planets we've been protecting," Kriin said excitedly.
"That's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is 'one of the planets we put at risk'," Kraan replied with air quotes.
"That's rich, coming from the cloaca that put the planets at risk in the first place!"
"Hey! I was following procedure! Why don't you..."
"That's enough," I interrupted, trying to keep a straight face. "I'll go find out what they want. You just stay ready for our next move."
I stood and left as the two siblings began whispering insults at each other. As I exited the ship, I wondered how long I'd have to wait for the guide. To my surprise, the guide was actually waiting for me. A seven foot tall human wearing olive drab armor and carrying a rifle that was the size of my leg. That's a bad sign.
"Ship-head Uleena. This way please," the marine gestured.
"Of course," I said as I began to follow.
We walked past a crew of gont engineers and one of them waved at me. I waved back. Must be Plinas, but it's hard to tell them apart at a distance. We continued into a corridor and I began to have questions. I worked up my nerve to ask the giant death machine that was guiding me to my destination.
"So, why isn't Tim guiding me this time?" I finally asked.
"I don't know, sir," he replied.
"Do you know Corporal Simmons and Lance Corporal Johnson?"
"I know a few Corporals named Simmons and a few lances named Johnson, sir."
"They're the ones who were assigned to our rescue detail."
"Oh. Then they're probably part of a ship crew. Or maybe MARSOC," he said. "So I probably don't know them."
"What's MARSOC?"
"Marine Special Operations Command. It's special forces. They get assigned to whatever needs a specially trained marine, and usually whatever's closest to wherever they happen to be."
"So they probably wouldn't still be on the Thanatos, then?"
"Sir, I'm not qualified to even begin to wager a guess," the marine said with a chuckle. "There's plenty of MARSOC marines aboard, but I'm not one of 'em. Just a home-grown, corn-fed grunt, at your service."
"Corn?" I asked. "What's corn?"
"Huh?" He stopped to look at me. "Oh, right. It's a type of vegetable that's kinda sweet. Small yellow kernels that grow on a cob are the edible part, but some people use the leaves to store their food for some added flavor."
"I see... So you eat a lot of corn?"
"Yes, sir. It's good for muscles if you have it with meat," he said as he began to guide me again. "The phrase corn-fed refers to someone who's normal, though. Like, there's nothing special about them."
"But aren't you one of those... um..." I said as I struggled to remember the term.
"A gen-alt? Nope," the marine replied with laugh. "Believe it or not, some of us humans naturally get this big."
"Really?" I asked, my eyes widening in shock.
"Oh yeah. The genetic augmentation just swaps around certain genomes that we all already have, or something like that," the marine said. "Technically, every human has a chance to be born with all the benefits of being a gen-alt. It's a pretty low chance though."
It was with this shocking information that we boarded a bus. The ride was spent in silence as I digested what I had just learned. Humans were odd, to be sure. Despite their soft skin and disarming features (which I'm pretty sure has a lot to do with how much of their face actually moves), they were a warrior race.
I remembered how nervous I had been to meet my first Isolan. Now THEY look the part of a warrior race. Muscles that ripple and bulge with every movement, a natural scowl, and elongated canines that can definitely tear into most throats with little to no effort. Their military was very disciplined as well, to the point that horror stories about disciplinary action have spread throughout the fleet. Still, the Republic would have been able to handle the Isolan without much problem if they went rogue.
I can't say the same about humanity, though. Maybe if the Republic had found them early on in their development, we could have taken them. On the other hand, I get the dreadful feeling that we would have lost a lot of people in the attempt. I couldn't help but imagine what life would have been like if humanity had joined the Republic without a fight, though. We'd have a lot more in the way of technology, that's for sure.
They like to give a lot of credit to the knuknu and the gont for their current level of tech, but it's obvious that the majority of it comes from humans. The other species likely sped things along, but humanity would have gotten to the point they are now on their own eventually, and still much faster than us. Although I wonder how much of that is due to their bloody history, and how that history would have changed as part of the Republic.
"We've arrived, sir. Just inside those doors is where the debrief is," the marine gestured.
"Understood, thanks," I replied.
I stepped towards the doors and they opened with a slight hiss. Inside the room was a table with plenty of chairs and several US and Republic officers. I immediately recognized Reynolds and Wong, as well as fleet-leader Onaya. I snapped to attention.
"Ship-head Uleena reporting as ordered, sirs!"
"Sit down, Uleena," Onaya said with smiling eyes.
I took my seat as introductions went around the table. Most of the people here were higher officers of the fleets protecting Sol, but there were also a couple of diplomats from both sides. Not my sister, though. Thank the sun. I'm sure she tried to be here, but I'm willing to bet that our father blocked her attempts. Far too dangerous.
"There's one more that we need to introduce, but he's been delayed somewhat," Admiral Heckett said as the doors hissed.
I turned to look and saw a short human in the black directorate armor with two marines flanking it. It took me a second to realize that the human looked short because the marines were so damned tall. I'll never get used to that.
"What impeccable timing," Heckett said with a grin. "Everyone, meet Director 3. I'm sure he already knows who you are."
"Correct," Director 3 said as he took a seat. "Ship-head Uleena, pleasure to see you again."
"Likewise," I replied.
"Oh, hey Uleena!" one of the marines said with a familiar voice. "Good to see you again."
"Simmons, we're on duty. We can say hi later," the other marine said.
I smiled and replied, "Hi Corporal Simmons and Lance Corporal Johnson. Good to see you too."
I was glad to see the two of them alive and well. So glad that I almost didn't notice the rest of the Republic officers giving me a sideways glance. As I deflated slightly under their gaze, I noticed that the human officers were doing the same to the two marines. I guess we're more alike than I thought.
"Okay. Well, with all of the pleasantries out of the way, I'm going to turn things over to Director 3," Admiral Heckett said.
"Thank you, Admiral," Director 3 said with a nod before turning to look at the Republic side of the table. "The invasion of the Omni-Union stronghold was a success."
Clapping and some light cheering erupted from both sides of the table, but Director 3 quickly held up a hand to quiet things down.
"That's the only good news, I'm afraid. What I am about to tell you has already been relayed to the Republic's senior leadership, and they will be communicating with you in regards to whether they consider the information classified or not. Until they do so, I recommend treating it as classified," he said.
After a round of nods, he continued, "First, some of you may already know this, but we have a superweapon called the USSS Nidhogg. It's a dreadnought class ship that has the capacity to destroy a solar system by causing a star to go supernova."
"What?" one of our officers asked in shock. Several senior officer's eyes immediately darted towards the offending individual, who quickly quieted down.
"Your shock is understandable. To clarify, the Nidhogg was built in response to our conflict with the Daluran, as a deterrence to any further xenocidal action taken against the United Systems and its member species. Frankly, many of us hoped to never use it. But we were forced to use it against the Omni-Union during the invasion."
I couldn't believe what I was hearing. It was like the room got smaller somehow. A superweapon that can destroy an entire solar system, something the likes of which the Republic would likely never get close to. And they USED it. Wait hold on, did he say...
"Apologies, Director, but what do you mean you were forced to use it?" Fleet-Leader Onaya asked.
"Exactly that. One of our AI infiltrated their planetary systems, as planned, and retrieved mission critical intelligence. The next step of the plan would have been to cripple the OU's planetary activities by any means possible and move on to the next planet," Director 3 said. "However, it turned out that the planet wasn't actually a planet at all. It was a massive machine containing an Artificial Intelligence of unknown origin. And it was heavily armed."
Silence filled the room as images taken from US ships began to display. A planet filled our view. It looked like any other planet, but something was off about it. The images scrolled until they reached a short video of the planet firing, and two US ships exploding. My blood ran cold. Two US ships, ships with the most advanced shielding and hulls that I've ever seen, with one shot.
As much as I hated to admit it, I was grateful that they had that superweapon. The Republic was pursuing an offensive war against the Omni-Union even now, and if we would have run into this thing... Sun preserve us.
"This AI was called Prime 29 and the machine itself is a Mobile Prime Platform. During the confrontation with our AI, Prime two-niner was able to extract actionable intelligence from the AI. Thankfully, prior to this confrontation our AI managed to disable their communications which prevented Prime two-niner from being able to communicate said information with the Omni-Union. We were able to keep it trapped in the system using our own warp-jamming technology," Director 3 said. "The reason that we used the Nidhogg was to make certain that it didn't have enough time to eliminate the warp-jammers or escape their range."
"If we had tried to eliminate that thing with standard tactics, our casualties would have been in the tens of thousands," Admiral Heckett said. "As it stands, we lost 2,316 ships and more than one million marines."
"The Republic's casualties would have easily exceeded one hundred thousand ships. If we were even able to take it out at all," Fleet-Leader Onaya said, looking somewhat deflated.
"Was this the only Mobile Prime Platform, sir?" I asked, knowing damned well what the answer would be.
"No," Omega said, his avatar appearing where the images were previously. "We found intelligence in the form of a list that shows a total of 114 Mobile Prime Platforms. The intel indicated that at least one was damaged beyond repair prior to Prime 29's destruction, and that one is currently being built. Since we couldn't confirm if the other four planets in the stronghold system were MPPs or not, we will go on the assumption that there are now 111."
"Why don't we know if the other four planets are MPPs?" Onaya asked. "They didn't attack, so isn't it likely that they weren't?
"I suspect that the platforms require immense amounts of power, and so they stay in a sort of hibernation until something forces them out of it. Since the OU didn't awaken the MPP, it's reasonable to assume that they might not be able to. Prime 29 also had its communications cut, so it wouldn't have been able to wake them up, either," Omega said. "We had to go on the assumption that the other four planets were also MPPs, which is why we utilized the Nidhogg."
"So what's the plan to deal with them?" I asked.
"We're working on that," Director 3 interjected. "Obviously, we don't want to be running around causing supernovas everywhere."
"I guess it's time to come up with another 'bigger gun', eh?" Tim asked.
"Or a lot of little ones," John replied, appearing next to Omega.
A lot of our officers began to look nervous. Until very recently, AI was seen as the enemy and it's hard to kill old habits. They all looked to fleet leader Onaya to judge what their reactions should be. He didn't react, so they didn't either.
A bigger gun, or even a lot of little ones, would probably take quite a while to come up with. The US has amazing manufacturing procedures, but not nearly as many shipyards as the Republic. It was arguable whose engineers were better. The US had come up with some amazing things, but they had the benefit of necessity driving their creativity. Our engineers came up with what they created out of pure speculation. If the two worked together...
"Omega, if I may ask, how long would it take the US to create a new fleet?"
"One of ours or one of yours," the AI asked with a hint of smugness.
"One of yours," I replied.
"Factoring in material procurement, at least a year and a half. Assuming everyone working at capacity and nothing went wrong, which isn't a very realistic assumption," Omega said.
"What about us, fleet leader? How long to manufacture five million ships?" I asked.
"Or primary delay would be material procurement, but we managed to do eight million in seven months at the beginning of the OU war," Onaya replied.
All of the US officers eyebrows rose at this. I took a little pleasure at being able to surprise them, for once. Our manufacturing capability was borne from nearly every species already having at least one shipyard prior to joining the Republic, and maintaining those shipyards even now. If we were able to apply US manufacturing standards to those shipyards, the OU wouldn't stand a chance.
"We have a lot more shipyards than the US does," I began. "If the US were to make use of those shipyards, both sides would benefit massively."
"While that may be true, there's always the risk of us turning on each other after the OU is dealt with," Omega said.
"That's a bit pessimistic," John said.
"But historically accurate!" Tim cheerily exclaimed.
"That may be the case, but there are ways to prevent that. Bolstering the US fleet and shipyards to meet the same size as the Republic's, for instance. It would take quite a while for the US to catch up to the Republic's ship count on its own, and we've got barely any chance of catching up to your tech on our own," I said, holding my hands up to quiet the AI.
"This is true," Onaya began, "and your corporations would even fall in line. Greed is their primary motivator, and this deal would require a lot of trade and chance for profits."
Director 3 looked deep in thought before he finally spoke up, "Is this something that the Republic would agree to?"
"Probably," I said. "I'm not an official diplomat so I can't say with 100% certainty, but the US is more likely to say no than we are."
"I'll bring it to the Directorate, and we'll convince the senate of the necessity," Director 3 said with a nod.
"And I'll get have the diplomatic corps draw up an official agreement, and I'll push the proper buttons to get the votes on our end," Onaya said with smiling eyes. "Also, Uleena, you actually are an official diplomat now. The RSV Lowelana is our first armed diplomatic vessel. The decision came down yesterday."
"What?" I asked in shock.
"Your temporary post as liaison has become a permanent one. You'll be starting your training as soon as we can spare you. Same with your crew," Onaya said, the smiling eyes turning ever so slightly malicious.
Ah, I see. The Sun has forsaken me for some grave, unknown sin. Woe be unto me.
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2023.06.02 15:30 PerformanceKey5637 INSTANT 10K ALL NAVYS AND CREDIT UNIONS TAP IN NO MONEY UPFRONT TELEGRAM @BREADWINNER2000

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2023.06.02 15:26 GoStockGo Predictmedix Inc. (CSE: PMED, OTCQB: PMEDF) Special Report

Predictmedix Inc. (CSE: PMED, OTCQB: PMEDF) Special Report
Predictmedix – a great way to surf the Artificial Intelligence wave.
https://preview.redd.it/kg4bcsw4wl3b1.jpg?width=741&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=728d042d11fd1e03cff86a22052e7f72345dbb08
There is a saying attributed to Mark Twain that goes, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but if often rhymes.” This means circumstances might be different but similar events often recur. This is good because securities regulators demand that you make it clear that in the financial markets, “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.”
However, investment analysts continue to use rhymes and here’s one that could help you see sizeable investment returns from Predictmedix Inc. (CSE: PMED, OTCQB: PMEDF). This is how the rhyme comes together:
A. The 1990s technology boom: The parallel I see is between the current Artificial Intelligence cycle and the dot-com stock market cycle of ≈1990 to ≈ 2002. As background, the 1990s either developed or laid the groundwork for changes that completely transformed the world we live in. Out of that time came many new technologies and related developments and each was highly disruptive. Here is a very brief list of some of those developments:
(1) Nokia was the first mass-produced cellphone offered in 1992 with the ability to send and receive phone calls as well as store data (e.g. phone numbers).
(2) The World Wide Web, a.k.a. the Web browser was proposed in 1990 and debuted in 1991. This was the start of the Internet, Websites, e-mails and a massive amount of information that would become available to everyone.
(3) With the explosion of data available, finding it became a challenge. Mosaic started as the first search engine in 1993 followed by Yahoo in 1994 and Google in 1998. Today, Google has risen to the top and become synonymous with an Internet search. Google it.
(4) Other important developments of that time included the growth in the capacity of microprocessors, Photoshop, texting, rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, realistic videogames for a more adult market, collecting and using DNA, the start of e-tailing and more.
(5) Finally, we have the stock market. Cisco, Dell, Intel and Microsoft are sometimes referred to as the four horsemen of the 1990s tech boom. But we can’t ignore Apple and Google and there were many more that benefited. The smaller, new, Initial Public Offering companies came to the fore with incredibly high returns in the second half of the 1990s.
The chart to the right shows how stock markets performed during the 1990’s high-tech boom. A few things are worth noting:
(1) The Dot.Com stock market cycle lasted a long t time. Essentially, more than the decade of the 1990s. It’s length reflected the importance of the fundamental changes taking place.
(2) There was an important development regarding the stock market that has become part of the stock market legend. On December 5, 1996, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan in a televised speech used the term “irrational exuberance” to describe a stock market that he thought was highly speculative and overvalued. His comment was intended as a warning from the Fed that the stock market, driven by the high-tech developments described above, was overvalued. His timing was five years early which is a lifetime in the stock market.
(3) The five years after Greenspan’s “irrational exuberance” statement was the most profitable for investors of the entire ten years plus of the stock market cycle.
As you sit reading this brief, imagine your life without a cell phone, the Internet, e-mail and text messages. How different would your life be without just these four products that emerged from the 1990s. A more relevant question might be how different would your life be if you had purchased shares in Apple or Cisco or Dell or Google or Microsoft back then?
B. The Artificial Intelligence Boom (AI): The term Artificial Intelligence was created in 1955. The idea was to have a machine that could take data, and find patterns that would enable it to make predictions and reach conclusions (make decisions). The Oxford Dictionary defines AI as “The theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.”
It was Moore’s Law in 1975 that stated the capacity of semiconductors would continue to double every two years which enabled computers to be able to put into practice the AI Boom that is taking place today. Current forecasts say the AI industry will grow to $900 billion by 2026 and $15.7 trillion by 2030. AI growth in the 1920s could dwarf anything high-tech was able to accomplish in the 1990s.
(1) There is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) boom going on and many people don’t yet realize it is even happening. AI is used in:
i. Self-driving and parking cars. AI is used by Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla, Toyota and Volvo.
ii. Maps and navigation. Enter where you are and where you want to go by car and Google Maps, for example, will give you a choice of routes, the time optimal route taking into account construction and traffic.
iii. Facial detection or recognition. Facial detection identifies a human face or facial recognition that identifies a specific face that can be used for surveillance and security.
iv. Digital assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google’s Now and Microsoft’s Cortana. When combined with search and recommendation AI, Alexa or Siri is able to learn your preferences and recommend things you are interested in.
v. Customer service chatbots that answer frequently asked questions, track orders or direct calls. Often people will be unaware they are dealing with a machine.
vi. Vehicle recognition use computer vision and deep learning to find a specific car on a surveillance video.
vii. Robot vacuums can scan a living area, look for and remember objects in the way, remember the best route for cleaning the area and decide how many times it should repeat cleaning a specific area.
It is estimated that by 2030, between 400 and 800 million jobs will be displaced by Artificial Intelligence and 375 million people will have to change to a totally different type of work. It is also forecast that it is not just lower-paying, blue-collar jobs that will be replaced by AI. Jobs such as accountants, lawyers, doctors, investment advisors and portfolio managers might all be substantially eliminated. AI will impact all industries and the rate of change will be exponential, that is, the rate of change will accelerate.
For example, what does a doctor do? In general, a doctor gathers new information, refers to a patient’s medical history, refers to a medical book or today’s Internet, makes a diagnosis and provides s treatment. This is also what a lawyer does. AI might reach the point where it can do it faster and better than a human..
AI does present threats to human existence. As AI is changing exponentially, it will happen faster than the technology boom of the 1990s. It took technology 20 years to produce the changes we discussed above. AI could produce equivalent changes in 10 or 15 years. For example, ChatGPT, an AI product went from zero to 100 million users within months making it the fastest-growing consumer software product in history. There will be others.
(2) The AI shift could drive economic change and a stock market cycle at least as significant as the last “dot.com” cycle. The “go-to” companies today for participation in AI are the likes of Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL), Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), Meta (NASDAQ: META), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) and Oracle (NYSE: ORCL). These are very large companies. GOOGL has a market cap of $1.6 trillion, AMZN has a market cap of $1.2 trillion, META has a market cap of $$648 billion, MSFT has a market cap of $2.4 trillion, NCDA has a market cap of $963 billion and ORCL has a market cap of $282 billion.
(3) While these are excellent businesses, they are also amongst the world’s largest companies. In 2022, GOOGL, META and MSFT purchased 2 out of every 3 AI chips. In my opinion, it is almost unthinkable that GOOGL can be a ten-bagger from a base market cap of $1.6 trillion or AMZN from $1.2 trillion. But it is clear these stocks now have a major component of their value derived from involvement in Artificial Intelligence and it is not surprising that early adopters would choose a lower risk/lower return approach to gain exposure to an emerging Artificial Intelligence industry.
(4) The changes created by AI also carry some risks. The speed of change will be challenging to human beings. There are forecasts that say one in four workers globally will see their jobs disappear and one in eight workers will have to be retrained in a totally unrelated field. During the industrial revolution and the tech boom, there was always the promise of more and better jobs. With AI we may have reached the point where machines actually do replace workers.
(5) Cathie Wood is a well-known and widely followed money manager with a reputation for expertise in the Artificial Intelligence sector. Wood manages a range of portfolios including the ARK Innovation Exchange Traded Fund (ARKK) and since its founding in 2014, Bloomberg estimates NDVA has contributed 13% of the fund’s 112% total return only behind Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, Invitae Corp and Tesla. That is all positive but Wood sold the ARKK holding in NVDA in January 2023 just before it rallied strongly adding some $560 billion to its market cap with $200 billion coming on one day after reporting earnings. Wood’s investors have basically missed the huge rally in the stock and the sector in 2023.
(6) But there is another phase I would look for and that is the participation of smaller, retail investors. Whether it was in the tech cycle I discussed above, the “meme” stocks or commodity exploration and development cycles in the past, the retail investor buys in before the bull market ends. Market pundits such as Citi global asset allocation and Vanda Research make the same observation: where is the retail investor?
We know the institutional investors have been getting in. So far in 2023 according to Bloomberg, the top 4% of stocks in the S&P 500 have contributed 94% of the index return and 8 of the top 20 include Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet Class A, NVIDIA, Alphabet Class C, Tesla and Meta. In other words, the top 2% of the stocks in the S&P 500 contributed 94% of the return. Through mid-May, if the AI stocks are omitted, the S&P Index would be down -1.4% instead of up +8.3%. All of these stocks are AI leaders and each of them is an institutional stock. Yet, I believe the retail investor will come into the market and when they do, it is stocks like PMED for which they have always had an appetite.
C. I think investors will get more bang for their buck by investing in a small company like Predictmedix Inc. (CSE: PMED, OTCQB: PMEDF) with a total commitment to AI. From a base market cap of $16.6 million and, as I have pointed out in recent reports, many different business verticals to get them higher, I see PMED as a unique opportunity for aggressive growth investors. It is hard to imagine any decade having more of an impact on the ensuring socio-economic decades than the 1990s. Imagine your activities today without your cellphone, Internet, email and texting.
I expect the cycle driven by AI to be a long one, similar to the dot-com cycle that lasted longer than the decade of the 1990s. To the right is a chart published by Luke Lango’s Hypergrowth Investing. It shows the stock market in the 1990s and overlays current results. The parallels Lango sees include:
• Federal Reserve’s tight money policy slowed economic growth in 1990 as it is doing currently.
• In 1990, the markets were down around 20% and in 2022 stocks dropped around 25%.
• In late 1990, the Fed started reducing interest rates and the markets rebounded.
• In late 2022, the Fed has turned less hawkish and into 2023 has slowed the pace of interest rate increases. The markets have been recovering.
• In the early 1990’s, the dot-com stock market rally began and the market would advance generally higher for the rest of the decade and into the new millennium.
• Today, it is Artificial Intelligence that is pushing stocks higher and given my expectations for AI, it could stock prices higher until at least 2030.
Conclusion: I believe Predictmedix Inc. (CSE: PMED, OTCQB: PMEDF) is exceptionally well positioned to participate in the upcoming boom in Artificial Intelligence. There are many different ways to describe market cycles that evolve around such drivers. Here is mine:
  1. Accumulation: the earliest buyers tend to be larger institutions that gain the information necessary to be early adopter. I have given several statistics to show this has been happening.
  2. Retail Participation/Speculation: as the story gains acceptance, less experienced investors enter the market and prices begin to rise more quickly. After two to three years of combined buying by large and small investors, it is possible to identify speculative activities such as very rapid increases in a stock price or underwritings of companies based on questionable valuations. This is the next phase I see ahead for the current AI cycle.
  3. Distribution/Sale: At some point, toward the end of the Retail Participation/Speculation phase, some investors will begin to sell. It is popular to believe that institutional investors or “smart money” sell at this stage. During the many years, I have spent in the investment business, this is not true. Institutions can hold on to their AI stocks for far too long and end up seeing their portfolios incinerated. This is still many years away. The challenge today with a stock like PMED is not getting out; it is getting in.
  4. Bear Market: eventually there will be a broad sell-off of AI stocks. Some institutions will sell without regard for their impact on the market. Margin buyers will get margin calls and may be forced to sell again without regard to price. At this time, over half of the AI companies trading at that time will simply disappear. Some will be successful but remain smaller. Some will merge with another AI company. Some will be acquired. Very few will survive and become leaders in the industries. They will become the Alphabets, Amazons, Metas, Microsofts, Nvidias, and Oracles of the 2040s and 2050s.
I started out with the quote “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” So I don’t think the AI cycle of the 2020s will be the same as the high-tech cycle of the 1990s but I think it will be similar. If you agree, Predictmedix Inc. (CSE: PMED, OTCQB: PMEDF) is a stock to buy for your portfolio.
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2023.06.02 15:25 GoStockGo Predictmedix Inc. (CSE: PMED, OTCQB: PMEDF) Special Report

Predictmedix Inc. (CSE: PMED, OTCQB: PMEDF) Special Report
Predictmedix – a great way to surf the Artificial Intelligence wave.
https://preview.redd.it/32yljrc6wl3b1.jpg?width=741&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=af6eca4f1a380c15e08b20f6e4603b4836535991
There is a saying attributed to Mark Twain that goes, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but if often rhymes.” This means circumstances might be different but similar events often recur. This is good because securities regulators demand that you make it clear that in the financial markets, “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.”
However, investment analysts continue to use rhymes and here’s one that could help you see sizeable investment returns from Predictmedix Inc. (CSE: PMED, OTCQB: PMEDF). This is how the rhyme comes together:
A. The 1990s technology boom: The parallel I see is between the current Artificial Intelligence cycle and the dot-com stock market cycle of ≈1990 to ≈ 2002. As background, the 1990s either developed or laid the groundwork for changes that completely transformed the world we live in. Out of that time came many new technologies and related developments and each was highly disruptive. Here is a very brief list of some of those developments:
(1) Nokia was the first mass-produced cellphone offered in 1992 with the ability to send and receive phone calls as well as store data (e.g. phone numbers).
(2) The World Wide Web, a.k.a. the Web browser was proposed in 1990 and debuted in 1991. This was the start of the Internet, Websites, e-mails and a massive amount of information that would become available to everyone.
(3) With the explosion of data available, finding it became a challenge. Mosaic started as the first search engine in 1993 followed by Yahoo in 1994 and Google in 1998. Today, Google has risen to the top and become synonymous with an Internet search. Google it.
(4) Other important developments of that time included the growth in the capacity of microprocessors, Photoshop, texting, rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, realistic videogames for a more adult market, collecting and using DNA, the start of e-tailing and more.
(5) Finally, we have the stock market. Cisco, Dell, Intel and Microsoft are sometimes referred to as the four horsemen of the 1990s tech boom. But we can’t ignore Apple and Google and there were many more that benefited. The smaller, new, Initial Public Offering companies came to the fore with incredibly high returns in the second half of the 1990s.
The chart to the right shows how stock markets performed during the 1990’s high-tech boom. A few things are worth noting:
(1) The Dot.Com stock market cycle lasted a long t time. Essentially, more than the decade of the 1990s. It’s length reflected the importance of the fundamental changes taking place.
(2) There was an important development regarding the stock market that has become part of the stock market legend. On December 5, 1996, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan in a televised speech used the term “irrational exuberance” to describe a stock market that he thought was highly speculative and overvalued. His comment was intended as a warning from the Fed that the stock market, driven by the high-tech developments described above, was overvalued. His timing was five years early which is a lifetime in the stock market.
(3) The five years after Greenspan’s “irrational exuberance” statement was the most profitable for investors of the entire ten years plus of the stock market cycle.
As you sit reading this brief, imagine your life without a cell phone, the Internet, e-mail and text messages. How different would your life be without just these four products that emerged from the 1990s. A more relevant question might be how different would your life be if you had purchased shares in Apple or Cisco or Dell or Google or Microsoft back then?
B. The Artificial Intelligence Boom (AI): The term Artificial Intelligence was created in 1955. The idea was to have a machine that could take data, and find patterns that would enable it to make predictions and reach conclusions (make decisions). The Oxford Dictionary defines AI as “The theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.”
It was Moore’s Law in 1975 that stated the capacity of semiconductors would continue to double every two years which enabled computers to be able to put into practice the AI Boom that is taking place today. Current forecasts say the AI industry will grow to $900 billion by 2026 and $15.7 trillion by 2030. AI growth in the 1920s could dwarf anything high-tech was able to accomplish in the 1990s.
(1) There is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) boom going on and many people don’t yet realize it is even happening. AI is used in:
i. Self-driving and parking cars. AI is used by Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla, Toyota and Volvo.
ii. Maps and navigation. Enter where you are and where you want to go by car and Google Maps, for example, will give you a choice of routes, the time optimal route taking into account construction and traffic.
iii. Facial detection or recognition. Facial detection identifies a human face or facial recognition that identifies a specific face that can be used for surveillance and security.
iv. Digital assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google’s Now and Microsoft’s Cortana. When combined with search and recommendation AI, Alexa or Siri is able to learn your preferences and recommend things you are interested in.
v. Customer service chatbots that answer frequently asked questions, track orders or direct calls. Often people will be unaware they are dealing with a machine.
vi. Vehicle recognition use computer vision and deep learning to find a specific car on a surveillance video.
vii. Robot vacuums can scan a living area, look for and remember objects in the way, remember the best route for cleaning the area and decide how many times it should repeat cleaning a specific area.
It is estimated that by 2030, between 400 and 800 million jobs will be displaced by Artificial Intelligence and 375 million people will have to change to a totally different type of work. It is also forecast that it is not just lower-paying, blue-collar jobs that will be replaced by AI. Jobs such as accountants, lawyers, doctors, investment advisors and portfolio managers might all be substantially eliminated. AI will impact all industries and the rate of change will be exponential, that is, the rate of change will accelerate.
For example, what does a doctor do? In general, a doctor gathers new information, refers to a patient’s medical history, refers to a medical book or today’s Internet, makes a diagnosis and provides s treatment. This is also what a lawyer does. AI might reach the point where it can do it faster and better than a human..
AI does present threats to human existence. As AI is changing exponentially, it will happen faster than the technology boom of the 1990s. It took technology 20 years to produce the changes we discussed above. AI could produce equivalent changes in 10 or 15 years. For example, ChatGPT, an AI product went from zero to 100 million users within months making it the fastest-growing consumer software product in history. There will be others.
(2) The AI shift could drive economic change and a stock market cycle at least as significant as the last “dot.com” cycle. The “go-to” companies today for participation in AI are the likes of Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL), Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), Meta (NASDAQ: META), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) and Oracle (NYSE: ORCL). These are very large companies. GOOGL has a market cap of $1.6 trillion, AMZN has a market cap of $1.2 trillion, META has a market cap of $$648 billion, MSFT has a market cap of $2.4 trillion, NCDA has a market cap of $963 billion and ORCL has a market cap of $282 billion.
(3) While these are excellent businesses, they are also amongst the world’s largest companies. In 2022, GOOGL, META and MSFT purchased 2 out of every 3 AI chips. In my opinion, it is almost unthinkable that GOOGL can be a ten-bagger from a base market cap of $1.6 trillion or AMZN from $1.2 trillion. But it is clear these stocks now have a major component of their value derived from involvement in Artificial Intelligence and it is not surprising that early adopters would choose a lower risk/lower return approach to gain exposure to an emerging Artificial Intelligence industry.
(4) The changes created by AI also carry some risks. The speed of change will be challenging to human beings. There are forecasts that say one in four workers globally will see their jobs disappear and one in eight workers will have to be retrained in a totally unrelated field. During the industrial revolution and the tech boom, there was always the promise of more and better jobs. With AI we may have reached the point where machines actually do replace workers.
(5) Cathie Wood is a well-known and widely followed money manager with a reputation for expertise in the Artificial Intelligence sector. Wood manages a range of portfolios including the ARK Innovation Exchange Traded Fund (ARKK) and since its founding in 2014, Bloomberg estimates NDVA has contributed 13% of the fund’s 112% total return only behind Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, Invitae Corp and Tesla. That is all positive but Wood sold the ARKK holding in NVDA in January 2023 just before it rallied strongly adding some $560 billion to its market cap with $200 billion coming on one day after reporting earnings. Wood’s investors have basically missed the huge rally in the stock and the sector in 2023.
(6) But there is another phase I would look for and that is the participation of smaller, retail investors. Whether it was in the tech cycle I discussed above, the “meme” stocks or commodity exploration and development cycles in the past, the retail investor buys in before the bull market ends. Market pundits such as Citi global asset allocation and Vanda Research make the same observation: where is the retail investor?
We know the institutional investors have been getting in. So far in 2023 according to Bloomberg, the top 4% of stocks in the S&P 500 have contributed 94% of the index return and 8 of the top 20 include Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet Class A, NVIDIA, Alphabet Class C, Tesla and Meta. In other words, the top 2% of the stocks in the S&P 500 contributed 94% of the return. Through mid-May, if the AI stocks are omitted, the S&P Index would be down -1.4% instead of up +8.3%. All of these stocks are AI leaders and each of them is an institutional stock. Yet, I believe the retail investor will come into the market and when they do, it is stocks like PMED for which they have always had an appetite.
C. I think investors will get more bang for their buck by investing in a small company like Predictmedix Inc. (CSE: PMED, OTCQB: PMEDF) with a total commitment to AI. From a base market cap of $16.6 million and, as I have pointed out in recent reports, many different business verticals to get them higher, I see PMED as a unique opportunity for aggressive growth investors. It is hard to imagine any decade having more of an impact on the ensuring socio-economic decades than the 1990s. Imagine your activities today without your cellphone, Internet, email and texting.
I expect the cycle driven by AI to be a long one, similar to the dot-com cycle that lasted longer than the decade of the 1990s. To the right is a chart published by Luke Lango’s Hypergrowth Investing. It shows the stock market in the 1990s and overlays current results. The parallels Lango sees include:
• Federal Reserve’s tight money policy slowed economic growth in 1990 as it is doing currently.
• In 1990, the markets were down around 20% and in 2022 stocks dropped around 25%.
• In late 1990, the Fed started reducing interest rates and the markets rebounded.
• In late 2022, the Fed has turned less hawkish and into 2023 has slowed the pace of interest rate increases. The markets have been recovering.
• In the early 1990’s, the dot-com stock market rally began and the market would advance generally higher for the rest of the decade and into the new millennium.
• Today, it is Artificial Intelligence that is pushing stocks higher and given my expectations for AI, it could stock prices higher until at least 2030.
Conclusion: I believe Predictmedix Inc. (CSE: PMED, OTCQB: PMEDF) is exceptionally well positioned to participate in the upcoming boom in Artificial Intelligence. There are many different ways to describe market cycles that evolve around such drivers. Here is mine:
  1. Accumulation: the earliest buyers tend to be larger institutions that gain the information necessary to be early adopter. I have given several statistics to show this has been happening.
  2. Retail Participation/Speculation: as the story gains acceptance, less experienced investors enter the market and prices begin to rise more quickly. After two to three years of combined buying by large and small investors, it is possible to identify speculative activities such as very rapid increases in a stock price or underwritings of companies based on questionable valuations. This is the next phase I see ahead for the current AI cycle.
  3. Distribution/Sale: At some point, toward the end of the Retail Participation/Speculation phase, some investors will begin to sell. It is popular to believe that institutional investors or “smart money” sell at this stage. During the many years, I have spent in the investment business, this is not true. Institutions can hold on to their AI stocks for far too long and end up seeing their portfolios incinerated. This is still many years away. The challenge today with a stock like PMED is not getting out; it is getting in.
  4. Bear Market: eventually there will be a broad sell-off of AI stocks. Some institutions will sell without regard for their impact on the market. Margin buyers will get margin calls and may be forced to sell again without regard to price. At this time, over half of the AI companies trading at that time will simply disappear. Some will be successful but remain smaller. Some will merge with another AI company. Some will be acquired. Very few will survive and become leaders in the industries. They will become the Alphabets, Amazons, Metas, Microsofts, Nvidias, and Oracles of the 2040s and 2050s.
I started out with the quote “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” So I don’t think the AI cycle of the 2020s will be the same as the high-tech cycle of the 1990s but I think it will be similar. If you agree, Predictmedix Inc. (CSE: PMED, OTCQB: PMEDF) is a stock to buy for your portfolio.
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2023.06.02 15:01 AutoModerator BEWARE! AVOID BEING SCAMMED!

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2023.06.02 14:54 Dismal-Jellyfish Do you have concerns about how Mortgage Originators and Secondary Market Issuers determine a mortgage's collateral value? How they can use automated valuation models (AVMs) to manipulate & overestimate property value, rife with conflict of interest opportunities creating securitization risk? COMMENT

Do you have concerns about how Mortgage Originators and Secondary Market Issuers determine a mortgage's collateral value? How they can use automated valuation models (AVMs) to manipulate & overestimate property value, rife with conflict of interest opportunities creating securitization risk? COMMENT
Six federal regulatory agencies request PUBLIC COMMENT on a proposed rule designed to ensure the credibility and integrity of models used in real estate valuations. In particular, the proposed rule would implement quality control standards for automated valuation models (AVMs)
https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/files/bcreg20230601a1.pdf
Under the proposed rule, the agencies would require institutions that engage in covered transactions to adopt policies, practices, procedures, and control systems to ensure that AVMs adhere to quality control standards designed to ensure the credibility and integrity of valuations. The proposed standards are designed to ensure a high level of confidence in the estimates produced by AVMs; help protect against the manipulation of data; seek to avoid conflicts of interest; require random sample testing and reviews; and promote compliance with applicable nondiscrimination laws.
AVMs are used as part of the real estate valuation process, driven in part by advances in database and modeling technology and the availability of larger property datasets. While advances in AVM technology and data availability have the potential to contribute to lower costs and reduce loan cycle times, it is important that institutions using AVMs take appropriate steps to ensure the credibility and integrity of their valuations. It is also important that the AVMs institutions use adhere to quality control standards designed to comply with applicable nondiscrimination laws.

The Proposed Rule

  • The agencies are inviting comment on a proposed rule to implement quality control standards for the use of AVMs that are covered by this proposal.
  • The agencies’ proposed rule would require that mortgage originators and secondary market issuers adopt policies, practices, procedures, and control systems to ensure that AVMs used in certain credit decisions or covered securitization determinations adhere to quality control standards designed to meet specific quality control factors.
  • The proposed rule would not set specific requirements for how institutions are to structure these policies, practices, procedures, and control systems. This approach would provide institutions the flexibility to set quality controls for AVMs as appropriate based on the size of the institution and the risk and complexity of transactions for which they will use AVMs covered by this proposed rule. As modeling technology continues to evolve, this flexible approach would allow institutions to refine their policies, practices, procedures, and control systems as appropriate.
  • The agencies’ existing guidance related to AVMs would remain applicable.
  • The quality control standards in section 1125 of title XI apply to AVMs “used by mortgage originators and secondary market issuers to determine the collateral worth of a mortgage secured by a consumer’s principal dwelling.”
  • The proposed rule would implement the statute by applying the quality control standards when an AVM is being used to make a determination of collateral value, as opposed to other uses such as monitoring value over time or validating an already completed valuation. Determinations of collateral value are generally made in connection with credit decisions or covered securitization determinations as defined in this proposed rulemaking, for example when determining a new value before originating a purchase-money mortgage or placing a loan in a securitization pool. Other uses of AVMs, such as for portfolio monitoring, do not involve making a determination of collateral value, and thus are not within the scope of the proposed rule.
  • The agencies are further proposing that the rule would not cover the use of AVMs in the development of an appraisal by a certified or licensed appraiser, nor in the review of the quality of already completed determinations of collateral value (completed determinations).
  • The proposed rule would cover the use of AVMs in preparing evaluations required for certain real estate transactions that are exempt from the appraisal requirements under the appraisal regulations issued by the OCC, Board, FDIC, and NCUA, such as transactions that have a value below the exemption thresholds in the appraisal regulations.
  • Section 1125(c)(1) provides that compliance with regulations issued under this subsection shall be enforced by, "with respect to a financial institution, or subsidiary owned and controlled by a financial institution and regulated by a Federal financial institution regulatory agency, the Federal financial institution regulatory agency that acts as the primary Federal supervisor of such financial institution or subsidiary.”
  • Section 1125(c)(1) applies to a subsidiary of a financial institution only if the subsidiary is (1) owned and controlled by a financial institution, and (2) regulated by a Federal financial institution regulatory agency. Section 1125(c)(2) provides that compliance with regulations issued under this subsection shall be enforced by, "with respect to other participants in the market for appraisals of 1-to-4 unit single family residential real estate, the Federal Trade Commission, the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, and a State attorney general.”
  • The proposed rule would define “covered securitization determination” to mean a determination regarding (1) whether to waive an appraisal requirement for a mortgage origination in connection with its potential sale or transfer to a secondary market issuer, or (2) structuring, preparing disclosures for, or marketing initial offerings of mortgage-backed securitizations. Monitoring collateral value in mortgage-backed securitizations after they have already been issued would not be covered securitization determinations.

Rules on AVMs used in connection with making credit decisions:

The proposed rule would apply to AVMs used in connection with making a credit decision. The proposed rule would define “credit decision,” in part, to include a decision regarding whether and under what terms to originate, modify, terminate, or make other changes to a mortgage. The scope provision of the proposed regulatory text would expressly exclude the use of AVMs in monitoring the quality or performance of mortgages or mortgage-backed securities. The use of AVMs solely to monitor a creditor’s mortgage portfolio would not be a credit decision under the proposed rule because the lending institution has already made the credit decision. The scope of the proposed rule would include, for example, decisions regarding originating a mortgage, modifying the terms of an existing loan, or renewing, increasing, or terminating a line of credit. The proposed rule uses the term “credit decision” to help clarify that the proposed rule would cover these various types of decisions. The proposal to limit the scope of the rule to credit decisions and covered securitization determinations reflects the statutory definition of AVM, which focuses on the use of an AVM “by mortgage originators and secondary market issuers to determine the collateral worth of a mortgage secured by a consumer’s principal dwelling.”23 The proposed rule would distinguish between using AVMs to determine the value of collateral securing a mortgage and using AVMs to monitor, verify, or validate a previous determination of value (e.g., the proposed rule would not cover a computerized tax assessment used to verify the valuation made during the origination process).24 The proposed rule focuses on those aspects of mortgage and securitization transactions where the value of collateral is typically determined. Loan modifications and other changes to existing loans. The proposed rule would cover the use of AVMs in deciding whether to change the terms of an existing mortgage even if the change does not result in a new mortgage origination, as long as a “mortgage originator” or “secondary market issuer,” or servicers that work on the originator’s or secondary market issuer’s behalf, uses the AVM to determine the value of a mortgage secured by a consumer’s principal dwelling. For example, the proposed rule would cover AVMs used in making decisions to deny a loan modification or to confirm collateral values, such as when there is a request to change or release collateral. In relevant part, section 1125 provides that an AVM is “any computerized model used by mortgage originators and secondary market issuers to determine the collateral worth of a mortgage . . . .”25 The agencies’ view is that the phrase “determine the collateral worth” broadly covers instances where mortgage originators and secondary market issuers use AVMs in connection with making credit decisions. Under the proposal, the agencies consider mortgage originators and secondary market issuers or servicers that work on their behalf to be using AVMs in connection with making a credit decision when they use AVMs to modify or to change the terms of existing loans.

How I understand it:

  • The rule would cover a range of decisions such as mortgage origination, modification, or termination, and uses "credit decision" as a blanket term to simplify this. Think of it as the umbrella under which all these different decisions take shelter.
  • The rule would differentiate between using AVMs for deciding the value of collateral securing a mortgage and using them to check, validate, or affirm a previous value determination. In short, it’s not about looking back and second-guessing, but rather about making fresh valuation decisions.
​

AVMs used by secondary market issuers:

The language of section 1125 includes not only mortgage originators, but also secondary market issuers. Given that the statute refers to secondary market issuers and the primary business of secondary market issuers is to securitize mortgage loans and to sell those mortgagebacked securities to investors, the proposed rule would cover AVMs used in securitization determinations. In addition, covering AVMs used in securitizations could potentially protect the safety and soundness of institutions and protect consumers and investors by reducing the risk that secondary market issuers will misvalue homes. For example, misvaluation by secondary market issuers could in turn incentivize mortgage originators to originate misvalued loans when making lending decisions Such misvaluations could pose a risk of insufficient collateral for financial institutions and secondary market participants and could limit consumers’ refinancing and selling opportunities.

How I understand it:

  • The proposed rule would also apply to AVMs used in securitization decisions, because secondary market issuers are typically busy bundling up these mortgages for selling to investors.
  • By extending to securitizations, the rule could help protect the safety of institutions, consumers, and investors by reducing the risk of misvaluing homes. So, it's like a security guard keeping watch over the valuation process.
    • Misvaluation by secondary market issuers could encourage mortgage originators to originate misvalued loans, a domino effect we don't want to see in the lending decisions....
      • Such misvaluations could pose a risk of insufficient collateral for financial institutions and secondary market participants and could limit consumers’ refinancing and selling opportunities.
​

Appraisal waivers:

The proposed rule would define “covered securitization determination” to include determinations regarding, among other things, whether to waive an appraisal requirement for a mortgage origination (appraisal waiver decisions).Under the proposal, a secondary market issuer that uses AVMs in connection with making appraisal waiver decisions would be required to have policies, practices, procedures, and control systems in place to ensure that the AVM supporting those appraisal waiver decisions adheres to the rule’s quality control standards. In contrast, a mortgage originator that requests an appraisal waiver decision from a secondary market issuer would not need to ensure that the AVM used to support the waiver meets the rule’s quality control standards because the secondary market issuer would be using the AVM to make the appraisal waiver decision in this context, not the mortgage originator.For example, both GSEs have appraisal waiver programs and are the predominant issuers of appraisal waivers in the current mortgage market. To determine whether a loan qualifies for an appraisal waiver under either GSE program, a mortgage originator submits the loan casefile to the GSE’s automated underwriting system with an estimated value of the property (for a refinance transaction) or the contract price (for a purchase transaction). The GSE then processes that information through its internal model, which may include use of an AVM, to determine the acceptability of the estimated value or the contract price for the property. If the GSE’s analysis determines, among other eligibility parameters, that the estimated value or contract price meets its risk thresholds, the GSE offers the lender an appraisal waiver. In this example, when the GSEs use AVMs to determine whether the mortgage originator’s estimated collateral value or the contract price meets acceptable thresholds for issuing an appraisal waiver offer, the GSEs would be making a “covered securitization determination” under the proposed rule. As a result, the proposed rule would require the GSEs, as secondary market issuers, to maintain policies, practices, procedures, and control systems designed to ensure that their use of such AVMs adheres to the rule’s quality control standards. On the other hand, when a mortgage originator submits a loan to determine whether a GSE will offer an appraisal waiver, the mortgage originator would not be making a “covered securitization determination” under the proposed rule because the GSE would be using its AVM to make the appraisal waiver decision in this context. As a result, the mortgage originator would not be responsible for ensuring that the GSEs’ AVMs comply with the proposed rule’s quality control standards.

How I understand it:

  • Defining "Covered Securitization Determination": This term would include decisions about waiving an appraisal requirement for a mortgage origination, also known as appraisal waiver decisions.
  • If these issuers use AVMs for making appraisal waiver decisions, they need to have policies and control systems in place to ensure that the AVMs adhere to the rule's quality control standards.
  • Mortgage originators requesting an appraisal waiver from a secondary market issuer wouldn't have to ensure that the AVM used meets the rule’s quality control standards.
    • This responsibility would rest with the secondary market issuer, not the originator.
  • GSEs as an Example: When GSEs (like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) use AVMs to decide whether the mortgage originator’s estimated collateral value or the contract price meets thresholds for issuing an appraisal waiver, they would be making a "covered securitization determination". As such, GSEs would need to ensure AVM adherence to the rule's quality control standards.
    • When a mortgage originator submits a loan to see if a GSE will offer an appraisal waiver, the originator is not making a "covered securitization determination", so they don't need to ensure GSEs' AVMs comply with the proposed rule’s quality control standards.
​

Other uses by secondary market issuers:

The proposed rule would define “covered securitization determination” to include determinations regarding, among other things, structuring, preparing disclosures for, or marketing initial offerings of mortgage-backed securitizations. Monitoring collateral value in mortgage-backed securitizations after the securities have already been issued would not be a covered securitization determination. The proposed rule would cover AVM usage if and when a secondary market issuer uses an AVM as part of a new or revised value determination in connection with covered securitization determinations. For example, the GSEs use the origination appraised value or the estimated value in appraisal waivers when issuing mortgage-backed securities. Hence, AVMs are not used by the GSEs to make a new or revised value determination in connection with MBS issuances. However, because the GSEs provide guarantees of timely payment of principal and interest on loans that are included in an MBS, they are obligated to purchase loans that are in default from MBS loan pools. The GSEs may modify such loans and subsequently re-securitize them as new MBS offerings. In these instances, the GSEs may use an AVM to estimate collateral value for investor transparency and disclosure. AVMs used in this manner by the GSEs would be considered covered securitization determinations because there are new or revised value determinations. As discussed in part II.A.3 of this SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION, the proposed rule distinguishes between secondary market issuers using AVMs to determine the value of collateral securing a mortgage versus using AVMs solely to review completed value determinations. For example, AVMs used solely to review appraisals obtained during mortgage origination would not be covered by the proposed rule.

How I understand it:

  • “Covered Securitization Determination”: This term would include decisions about structuring, preparing disclosures for, or marketing initial offerings of mortgage-backed securities.
    • However, monitoring collateral value after securities issuance wouldn't fall under this definition.
  • The rule would apply if a secondary market issuer uses an AVM for new or revised value determination in relation to covered securitization determinations.
  • Although GSEs don't use AVMs for new or revised value determinations for MBS issuances, they do use them when re-securitizing defaulted and modified loans for new MBS offerings.
    • In these cases, AVMs are used for estimating collateral value for investor transparency, and these instances would be considered covered securitization determinations.
  • The proposed rule differentiates between using AVMs to determine collateral value and using them only for reviewing completed value determinations.
    • For instance, using AVMs solely to review appraisals obtained during mortgage origination wouldn't be covered by this rule.

AVM uses not covered by the proposed rule

Uses of AVMs by appraisers. The proposed rule would not cover use of an AVM by a certified or licensed appraiser in developing an appraisal. This approach reflects the fact that, while appraisers may use AVMs in preparing appraisals, they must achieve credible results in preparing an appraisal under the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (USPAP) and its interpreting opinions.33 As such, an appraiser must make a valuation conclusion that is supportable independently and does not rely on an AVM to determine the value of the underlying collateral. The agencies also note that it may be impractical for mortgage originators and secondary market issuers to adopt policies, procedures, practices, and control systems to ensure quality controls for AVMs used by the numerous independent appraisers with which they work.
Who watches the watchmen though?
​

How to comment:

Commenters are encouraged to submit comments through the Federal eRulemaking Portal. Please use the title “Quality Control Standards for Automated Valuation Models” to facilitate the organization and distribution of the comments. You may submit comments by any of the following methods:
  • Federal eRulemaking Portal – Regulations.gov: Go to https://regulations.gov/. Enter “Docket ID OCC-2023-0002” in the Search Box and click “Search.” Public comments can be submitted via the “Comment” box below the displayed document information or by clicking on the document title and then clicking the “Comment” box on the top-left side of the screen. For help with submitting effective comments, please click on “Commenter’s Checklist.” For assistance with the Regulations.gov site, please call 1-866- 498-2945 (toll free) Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm ET, or e-mail [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])
  • Mail: Chief Counsel’s Office, Attention: Comment Processing, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, 400 7th Street, SW, suite 3E-218, Washington, DC 20219.
  • You must include “OCC” as the agency name and “Docket ID OCC-2023- 0002” in your comment.
  • In general, the OCC will enter all comments received into the docket and publish the comments on the Regulations.gov website without change, including any business or personal information provided such as name and address information, e-mail addresses, or phone numbers. Comments received, including attachments and other supporting materials, are part of the public record and subject to public disclosure.
  • Do not include any information in your comment or supporting materials that you consider confidential or inappropriate for public disclosure.
​

TLDRS:

  • The proposal discusses the use of automated valuation models (AVMs) by mortgage originators and secondary market issuers to determine a mortgage's collateral value
  • Institutions engaged in certain credit decisions or securitization determinations would be required to adopt policies and procedures to ensure AVMs used adhere to quality control standards.
  • The proposal also aims to protect against data manipulation, avoid conflicts of interest, require random sample testing and reviews.
    • Data Manipulation: By implementing quality control standards and promoting transparency, this rule may reduce the risk of AVMs being manipulated to overestimate or underestimate a property's value.
    • Conflicts of Interest: It may mitigate potential conflicts of interest where a party could benefit from the property's valuation being higher or lower than its actual worth.
    • Inaccurate Valuations: The required random sample testing and reviews could catch systematic errors or biases in the AVMs that lead to inaccurate property valuations.
    • Discrimination: By requiring compliance with nondiscrimination laws, the rule could address loopholes where certain properties might be undervalued due to location in certain neighborhoods or other discriminatory practices.
    • Securitization Risks: The rule could help reduce the risk of mispriced mortgage-backed securities, by ensuring that the underlying assets (i.e., the properties) are properly valued. This is particularly crucial because undervaluation or overvaluation of properties could result in financial instability.
  • How does this relate to GameStop?
    • The broader economy is seeing regional banks blow up at these rates, what sort of stress will higher rates cause in the banking system with those trying to maintain their short positions for another day if they can't tip the scale on valuations on items that have become linchpins of their collateral down the line?
https://preview.redd.it/rf2lqu2jql3b1.png?width=610&format=png&auto=webp&s=8723c8c14153a7943d368594457c339fd39a772b
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