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@thequeas

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So⌠I got a notification from the State Department at like 8 PM Pacific that my passport was approved, and I was quietly thankful and stunned bc my legal gender in Oregon is listed as X, or undeclared, and that's what's on my passport. I'm pretty sure someone(s) worked late to get the X passports done today.
I was already really grateful to whoever in the Seattle Passport Office worked late to get these things processed on the last Friday before That Man gets back into office... and then I got a notification that my passport shipped at fucking midnight Pacific and whoever got that shit out the door so it couldn't be picked up on Monday and like, denied and shredded?
They're my fucking hero.
So... I heard from a friend of 20+ years who works for the State Department who confirmed to me in so many words that they can assure me, without specifics, that "all of the suppositions you have made here are true."
So... yep. Passport folx at the State Department really did work incredibly long hours this week just... shoveling every passport out the door (and prioritizing the ones that might be A Problem come Monday) and yes, they did On Purpose make sure that all of them weren't just DONE but MAILED and out the door and in the hands of the USPS so that they can't be told to pull those passports back and deny/destroy them.
This also means they got the OK for the mountains of overtime from the Biden administration to get that done.
This is what I mean when I say that the Good Work is often not glamorous and that we have to prioritize things which actively and immediately better the lives of our siblings. The State Department worker who was still in the office last night at midnight Pacific time stuffing my passport into an Express Mail envelope and making sure that it was in the hands of USPS has done more liberatory work for the trans movement than 100 people endlessly auditing the language others use to describe their lives ever will.
These next years are gonna be real hard. Find something tangible to do for yourself and others, however small, and do it as hard as you can.
"No one can love you until you love yourself" is like the worst possible way of articulating "if you don't respect and value yourself, it's very easy to become attracted to people who don't treat you right and then justify their mistreatment, so be careful."
so THAT'S what it's supposed to mean. that actually makes sense.

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really beautiful things are happening between americans and chinese netizens right now
Oh strawberry... We're really in it now...
it's the start of the week, there's still time!
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Meirl
LOOK AT THE LITTLE DUDEÂ
Heâs just a little guy.
This is why people get PHDs.
Wow everyone is going through it. Hold my hand
reblog to hold the hand of the person you reblogged from
Someone who's good at the economy but not in a "we gotta kill homeless people to make the line go up" way, what's the deal with the silicon valley bank going bankrupt
So, Silicon Valley Bank is a bank that focused on serving business clients in the tech sector, both startups and the venture capital firms that funded them. Lotta money there, right? Right! Well, they spent all that money making more money , and not very much of it doing things like building infrastructure or making their services actually, like, good. Which is a problem.
The way banks work these days, when you hand them money they don't just put it in a room and lock it up. It's all electronic anyway, so there's no really much to lock up. Instead, they add numbers to your balance and take that money and use it for other things. IE you put $100 in your savings account, they write down "You have $100" and occasionally update it as your savings earns interest, then they take that same $100 and hand it to someone else as a loan. This does mean that they don't, technically speaking, have your $100 anymore. If you hit up an ATM and pull your $100 out, they'll hand you someone else's $100. That is normal and expected bank operation, and as long as they aren't idiots it isn't a problem.
Recently, some badly-timed business decisions on their part sparked a bank run. Bank runs are when depositors at a bank all freak out and try to pull their money out at the same time. If no one is putting money in and everyone is pulling money out, and they don't technically keep all that money on hand... well, that is a capital-P Problem. They can't hand you someone else's $100 if that person is also asking for their $100 and so is everyone else.
Now, we know this is a problem. This made a very big fucky-wucky about 90 years ago when the Great Depression happened. So in the wake of that clusterfuck, the government created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or FDIC. FDIC insures deposit accounts (checking, savings, CDs, etc) up to $250,000 per bank per person. Even in the event of a massive bank run and every single person pulling out every single dollar all at once, you will get your $250,000 back. Above that, it depends how much money the bank can scrounge up and how many people it has to make good to.
Now, the reason this continues to be a capital-P Problem for SVB is that thing I said right at the start.
Silicon Valley Bank is a bank that focused on serving business clients in the tech sector, both startups and the venture capital firms that funded them. Lotta money there, right?
$250,000 is a pretty hefty chunk of change for an individual human person. If you have that kind of money in cash, you're probably not keeping it all in a bank deposit account anyway, because it's earning 0.01% interest and therefore getting chewed down by inflation constantly. But a business may absolutely need to keep that kind of cash on hand, because that is the cash they're using for things like, oh. Paying employees.
So while we can point and laugh at Silicon Valley tech bros and the kind of cowboy startups that try to pay their employees in beer and worthless stock options losing money, this is also hitting a lot of ordinary people via their employers' sudden loss of payroll funds. Etsy, for instance, used SVB, and now their ability to pay all the folks selling their work on Etsy is, to use a highly technical term, super fucked up.
FDIC is doing their do, which means that depositors will be getting back their up-to-$250,000. This is, like all processes involving money, highly bureaucratic and slow-moving. It kind of has to be, because when there is a chance to be handed money, there are loads of people who will lie their asses off in order to get in on the action. So FDIC has to validate all the depositors and make sure their balance claims are genuine &etc before they can fling money around, and they're working on selling off everything SVB owned in order to make them make good on it as much as possible. But in the meantime, folks aren't getting paid and also it's making people in the business world look nervously at the rest of the financial sector, because banks are a pretty incestuous pile of daisy-chained handjobs. The last time there was a Big Bank Problem was the 2007-2008 crash, and the collapse of a couple big financial institutions took down a ton of big respected money names. So everyone is freaking out.
This is all correct.
Here is another layer:
The amount of money that a bank is required to keep on hand, just in case, is regulated. The government has a vested interest in keeping the banking system running, right? So they require the banks to keep a percentage of the assets (their member's money) set aside so that if there *is* a sudden rush of withdrawls or an investment turns up bad, then they can still pay.
Because here's the deal: Big banks dont just use members' deposited money for loans. They also use it to invest in other businesses. They are betting that the business that they have invested in via stocks, bonds, or whatever (or loaned money to or all of those things) will do well and pay back their investment plus extra.
Federal regulations tell the banks to set aside a portion of their total money so that it WON'T be loaned out OR invested.
Well, back in 2018, Congress and the President (guess who!) decided that regulations were actually terrible and got rid of a bunch of them. Their goal was to stimulate the economy by making it easier to do business. Unfortunately, a lot of those regulations were made in the first place to stop terrible things from happening. (Like bank runs. Or mass poisoning via poor food production practices. Or train derailments because of over stressed infrastructer and increasingly stressed, understaffed workers. Just to name a few examples.)
One of the regulations they tinkered with was the amount of money that banks are required to keep in reserve. They lowered that amount by a lot.
Surprise, surprise, banks were like, "holy snap, we can spend so much more money now!!!" And promptly did so, using all of the money above the new, lower, legal cap for things like loans and venture captial investments. Aka, risky investments. High risk, high reward.
SVB did this, and made some bad investment choices. They lost a bunch of money. Because of the relatively recently lowered regulations, SVB had way less money on hand, meaning they couldn't absorb the loss from their bad investments. A few important people (ngl i forget who) advised folks to take cash out of their accounts.
In the world of electronic echanges, no one needs to physically go to a bank to get their money. They just pop on the app on their phone and do an electronic transfer.
The withdrawls quickly became a full on Bank Run as word spread and EVERYONE raced to get their money out while there was still money to get.
SVB fell in less than 48 hours. This is *shockingly* quick.
So the problem isnt just that everyone all together ran off to get their money from the bank, it's ALSO that the bank regulations got lowered and SVB used every extra cent they could to bet on other businesses and then when they lost that money they didnt have much left over to give to people when they demanded their money back.
Correct!
Making it even more byzantine, a lot of SVB's problematic investments weren't even the ones traditionally considered risky, though. (NB: there are many many flavors of financial risk, but that's a whole post's worth of digression all on its own.)
In fact, it was their SAFEST investments (other than, you know, the cash they should have been keeping on hand but weren't due to all the above wrt deregulation) that helped bring them down.
So, normal banks invest and give out loans to earn money with your money. SVB, serving VC firms and startups, wasn't doing much in the loan business, so they had to find alternative means for bringing in cash. One of the alternatives they found was in buying Treasury bonds.
Now, Treasurys (and yes, that is how they're pluralized here in the industry, and it makes my soul weep) are generally considered the safest thing you can buy that falls under the definition of "investment." They are debt instruments, meaning a commitment to pay back face value, and they are drawn against the full faith & credit of the US Government. Treasurys are what your 80yo Grandma buys to get a steady income and no risk of her purchase going bankrupt.
But here's the thing. Treasurys pay back their face value on a set date, called the maturity date. If you need to pull your money out of them before that date, you're going to have to sell them to another investor, and that might pay you more or less than the face value. Sometimes a LOT more or less.
Here's the other thing. The resale value of Treasurys, like all debt investments, rises and falls based on current interest rates, because they pay interest based on whatever interest rates were at when they were first issued. If the Treasury puts out a bond that pays 1% interest for 10 years, and then six months later they put out a bond that pays 3% interest for 10 years, that 1% bond no longer looks like such a great deal, and to find a buyer you'll have to sell it at a discount. There is a lot of math that goes on here, but that's the principle. Rising interest rates = old bonds get cheaper.
And what's been happening like CRAZY recently? You got it - rising interest rates.
So this would have been temporarily painful for SVB if not for the bank run. They would have watched their bond holdings show painful market values, but they could have continued to hold them and wait for things to hopefully cool down and at least stabilize.
But then the bank run happened, they needed cash urgently, and they had to face the prospect of selling those Treasurys for a whole lot less than they'd bought them for, meaning that the cash they'd parked there was now a lot less cash. And in a bank run, where they really really needed cash...
(If this was a harder explanation to follow, don't sweat it - for my licensing class, the section on how debt investing works was where everyone started crying.)
This is a fantastic post. I want to touch on one more thing with an addition of a video. And please correct me if I get anything wrong.
Here is a relatively short investigative news segment where they follow the FDIC as they take over a bank. I found it really interesting and actually comforting, especially because it shows that thereâs support for the bank employees and the customers. Even if itâs shocking for them, there is continuity of employment and services. Itâs a crappy day all around, but nobody ends up penniless. They even launch the whole procedure overnight so that the bank opens the next day as normal.
Additionally, for anyone from the human-sacrifices-to-the-line crowd who starts screaming at you that this is a âtaxpayer-funded bailout of a âwokeâ west-coast soyboy bank,â you can just flatly tell them that theyâre wrong. Our money--our taxpayer money--does not make up the funds the FDIC uses as remedy in these situations. That money comes from their own reserves from, essentially, the dues that banks pay to be covered by the FDIC.
âThe FDIC is not supported by public funds; member banks' insurance dues are its primary source of funding.â (Bovenzi, John [2015]. Inside the FDIC: Thirty Years of Bank Failures, Bailouts, and Regulatory Battles. New York: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-118-99408-5. p. 69.) (Also from about 5:30 of the video above.)
They are backed by the US Government, so they can tap the Treasury Dept. if they need to (that is, if the FDIC has to rescue so many banks that it runs out of its own funds). So banks can fall, but the FDIC canât fall.
Because SVB catered to so many businesses, there were many accounts with a value over $250,000--the FDIC and the Federal Reserve already announced that they will make those companies whole by ensuring their access to all their deposited cash, even over $250,000 (https://fortune.com/2023/03/13/how-does-fdic-insurance-work-silicon-valley-bank-implosion/). And they still wonât be touching taxpayer money to get it done:
âNo losses associated with the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank will be borne by taxpayers,â the FDIC said in a press release. Â The money will come from the Deposit Insurance Fundâwhich is mainly funded by quarterly fees levied on banksâas well as liquidated assets from SVB. Those losses to the fund âwill be recovered by a special assessment on banks, as required by law.â
we need to give this tweet more credit for im pretty sure coining "die mad about it"
checks out, thank you melanie
The only good thing reddit has ever produced https://www.reddit.com/r/casualiama/comments/65788g/im_3_i_know_everything_ama/?st=1Z141Z3&sh=f48ba715
wholesome
This post missed the best one

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âitâs weird for queer minors to be friends with queer adultsâ oh my god. ohhh my god.
intergenerational community support, especially in a community that is split so much age wise as the queer community, is immensely fucking important. get to know older queers and younger queers. this is how communities frazzle out and die to infighting.
the hypothetical queer adult that people are mad over in the post this is refrencing is 35 years old. only 35.
its weird for any minors to be friends with any adults, queer or not. There should be no reason why unrelated adults or minors should be making close relationships in any sense outside of professional ones. I understand wanting education, but they can be taught when they are adults as well.
is this a joke.
That commenter seems to forget that children are human beings too
Has this person never been involved in hobbies or politics or religion or the arts or any environment that normal people interact in?
I think part of the problem is thinking thereâs only one kind of friendship. The friendship I form with a kid is going to look different than a friendship I have with someone my own age or friendship with someone significantly older than me. But that doesnât mean itâs not friendship. I mean, being kind to each other, talking about similar interests, giving each other support and advice when neededďżźâ these are good things, and there may be another type of relationship you could term this, but I think friendship works just as well.
Unless youâre the type of person who thinks that friends will inevitably take advantage of each other, or that a friendship always has potential to turn into a relationship. Because those are the circumstances where you would need to watch out with an adult becoming friends with a kid. ďżź But just because those bad apples exist, doesnât mean you should cut down all the apple trees. ďżź
I think theyâre the type of person who thinks all adults are looking to take (sexual) advantage of any person younger than they are, and can literally not fathom the concept of a community made up of people across all ages interacting with each other as being healthy, despite that being the standard way of living throughout pretty much all cultures throughout all of history. Theyâre really going to have problems when they eventually graduate into the working world and have no idea how to socialize with most of the people around them.
Never mind that, you know, if a queer kid's parents kick them out for being queer, it's probably good if they have SOME other safe adults in their lives who might have, like, a couch they can crash on?
My adult friends were the ones who took me out to lunch when my dad died and told me theyâd been there too, and what it was like. They mentored me in math and volunteer work and my job. One drove me to synagogue every week and added me to her family plan. They have life experience that no one my age could dream aboutâmy tap teacher was even in the original Broadway cast of Hello, Dolly! I absolutely love my friends who are my age, but theyâve never asked me to help them name a hurricane.
Iâve only felt unsafe with adults a few times in my life, and I could see the danger signs BECAUSE I had much experience with good adults. Having adult friends throughout my childhood helped me learn how to be a good adult, too.
Knowing different kinds of people helps you grow and understand who you want to be. If I didnât have so many good influences from my (adult) friends, I might have turned out a very different person. Iâm forever grateful to them.
Youth having positive relationships with non related adults is literally known to be a major positive life influence and factors. Thatâs why there are literally programs for adults to VOLUNTARILY COMMIT to being a friend to an adolescent - mentors are also friends.
any time i hear the insufferable transphobic athlete arguments i think of that one time in middle school when my boys lacrosse team did a full-contact scrimmage against the girls team (who typically play with limited contact) and i, a six-foot, 180lb defender, got utterly laid-out by this 5-foot-nothing girl experiencing the newly-unleashed animosity accompanied by violent sport and as i looked up at my assailant from flat on my back i experienced a brief bout of heterosexuality and fell wildly in love and then had to be taken to the ER because i had a concussion
âfrom flat on my back i experienced a brief bout of heterosexualityâ took me out