Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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The former US president has been forced to reckon with Republican blame for underwhelming performances from rightwing candidates he endorsed in the midterm elections, with the defeat of Republican candidate Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, contributing to uncertainty over which party will control the Senate.
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Trump’s top staffers have firmly pressed him to announce his latest White House campaign as planned on Tuesday, the sources said, suggesting that he would appear weak and wounded by the results were he to cave to demands that he hold off until the Senate runoff early next month.
Trump also has no upside in waiting until the Senate runoff, where his handpicked Republican candidate Herschel Walker trails Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock. His staffers are said to have told him: if Walker wins, he can take credit, and if Walker loses, his position would be no different.
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The group urging a delay appears fear Trump could sink the Senate runoff for Republicans as he is widely considered to have done in 2020, when he focused on his own grievances about the 2020 election rather than helping Republican candidates.
The allies seeking a delay include Trump’s longtime advisor Jason Miller, who remains hugely influential to the extent that he amounts to around ten voices in the room, some Trump staffers conceded, as well as former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, now at Fox News.
“They want to ‘go’ because they need jobs,” one close Trump confidant suggested derisively about the staffers urging Trump to stick to his guns, adding that he wasn’t sure that anyone truly believed the former president should announce next Tuesday.
What to do, what to do…. But I thought he only hired the best people.
The upcoming cage match between MAGA and the GOP establishment is going to be awesome to watch. It will be bad for the country it entertaining as hell for those of us who enjoy politics Al battles.
Trump is going to burn it all down. And I can’t wait
@OzarkHillbilly: The ideal situation for Warnock is if Trump declares and makes the election all about him, i.e. making a vote for Walker a vote for Trump. I think it would depress Repub turnout and energize the Dems
Trump is really going after his heir apparent DeSantis. He pulled out the “desanctimonious” insult again and called DeSanctis disloyal and ungrateful last night.
As Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter entered its third week, and following mass layoffs, the billionaire laid bare a delicate financial future for the social media platform, amid an exodus of top privacy and security executives.
Yoel Roth, the head of safety and integrity who had been deputized to publicly address concerns advertisers and users had about the platform, is reportedly the latest to leave the company.
The departures began on the same day Elon Musk addressed employees for the first time, saying that “bankruptcy isn’t out of the question”, according to multiple reports.
The day began with the resignation of three top security officials – chief information security officer Lea Kissner, chief privacy officer Damien Kieran and chief compliance officer Marianne Fogarty – prompting warnings from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). (Twitter reached a settlement over privacy issues with the FTC in May.) Following those departures, Roth and Twitter’s head of client solutions, Robin Wheeler, also left the company.
Move along now, nothing to see here…
“Without significant subscription revenue, there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn,” Musk said in the email. “We need roughly half of our revenue to be subscription.”
But why, Elon? Twitter was actually turning a profit until you bought it. Admittedly a small profit, but it was there.
“So the two people Elon brought forward to talk with advertisers in an attempt to convince them to keep partnering with the company just quit,” tweeted Rashad Robinson, the president of Color of Change. “Companies that stay with Twitter at this point will be tied to these dangerous and unhinged policy changes.”
Now that will inspire confidence in advertisers.
“I have never seen a billionaire begging for your $8 this much,” said Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP. “Clearly, our efforts – calling on companies to pause all advertising on Twitter – are working. Corporations need to be held accountable, and Twitter is no exception. Hate speech and disinformation have no place anywhere.”
Ouch. The Guardian gets in a dig of it’s own:
Messages seeking comment were left with Twitter, but it is unlikely someone will respond as the communications department has been laid off.
As the Russian Ministry of Defence announced that the withdrawal was “complete”, key bridges and crossings over the Dnipro were blown up, including the Antonivsky Bridge, a pontoon beneath it and a nearby railway span.
Images of the retreat showed lines of distant Russian infantry hurrying over the Antonivsky pontoon, and columns of vehicles rushing to use the crossings at night-time.
In its daily briefing cited by Russian news agencies, the ministry said all forces and equipment had been transferred to the left, or eastern, bank of the Dnipro River. It said the withdrawal was completed by 0500 Moscow time (0200 GMT) on Friday. That claim could not be verified.
Sure. I’ll bet.
With Ukrainian estimates suggesting half of those soldiers had been withdrawn across the river by Thursday evening, footage posted on Russian social media channels suggested panic in some units as they scrambled to escape.
That sounds more like it
The Kremlin have remained defiant, insisting the retreat in no way represented an embarrassment for the president, Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters Moscow continued to view the Kherson region as part of Russia.
@Kingdaddy: The summation really sums it up. Like a summation should:
the Twitter board who accepted his purchase offer had to know that they were likely dooming the company. That their decision would lead to thousands of lives being materially worsened, and to millions of people all over the world losing a service they depend on for anything from simple pleasure to survival, all for the benefit of a handful of shareholders. And yet they apparently had to accept the offer, simply because it was so high. We should talk more about the fact that fiduciary responsibility running only towards the shareholders makes induced collapses like Twitter’s inevitable, and what can be done to prevent that.
In Thursday’s announcement, the space agency said the “artifact” was discovered by a film crew that was in search of aircraft from the second world war off the east coast of Florida.
Divers found a man-made element that was covered in sand and, given the location was near Florida’s “space coast” where the mission was launched from, they reached out to Nasa.
“While it has been nearly 37 years since seven daring and brave explorers lost their lives aboard Challenger, this tragedy will forever be seared in the collective memory of our country,” Nasa administrator Bill Nelson said in the statement. “For millions around the globe, myself included, 28 January 1986 still feels like yesterday.”
It happened 3 days after I got married for the first time, an omen I should have paid attention to.
@CSK: It wouldn’t depress MAGAs but I sense Trump has reached his endless-drama-Queen expiration point with a significant number of everyday Republicans. (Significant in the event of a close election).
@OzarkHillbilly: Some joker called @EliLilly with a blue checkmark tweeted that all insulin was now free, I suspect it’s just a matter of time before Twitter gets sued.
Measles can spread by coughing, talking, or simply being in the same room as someone with the virus. Ninety percent of unvaccinated people who are exposed will become ill, and 1 in 5 will require hospitalization, Ohio’s Franklin County health department noted in a press release (Franklin County encompasses Columbus).
(emphasis added)
I wonder who the parents are going to blame? Surely not the people who deserve it.
@OzarkHillbilly: Exactly. The board is getting not nearly enough blame for this disaster. They knew how he was funding the purchase, and the destructive impact it would have. They also knew who Musk is, and how his stated intentions would drive advertisers and users from the platform.
In the latest season fo Cautionary Tales, Tim Harford had a multi-episode look at the race to reach the South Pole. It was good overall, with lots of info and detail, but the most interesting part is the last, where he discusses cases of scurvy in the British expedition.
These were Royal Navy officers. The Royal Navy famously discovered how to prevent scurvy in the late XVIII century, no? And the race to the Pole happened in 1912. How did anyone get scurvy?
It has to do with the vitamin C content of limes vs that of lemons. I’ll spare the narrative, and why steamships made for a healthier diet than sail ships. What I want is to check Harford’s claims.
Two in particular. One is how much vitamin C is in limes. The other is how much does heat destroy vitamin C.
While there are many foods that contain vitamin C, traditionally the richest are citrus fruits and tomatoes. I consume both, but mostly limes and cooked/processed tomatoes. I don’t think I’m deficient, but it doesn’t hurt to look.
Board had no choice: law says their duty us to the shareholders and the shareholders alone. And the shareholders made out like gangbusters here.
Who we should be looking at is the banks that financed this and if this was doing their duty to THEIR shareholders getting stuck with the bill fircthus mess
Is the US mail working for you guys? My delivery time has been inconsistent. A check I mailed ten days ago still hasn’t cleared. I received a postcard yesterday from a friend who visited a tourist site in Tennessee; it was postmarked 11/2 and arrived 11/10. Is this a local problem or have others noted the same thing?
St. Elon is going about it all wrong. A billionaire begging for $8, even from a large pool of people, is bad optics. Almost as bad as a billionaire begging for money (what?).
What he should do is give a gift of $8.05 each month to every person who signs up for the Twitter Blue check mark service. that way hundreds of millions will subscribe and the company can meet its goals in that respect.
Yes, he’ll lose a ton of money, like enough to barely notice, but he’ll drive share price up. And isn’t that the point?
I can see that. In fact, I think it already happened, even in Georgia. Kemp and Raffensberger, trashed by Trump, won their races with very comfortable margins. Walker, praised to the skies by Trump, will probably lose.
@Kingdaddy: When I took corporations class in law school in the ’80s, I was taught that a corporation had 3 primary constituencies, its customers, its employees and its shareholders and that the role of the board was to manage these 3 interests for the benefit of the corporation as a whole. That was probably a progressive take even in the ’80s, but all signals since have been that the board’s only constituency is its shareholders and that the only objective measure of shareholder value is money as fast as you can make it. It creates very shortsighted decision making.
Or course he will and he may still get the nomination. This is an attempt by the R elites and the pundits that make up Conservatism Inc, to change the subject and move on.
There have been a couple of articles already comparing the failure of MAGA to the success of the Tea Party. A key difference between the two is that the TP was cooped by DC insiders and became a tool of the elites, while MAGA is trumps tool.
Something that is probably beyond hope, is that a tiny R majority may result in the survival of the 1/6 committee, so that it can become a vehicle for the elites to destroy trump. At the moment R’s have no reason to fear crossing him and till he demonstrates control over MAGA, they never will.
Musk running Twitter into the ground through his incompetence and arrogance, while amusing, is not materially different from what we saw from 2017-2021 during the Trump administration.
Perhaps we can collectively learn a lesson here: There is no correlation between having money and having the competence to run a complex organization.
Money does not follow automatically from any level of work ethic, intelligence, good decisions, etc. It comes primarily from luck.
The random Powerball lottery winner this week is no different than getting a “small loan of $100 million”.
I the last 2 days, I have had 2 posts disappear into the ether. After clicking “Post Comment,” I’m not getting the green box that says the commented is being posted but a grey one that says the page is being reloaded and poof the comment disappears. Anyone else having this problem.?
I’d look at one of my stonecutters hammering away at the rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet, at the hundred and first blow it would split in two, and I knew it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.
It took a long while to prepare the battlefield. Then the collapse happened.
KHERSON/1330 UTC 11 NOV/ RU forces on the N bank of the Dnipro collapsed on all axes of contact. Nearly all defensive positions were abandoned as RU units were routed. UKR troops are confirmed to be operating in the urban area of the city of Kherson.
It probably won’t have any if they are already paid out. It looks like a straight arms length transaction between equals with all sorts of lawyers involved. Musk/Twitter would have to prove some sort of massive fraud to be able to claw them back. If they are ongoing obligations they may be able to change or stop those.
I have all sorts of problems. Especially if my usual carrier is on vacation. Then nothing gets delivered. I’ve taken to Fedex-ing bank deposits and other important things.
@Sleeping Dog: It’s happened to me a time or 2. What I’ve done is hit the back arrow at the top of my screen (firefox) and my comment reappears in the comment box. Then I’ll resubmit it and it goes thru just fine. At least, so far.
I wish there was a “War Refugee Day” honoring all those civilians who lost their lives or livelihood to the insane actions of governments all over the world.
All too often, this is the worst overlooked scar of war, and the repercussions are generational.
Hmmm… June 20th is “world refugee day”… but that doesn’t have the same impact. Maybe with the help of Amnesty International and the ACLU, this could get some traction.
Since I am now one of those technology workers that has lost his position due to poor planning and execution by the CEO where I worked (no, not Twitter… it’s endemic), I have some time on my hands.
Musk running Twitter into the ground through his incompetence and arrogance, while amusing, is not materially different from what we saw from 2017-2021 during the Trump administration.
@Beth: I would have thought it would take a while to make those payouts, maybe in installments. A million here a few million there… Can you tell I have absolutely no experience with money like that?
@Liberal Capitalist: Sorry you lost your job. As a gypsy (union) carpenter I got used to being laid off. Eventually, the building is built. I learned to save a considerable chunk of every paycheck. Between that and my unemployment I never had a problem getting thru it (tho it did get nervous a time or 2). Most people aren’t prepared for it.
In the latest trumpian defeat (that’s like a Pyrrhic victory without the victory), much is being made that Benito’s hand-picked candidates did poorly, even when they won their race.
This brings to mind statements from a few people after the 2020 trumpian defeat. In particular I remember Christie wondering at the bad, terrible, no-good, quality of many of El Cheeto’s advisors and staff, seeing as how Benito purportedly only hires “the best people.”
At the time I joked that, “Hey, Christie. What does it mean he hired you?” Ha ha. But this points to a part of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Someone like Christie, and he’s not the only one, might validate the assertion “Benito hires only the best people,” by simply saying “Of course he does. He hired me.” Since it’s easier to see the mote in someone else’s eye than the beam in one’s own, then the Christies in Cheetoland are surprised to the point of actual shock the the terrible, horrible, incompetent, no-good, people the Head Cheeto picks as staff or advisors.
They seldom notice the beam in their eyes, though.
Last, keep in mind Harford’s dicutm: we may not all be card–carrying members of the Dunning-Kruger club, but we all visit the clubhouse from time to time.
And if perchance Trump does, inadvertently, hire good people, he dumps them if they don’t kiss his ass, ass-kissing being the sole qualification for employment with Trump.
I live in Washington (State) where balloting is all “by mail” and I looked at my County’s ballot returns by day and method received to evaluate the lag in reporting.
Bottom line: Ballots go out by mail, but the majority of voters (over 80%) use the (armored) ballot drop boxes rather than USPS to submit their ballot. There is a day delay in reporting voting results (so a ballot dropped off on Tuesday is reported as being dropped off, but the results aren’t reported/counted until the next day (Wednesday)).
The county has 551K registered voters, more than 5 or 6 states. On Tuesday election night, returns are reported for the mail ballots received up to some point that that day (maybe, could be day before), and for the drop boxes as of Monday night. The results do NOT include any of the ballots put into a drop box on Tuesday (election day) as the boxes (over 50) are emptied (with security, observers, etc) after 8PM and returned to the election HQ to be reported late the next day (4-8PM). On election day 63K ballots were received at drop boxes, and 8.5K by mail (obviously mailed prior) with 330K cumulative total ballots returned at that point.
Returns as a % of registered voters:
Nov 7 38.39% (82% drop box)
Nov 8 46.94% (77% drop box)
Nov 9 59.96% (88% drop box)
Nov 10 60.34% (additional all mail)
I believe a considerable number of the mailed ballots are military as the county has a very large Joint base.
* A few hundred handicapped voters go to the (one) election center for special assistance – so minor in-person voting.
Also most of the incumbent judges ran unopposed, but garnered 1.5-2% write-in votes.
The other thing I wonder is how they not notice how incompetent, ignorant, criminal, and all around deficient Benito is.
Some do, apparently. Mattis seems to. Tillerson did when he complained”He’s a fuc**ng moron.” But many more, inside and outside his circle, seem oblivious.
@OzarkHillbilly: This is a problem for me. In the past year, I have not received two bills resulting in not paying them and getting a dunning overdue statement the next month. I’m drawing up a schedule of my recurrent bills and checking to make sure that I’m not missing anything.
The US mail has been exemplary; is it deteriorated?
It probably won’t have any if they are already paid out.
I have read that Jack Dorsey didn’t take a payout after the sell and instead reinvested in more Twitter stock. Wonder how many others on the board did as well??
McMaster had unkind things to say about Trump, as did Gary Cohn, and John Kelly called him an idiot and referred to the White House as “crazy town.” Steve Bannon called him a 10-year-old.
I’m sure 99.9% of the people on staff, including his son-in-law, regarded him as a half–witted buffoon.
As for Melania, to her he’s just a permanent trick, although I assume his fucking days have dwindled down to almost nothing.
@Liberal Capitalist: Sorry you lost your job. As a gypsy (union) carpenter I got used to being laid off. Eventually, the building is built. I learned to save a considerable chunk of every paycheck. Between that and my unemployment I never had a problem getting thru it (tho it did get nervous a time or 2). Most people aren’t prepared for it.
Yeah, but don’t shed a tear for my situation… I aggressively set aside money, so I fall into that multi-millionaire category.
However, not being 65, looking at health care, that could run me $90 K for me and the wife in just over 2 years.
And for that , as well as the new mortgage for buying the southern estate, I am giving serious consideration to returning to the workforce for a few years.
Lucky me that my skills are specific (like yours, as a carpenter) and there is usually a need for those with specific skills.
However… even with a huge buffer, hoping to live a long life become concerning as I have found that in semi-retirement money flows… no more correctly: just blows away like mad.
But I have this to say:
I was watching a re-run of Dharma and Greg, and in this episode, Dharma was building a relationship with Greg’s dying Grandmother.
It appeared that 1) Grandmother didn’t approve of her son’s choice of wives (which set up an interesting dichotomy with Darma and Kitty), 2) No one wanted to acknowledge the inevitability of Grandmother dying but instead talked around it, 3) Grandmother was loaded financially, and 4) Dharma was her usual bull-in-the-social-china-shop.
So I told you all that, so I could say this:
Grndmother, on her death bed, was having a conversation with Dharna, and they were talking about someone else who had millions. And she said:
“Oh Dharna… Just because you have a million dollars, that doesn’t make you a millionare.”
Call me insensitive and out of touch, but I know exactly what she means.
I will never break that glass ceiling between me and the “Millionaires”… I am frist generation money, and that means nothing more than living paycheck-to-paycheck. This is absolutely nothing compared to American generational wealth.
I can’t even say that I am wealth adjacent. Hell, I paid $100K in taxes in 2022… If I was really wealthy that NEVER would have happened!
But I have seen wealth, drove through the neighborhood. sat next to them on planes (they were slumming. the private jet was down).
funny that when we were kids we were spoon fed Scrooge McDuck and Richie Rich. It’s probably what kept us from killing the rich.
Yeah… weird mood. Now I gotta go call the IRS and politely ask why they still want some more $$$. Not saying I don’t want to pay the $500… just want to know where the miscalculation was made.
@Michael Cain: “Assuming a tiny majority in the House, January will be interesting when the Republicans are unable to agree on a Speaker.”
Since the entire House votes for the speaker, seems to me that if the Republicans don’t coalesce around one person, the Democrats could do some serious screwing around with them…
Yeah, I mean they can structure these things all different sorts of ways depending (mostly) on how they want the tax ramifications to play out. All that stuff is way above my paygrade though.
It’s also possible that some of them galaxy brained themselves by dumping money into company stock thinking Musk was going to do something profound.
What wouldn’t shock me is if Musk runs it into the ground and it goes to bankruptcy that Dorsey and some consortium buys it (and the wreckage of a bank or two fingers crossed) for pennies on the dollar. There’s some value to the Twitter brand and IP that someone could theoretically restore. It just won’t be Musk or some wild eyed idiot like him.
One thing I want to know is how badly this ends up hurting Tesla. Depending on his financing agreements and how bad this blows up his financing partners Tesla could take a substantial hit. Someone in my friends group also mentioned SpaceX, but I’m not sure he put up any of that stock or if anyone (NASA, Boeing, the other vanity rocket companies) would let that fail.
In the good, amazing, wonderful, news department, I received my insurance pre-approval letter last night. So as long as I don’t get Covid right before, I’m good to go for Surgery on 12/8. I can’t begin to express just how excited I am. Because insurance companies are required to be insane, the pre-approval included “Amputation Penis Complete – 1.0 Unit”. So, setting aside for a second that it’s not entirely an “amputation” it’s more of a, lets say, “upcycling”. Anyway, how many penises does Blue Shield think I need upcycled?
Hm. If the entire House votes, then the Democrats should bow to the inevitable and agree to vote for a Republican.
Note how it’s been mentioned the Speaker need not be a sitting House member (you all see where I’m going with this). Therefore the Democratic leaders in the House should wrangle their party caucus to support Liz Cheney for the post.
Seriously, ever since that asshole took over there has been a decided worsening of service there. (he made several changes, such as no more overtime, downsizing sorting facilities, etc) A friend of mine had a massive stroke while in Springfield for business. I sent her a card with some pretty pictures I had taken (she was very much an outdoorsy person). It took over a month for it to get to her rehab facility and by the time it did she had already been transported back to Sullivan where her home was. It was finally returned to me 2 months after that. So, in total it took 3+ months to travel the 150 miles down there and the 150 back.
I do most of my bill paying on line and I know when things are due. So I am not affected by a bill showing up late. I did get a surprise notice from a collection agency for a med bill I am certain I never received. At the time I put it down to the sloppiness of med industry billing procedures but maybe it was the USPS.
What gets me about this whole debacle is just how short-sighted Musk is being. He’s shooting himself in the foot (with a flame-thrower).
Early on in the process–aside from the “free speech” stuff–Musk laid out some interesting ideas of where to take the platform. If I recall, he said he wanted to turn it into the American version of WeChat–which would be amazing (If Google could ever get their act together, they could do it with {insert current chat name here}, they could absolutely dominate messaging).
While Musk is CEO of SpaceX, it’s actually run by Gwynne Shotwell. And she does a damn fine job of it. The smartest decision he made was putting her in that position, and making it stick.
@Kingdaddy: The board saw the company sell for twice its value or more. That is a hell of a return for the shareholders. It’s a private company now. If it has a board still, it’s one that Musk chose.
Funny that you mention TN, because I traded in a phone (shipped from CA on 10/21) and while it seemed to be moving along just fine when it hit TN it bounced around from one cities Annex/Processing site to another (at least 3 dif locations in TN) and seemed to get stuck there. No updates since 11/01, then yesterday I get an email from Google that they received my phone and I am getting the full trade-in value (this returned $350 to my card, hence why I was eager to for the return to be completed).
However, the USPS site is still stuck showing me (as of this morning): Moving Through Network In Transit, Arriving Late November 1, 2022
I blame Trump and the GOP’s efforts to fork over the USPS for why the updates on the USPS tracking page may not match the reality on the ground.
Happy Veteran’s Day folks, and have a wonderful Friday. I am working (from home), but hey, it is Friday so there is that. Take Care everyone and stay warm (it is finally chilly willy in the Bay Area)!
@OzarkHillbilly: I doubt golden parachutes factor into it. They sold the company. They had a duty to protect the shareholders interests and, I’m sure, they were shareholders themselves. The shareholders voted and agreed they were ecstatic to sell the whole shebang to Elon at the price he was offering. At this point the board is history and none of them has any responsibility to the new owner(s).
There was news that Musk sold some Tesla stock the other day (about $4B worth). Since he is into the banks for som$12B, and the banks can’t peddle off those notes for much more than 50%, I wonder if Musk is going to buy some of that highly discounted debt. Financial engineering for fun and profit.
@Stormy Dragon: The board absolutely had a choice. If you expect Musk to ruin the company (which was widely forecast) then its obvious that driving the company into bankruptcy (which he is openly talking about a mere couple weeks after buying it) provides no value to shareholders at all. What good are shares worth $0? I’d argue their legal duty was to reject the offer when he changed his mind. I do not understand the thinking that says it’s a good idea to force someone to buy a company they don’t actually want (or many similar examples in our screwed up society). Why would anyone expect someone who doesn’t want the company to be a good steward of that organization?
That said, while I feel bad for Twitter employees and small shareholders, I still suspect the death of Twitter will be a good thing for our society overall. I just hope it doesn’t take SpaceX down with it.
Ukrainian forces are now in control of Kherson City centre.
Celebrations continue in darkness; with the graciousness and concern for civilians they are renowned for, Russian forces destroyed the electrical power lines on their way out.
@Kingdaddy: Whether planned or not…the destruction of Twitter closes off a huge injection point of Chinese and Russian malign influence into the US media market.
If I recall, he said he wanted to turn it into the American version of WeChat–which would be amazing (If Google could ever get their act together, they could do it with {insert current chat name here}, they could absolutely dominate messaging)
I’m not sure this is actually a good idea. The universal app is a thing in China because it’s nearly impossible to get new apps approved, so the only way to get new functionality is to graft it on to some already approved app. But absent that state imposed lack of competition, any app that tries to be everything to everyone will invariably end up doing nothing well and end up failing to a suite of apps each focusing on doing one of its pieces better.
Done properly–with planning and solid integration–it could easily be done. Google already has (or had) most of the important parts of WeChat.
Social feed? Plenty of those
Messaging? Yep
Wallet? Yep
Location information? Yep
Sharing location? Google used to have it, but turned it off.
Shopping? Yep
Transport? Partner with Uber, Lyft, etc., to integrate (just an API)
Hotels and travel? Partner with Expedia, etc. (API)
The board absolutely had a choice. If you expect Musk to ruin the company (which was widely forecast) then its obvious that driving the company into bankruptcy (which he is openly talking about a mere couple weeks after buying it) provides no value to shareholders at all.
If the company has already been sold (and at well above actual value) then the shareholders are no longer shareholders at that point, so whether it goes bankrupt at that point has no bearing on shareholder value.
Look, I agree that corporate boards SHOULD be responsible to other stakeholders (employees, customer, etc.) but at present they aren’t. And if you add in the fact Twitter was losing money even before Musk’s buyout, the board basically sold a white elephant for a huge premium and then left Musk and the banks holding the bag. The shareholders are probably ecstatic right now.
Yes, it COULD be done. The problem is that I don’t think there’s actually a market for it, outside places where people are forced into using it by an authoritarian government. Even in places like Japan or Korea, where people do everything on their phones, the super apps haven’t caught on in free societies. Only in places like China, Singapore, etc.
To put it blunt, if there were a US market for a super-app like WeChat or Grab, WeChat or Grab would already be filling it. The fact they’re not suggests to me they don’t think there is such a market.
@MarkedMan: I’m asking if twitter goes into bankruptcy, can they discharge those debts thru it. Legally, the language of their compensation deals puts Musk on the hook for them, but can he get out of paying them thru bankruptcy?
To put it blunt, if there were a US market for a super-app like WeChat or Grab, WeChat or Grab would already be filling it. The fact they’re not suggests to me they don’t think there is such a market.
Google just integrated their e-mail, chat, video chat, and group chat functions into one. They recently integrated new features into the payment platform, turning it from “Pay” to “Wallet”. It includes shopping, coupons, id cards, tickets, loyalty cards, and even digital car keys.
Google obviously thinks there’s a market for unified, bundled apps. It would be a small step to put the wallet inside the G-Mail app. With Twitter about to tank, it would be easy enough to add a social feed into there, too. And that’s probably already being discussed.
I’m not an apple user, but I’m betting that they have the same thing going on in their ecosystem.
@Kathy: “Therefore the Democratic leaders in the House should wrangle their party caucus to support Liz Cheney for the post.”
That would be fun, but pointless. But let’s say there’s a battle between Kevin and, say, MTG and neither has the votes in the congress to get across. Could the Dems find a handful of moderate Republicans who would coalesce around a sane Republican candidate and then take over the house with ten Republican votes and all the Ds?
Could the Dems find a handful of moderate Republicans who would coalesce around a sane Republican candidate and then take over the house with ten Republican votes and all the Ds?
They might not need 10–I saw a projection today that has the probable GOP majority at only five seats.
One hopes the internecine shitshow that’s sure to occur will fully occupy the Republicans and render them unable to inflict the full force of their imbecility on the nation.
@Just Another Ex-Republican: To repeat myself, the board that you are castigating sold the company at a tremendous price. An astounding price. At a time when it seemed that Musk, even as a shareholder, was driving down its value, day by day. To the now former shareholders, that board is comprised of heroes who saved their bacon. The new shareholders who, yes, are facing a $0 valuation are Musk and his personal investors. The original board is gone. If some members serve on a new board, they are now obligated to serve the new shareholders interests. Primarily Musk’s. He would have appointed them, in any case.
@OzarkHillbilly: I would assume their payouts were part of the acquisition. If there were any contingencies I would assume the funds were put in escrow. Only an idiot would have taken it in installments.
I may bore you a bit about this. Am currently swigging champagne, listening to the EFG London Jazz Festival, phoning cousins, and periodically shouting for sheer joy.
The Age of Exploration is a subject which has always fascinated me, and perhaps I can add a bit. I haven’t seen the show you mentioned though.
Cook’s expedition was the one where the issue was largely solved, but not with lime juice. It was sauerkraut. However even then it wasn’t really clear. Cook demanded several things, like scrubbing the bilge, daily (if at all possible) airing of bedding, dancing in fresh air, and by less over-cooking of the standard salt-pork, beef, and whatever. However they knew from that voyage that at least one of those things most definitely worked and from there it was but a process of narrowing it down, but they didn’t know why sauerkraut, or lime juice, worked until 1932.
What seemed to have happened to Scott is the issue had been so long “solved” they gave no thought to it when planning provisions. It was all about packing light, so they carried no canned veggies or fruits. I really takes but a trace to prevent the disease. So small a trace that Eskimos dodge it simply by consumption of freah meat that has been barely, if at all, cooked. Scott, on the other hand, travelled with canned pemmican, the lightest per-calorie food available.
There ARE no small Twitter shareholders anymore. Musk took the company private. Every single person who owned shares of twitter prior to the close no longer owns them and got $54.20 per share instead.
The only people who still own Twitter shares are people who were part of Musk’s deal, and the board of Twitter had no duty toward them until after the deal closed.
@MarkedMan: Only an idiot would have taken it in installments.
To paraphrase what I said to Beth, “Can you tell I have no experience with these things?” I literally don’t know how “golden parachutes” work. I just know of their existence. I’m just a dumb ass carpenter who never got anything more than a final check and a spot in the unemployment line.
People who get golden parachutes live in a whole ‘nother world than the one I live in.
I’ve no idea who owns what shares of Twitter any more. I know that 1) it’s no longer listed on any exchange, and 2) the board consists of St. Elon and his ego.
According to Harford, and I haven’t fact-checked it, the solution lay in lemons, not limes, as lemons have more vitamin C than limes.
Initially it seems the RN provided lemons grown in Sicily, then changed to limes grown in India by the XIX Century. Harford claims limes alone don’t prevent scurvy.
His thesis is that by then steamships dominated the Navy. Sail ships can be at sea as long as they have food and water. Steamships need to put in to port to replenish coal supplies (At least if you don’t want the ships to be enormous to be able to carry coal for voyages taking months).
Since ships went into ports for coal, they also got fresh food. Harford claims it was the more constant influx of fresh fruits and vegetables that kept scurvy at bay, rather than the lime rations while at sea.
Lastly, it seems Scott did bring lime juice for his trip. It just wasn’t enough to prevent scurvy, as they took a long voyage to Antarctica, and then on the trek over the continent to reach the South Pole.
Since I am now one of those technology workers that has lost his position due to poor planning and execution by the CEO where I worked (no, not Twitter… it’s endemic), I have some time on my hands.
Wait…So, you’re saying Mencius Moldbug’s idea to have a CEO dictator dude running the country could go horribly wrong?
Google just integrated their e-mail, chat, video chat, and group chat functions into one. They recently integrated new features into the payment platform, turning it from “Pay” to “Wallet”. It includes shopping, coupons, id cards, tickets, loyalty cards, and even digital car keys.
And you’ll note that e-mail is the only thing on that list where Google is considered a major player. Tacking chat, video, group chat, etc. into G-mail hasn’t lured anyone away from the single purpose apps everyone prefers for all those other things.
Since the entire House votes for the speaker, seems to me that if the Republicans don’t coalesce around one person, the Democrats could do some serious screwing around with them…
While I would love the Dems to pick some milquetoast back bencher Republican and inform him/her that they now have 210ish votes for speaker and then watch chaos unfold, I think it will not happen.
I could see a GOP/Q split, with about 20-40 moderate Democrats supporting McCarthy to keep the Q freaks sidelined. It depends on whether the Q caucus accepts half a loaf from McCarthy or tries to get a full loaf.
@Stormy Dragon: The non-Google options are dominant, and there’s no real need to move.
I do think that Google could brush off Google+ and release it now, and get a lot of traction because of the Twitter implosion.
But… I expect most of the services that G+ was built on are no longer there, as that was a decade ago. So, it wouldn’t be as easy as just redeploying it.
And the Circles were over complicated. Drop it to one circle and encourage multiple accounts.
(Circles was meant so you could expose different parts of your identity to different people through one account by defining your relationship(s) with them, and limiting visibility to friends, work-folk, etc. so if you do it right your nudes are not shared with your boss, just your office-crush and the cute barista or whatever. *If* you do it right.)
But if I were in charge there, I would have some engineers at least scoping out what it would take. A few of the core services that it was built on are definitely still there, or were replaced in a mostly backwards compatible way.
I am not sure what is most amusing, the fact that he’s yet again provided courtroom fodder with his inane ramblings, or the fact that he’s managed to get himself into legal hot water by lying.
Correct, they will use everything except the erectile tissue. I’m also going to require skin grafts from my leg and abdomen because there isn’t enough tissue. I was hoping to get a peritoneal pull through but I stupidly got a couple of minor hernias repaired a couple years ago and apparently the mesh and surgical techniques they use turn that hole area into a big scarred mess.
As for the nerves, I hope they don’t damage those. I’d really like some function post surgery. I’m hoping I get lucky like I did with my FFS and have wild but pleasant in my chin and mouth.
The defeat of scurvy in sailing ships of the RN was well documented, so his theory strikes me as very shallow rubbish. It really only takes a trace of C to prevent the disease so limes v lemons? There’s no effective difference between the two. The cure for early northern land explorers and native Americans in the tribes around the Great Lakes, who were also afflicted due to lack in available foods of the region, was a tea made from the needles of white cedar trees, which contain hardly any C compared to either.
First, OTB is giving me error message when I just use the normal Google Chrome browser, but I am typing this from an incognito Chrome window (OTB was also working fine surfing on my iPad), not sure what to make of that.
Next, it looks like Boebert will win, but it also sounds like it is not the end of the world if she wins her race. I do agree with the pundits who are shocked that she may only win by a margin of less than 2,000 votes, which is what, the population of just a few small towns in most states in the U.S., nothing for her to crow about but I am sure she will do her best.
I am also resigned that the House will technically be in control by the GOP, I say technically because I think the assumption that McCarthy says Jump and all the GOP members of the House say how high in unison is overly optimistic, as I have heard it can be like corralling cats when it comes to getting everyone on your team to agree with your plans.
Not to mention, that Hunter Biden and Fauci are not Clinton (who just turned out to be an irresistible target for the GOP to go after), and in the case of Hunter Biden I think a small handful of GOP members of the House (and all that is needed is a small # to agree with what I am about to say) will find it to be a bad look to go after the son of a sitting President, who has very publicly supported his son through good times and bad, and it is just an icky look for the GOP. I think internal polling will also show that Fauci is way more beloved by the general public than the GOP believes.
I sincerely believe that behind the scenes there will be some folks who can get it through the GOPs thick skulls that going after Hunter Biden and Fauci is not the path to the White House that they think it is. Many folks in the GOP claim that they only support going after H Biden and Fauci to keep Trump happy, but with Trump’s influence and popularity in general waning, I think McCarthy should count to 10 before going all in opening up these investigations.
Trump is not as scary as folks think he is, and there is a feeling not just amongst Liberals, that he might actually end up indicted before the year is up. McCarthy should start to distance himself from Trump.
McCarthy has a chance to be able to make the ask of some of the Democratic members of the House to support him when it comes to introducing a bill to help Americans, ensuring the Bill passes the House and makes it to the Senates desk, he can do this or go all in on still trying to please Trump, such an odious figure in Politics, that as we have seen this week, some members of the GOP feel that it is just not worth their time to try and satisfy him, Trump is just worth it.
I think this realization is slowly dawning (like sloth slowly dawning, lol) on some folks but who knows, not even two days after 01/06, some GOPers who said and did the right thing on that day were shockingly quick to go back grabbing their ankles to make Trump happy (yes Lindsey Graham, I am looking at you).
I can’t say I saw it coming, but I’m not at all surprised impostors and pranksters are making rather good use of their $8 tribute payment to the world’s richest billionaire.
On other tech-related stuff, I might just migrate to the work laptop if a) the HDMI-VGA adapter works and b) the nice tech support man can get my passwords to jump from the PC to the laptop.
The latter was an issue a few of years ago when they switched to a solid state hard drive. I had been assured all my log in info and passwords would be in the new one, only to find out that this was through a Google account.
I have a Google account, I’ve used Gmail as my only personal email for a long time. But I don’t mix my personal and work accounts. In my work phone, the work email is on Outlook rather than Gmail as is company policy.
So I made up a work Google account. I hope that will work.
Harford overlooked one very likely explanation: the polar explorers didn’t drink their lime juice. I can’t say I’d find it appealing in very cold weather.
I have been getting the daily newsletter from the Atlantic. Excerpts from a David Frum interview:
David: That’s what makes DeSantis’s subordination to Trump so striking. He has been very aggressive toward other targets. His message is that he’s a fighter; that was his closing ad in his gubernatorial-reelection campaign. He picks fights with the Walt Disney Company. He picks fights with school teachers. He picked fights with high-school students who wore masks in his presence. He’s willing to fight with just about everybody. But those people don’t have the job he wants. Donald Trump does, as the leader of the Republican Party. And so far, he has not done anything to challenge that job.
snip
David: The potential consequence of not speaking up is that he will just be overlooked. It’s quite possible that if the Republicans had had a better night on Tuesday, DeSantis might have been too intimidated ever to declare for the top job at all, and Trump would’ve won it unopposed. Now it looks like there’s more momentum to DeSantis challenging Trump.
But if you are going to challenge Trump, you have to fight him, because he’s going to fight. He’s going to call DeSantis names; he’s going to verbally abuse his loved ones and his children. That’s the Trump way. And if you just take it, you end up looking like a weak person in a party where strength is the thing they care about most.
snip
David: In the real world, the world we teach our children to live in, there’s a difference between strength and aggression. Strength is a moral quality adjoined to a sense of right, a sense of dignity. It’s adjoined to respect for others. But that’s not the world in which Trump plays politics.
In 2015, during the presidential race, he insulted Jeb Bush’s wife. Jeb Bush later stood on a debate stage beside Donald Trump and demanded that Donald Trump apologize. Trump refused. And Jeb Bush was left to stammer and yammer. That’s the game, and this is Ron DeSantis’s opponent.
DeSantis has to figure out how to look strong against that opponent so that the constituency he wants to win over will recognize his strength. They’re not looking for quiet dignity. They’re looking for more than that.
DeSantis is only 44, he would likely want to pass on 2024 and wait for 2028. But Trump, most likely, wants a fight and DeSantis will not be able to do that.
Nina Totenberg was interviewing one of the cofounders of the Federalist Society. At the beginning of the interview, he told her that the board has instructed him not to identify himself as a founder.
Found a pretty deep dive into the subject of the Scott expedition and it’s scurvy problem. It’s a bit more complex than I had thought it to be. The report was relying on canned pemmican was true, but Scott was hip to that problem, but wasn’t able to keep the fresh seal meat which had solved it for them previously.
If they had lemon juice it’s not mentioned here. As everybody knew the lemon juice was the old prevention it seems unlikely had had it and simply decided not to use it. However there is an explanation as to why Scott might have decided to leave it behind. Sometimes knowledge is lost, and indeed partially because it ceased to be a problem on steamships, it apparently was. A new (and very wrong) theory had taken hold and it doomed them.
A brief note to thank all the veterans in the group, wherever and whenever you served.
@Flat Earth Luddite:
Yes indeed.
What to do, what to do…. But I thought he only hired the best people.
Pobrecito.
@OzarkHillbilly:
And in related news, this is amusing:
http://www.nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/trump-truth-social-fake-apology-melania-hannity.html
The upcoming cage match between MAGA and the GOP establishment is going to be awesome to watch. It will be bad for the country it entertaining as hell for those of us who enjoy politics Al battles.
Trump is going to burn it all down. And I can’t wait
@OzarkHillbilly: The ideal situation for Warnock is if Trump declares and makes the election all about him, i.e. making a vote for Walker a vote for Trump. I think it would depress Repub turnout and energize the Dems
@MarkedMan:
Why would it depress Republican turn-out, especially MAGAs?
The R elites developing plan to replace one cult leader, trump and anoint another, DeSantis, has all the earmarks of a disaster in the making.
@Sleeping Dog:
Trump is really going after his heir apparent DeSantis. He pulled out the “desanctimonious” insult again and called DeSanctis disloyal and ungrateful last night.
@Sleeping Dog: Assuming a tiny majority in the House, January will be interesting when the Republicans are unable to agree on a Speaker.
One of the better observations on Twitter I’ve read:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2022/11/it-is-a-mathematical-certainty
As much as I’m no fan of Twitter personally, this isn’t creative destruction in action. Just destruction.
Meanwhile, the shitshow at twitter continues it’s downward spiral:
Move along now, nothing to see here…
But why, Elon? Twitter was actually turning a profit until you bought it. Admittedly a small profit, but it was there.
Now that will inspire confidence in advertisers.
Ouch. The Guardian gets in a dig of it’s own:
Speaking of shitshows: Reports of wounded soldiers being abandoned as Russia retreats from Kherson city
Sure. I’ll bet.
That sounds more like it
The great and powerful wizard of Oz…
@Kingdaddy: The summation really sums it up. Like a summation should:
ALEC wants to end freedom of speech: Rightwing group pushing US states for law blocking ‘political boycott’ of firms
Something tells me that only states that really can’t afford the inevitable legal headaches that will arise from such laws will pass them.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Don’t they believe in free enterprise?
@CSK: Only if it makes their corporate backers money. Everybody else can suck eggs.
It happened 3 days after I got married for the first time, an omen I should have paid attention to.
Let’s take a look at how well the pollster Trafalgar (relied upon heavily for both the 538 and RCP averages) performed in this cycle.
Georgia Senate
Trafalgar: Walker +3
Outcome: Warnock +0.9
Error: 3.9 points
PA Senate
Traflagar: Oz +2
Outcome: Fetterman +3.1
Error: 5.1
PA Governor
Trafalgar: Shapiro +5
Outcome: Shapiro +14
Error: 9.0
Michigan Governor
Trafalgar: Dixon +1
Outcome: Whitmer +10.6
Error: 11.6
Washington Senate
Trafalgar: Murray +0.6
Outcome: Murray +13.6
Error: 13.0
@CSK: It wouldn’t depress MAGAs but I sense Trump has reached his endless-drama-Queen expiration point with a significant number of everyday Republicans. (Significant in the event of a close election).
@OzarkHillbilly: Some joker called @EliLilly with a blue checkmark tweeted that all insulin was now free, I suspect it’s just a matter of time before Twitter gets sued.
Measles outbreak in Columbus, OH.
(emphasis added)
I wonder who the parents are going to blame? Surely not the people who deserve it.
@OzarkHillbilly: Exactly. The board is getting not nearly enough blame for this disaster. They knew how he was funding the purchase, and the destructive impact it would have. They also knew who Musk is, and how his stated intentions would drive advertisers and users from the platform.
In the latest season fo Cautionary Tales, Tim Harford had a multi-episode look at the race to reach the South Pole. It was good overall, with lots of info and detail, but the most interesting part is the last, where he discusses cases of scurvy in the British expedition.
These were Royal Navy officers. The Royal Navy famously discovered how to prevent scurvy in the late XVIII century, no? And the race to the Pole happened in 1912. How did anyone get scurvy?
It has to do with the vitamin C content of limes vs that of lemons. I’ll spare the narrative, and why steamships made for a healthier diet than sail ships. What I want is to check Harford’s claims.
Two in particular. One is how much vitamin C is in limes. The other is how much does heat destroy vitamin C.
While there are many foods that contain vitamin C, traditionally the richest are citrus fruits and tomatoes. I consume both, but mostly limes and cooked/processed tomatoes. I don’t think I’m deficient, but it doesn’t hurt to look.
.@Kingdaddy: But they made out like bandits. I wonder what affect, if any, the bankruptcy will have on their golden parachutes?
Now that the election is over, it’s safe to say, Slowing US inflation rate raises hopes cost of living crisis may have peaked.
@Kingdaddy:
Board had no choice: law says their duty us to the shareholders and the shareholders alone. And the shareholders made out like gangbusters here.
Who we should be looking at is the banks that financed this and if this was doing their duty to THEIR shareholders getting stuck with the bill fircthus mess
Is the US mail working for you guys? My delivery time has been inconsistent. A check I mailed ten days ago still hasn’t cleared. I received a postcard yesterday from a friend who visited a tourist site in Tennessee; it was postmarked 11/2 and arrived 11/10. Is this a local problem or have others noted the same thing?
@OzarkHillbilly:
St. Elon is going about it all wrong. A billionaire begging for $8, even from a large pool of people, is bad optics. Almost as bad as a billionaire begging for money (what?).
What he should do is give a gift of $8.05 each month to every person who signs up for the Twitter Blue check mark service. that way hundreds of millions will subscribe and the company can meet its goals in that respect.
Yes, he’ll lose a ton of money, like enough to barely notice, but he’ll drive share price up. And isn’t that the point?
@MarkedMan:
I can see that. In fact, I think it already happened, even in Georgia. Kemp and Raffensberger, trashed by Trump, won their races with very comfortable margins. Walker, praised to the skies by Trump, will probably lose.
@Kingdaddy: When I took corporations class in law school in the ’80s, I was taught that a corporation had 3 primary constituencies, its customers, its employees and its shareholders and that the role of the board was to manage these 3 interests for the benefit of the corporation as a whole. That was probably a progressive take even in the ’80s, but all signals since have been that the board’s only constituency is its shareholders and that the only objective measure of shareholder value is money as fast as you can make it. It creates very shortsighted decision making.
@CSK:
Or course he will and he may still get the nomination. This is an attempt by the R elites and the pundits that make up Conservatism Inc, to change the subject and move on.
There have been a couple of articles already comparing the failure of MAGA to the success of the Tea Party. A key difference between the two is that the TP was cooped by DC insiders and became a tool of the elites, while MAGA is trumps tool.
@Michael Cain:
Yup bring popcorn and beer.
Something that is probably beyond hope, is that a tiny R majority may result in the survival of the 1/6 committee, so that it can become a vehicle for the elites to destroy trump. At the moment R’s have no reason to fear crossing him and till he demonstrates control over MAGA, they never will.
Musk running Twitter into the ground through his incompetence and arrogance, while amusing, is not materially different from what we saw from 2017-2021 during the Trump administration.
Perhaps we can collectively learn a lesson here: There is no correlation between having money and having the competence to run a complex organization.
Money does not follow automatically from any level of work ethic, intelligence, good decisions, etc. It comes primarily from luck.
The random Powerball lottery winner this week is no different than getting a “small loan of $100 million”.
I the last 2 days, I have had 2 posts disappear into the ether. After clicking “Post Comment,” I’m not getting the green box that says the commented is being posted but a grey one that says the page is being reloaded and poof the comment disappears. Anyone else having this problem.?
@Slugger: All my bills show up right on time.
@OzarkHillbilly:
The Jacob Riis quote in action:
I’d look at one of my stonecutters hammering away at the rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet, at the hundred and first blow it would split in two, and I knew it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.
It took a long while to prepare the battlefield. Then the collapse happened.
https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1591069200281661442?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
@OzarkHillbilly:
It probably won’t have any if they are already paid out. It looks like a straight arms length transaction between equals with all sorts of lawyers involved. Musk/Twitter would have to prove some sort of massive fraud to be able to claw them back. If they are ongoing obligations they may be able to change or stop those.
@Slugger:
I have all sorts of problems. Especially if my usual carrier is on vacation. Then nothing gets delivered. I’ve taken to Fedex-ing bank deposits and other important things.
@Sleeping Dog: It’s happened to me a time or 2. What I’ve done is hit the back arrow at the top of my screen (firefox) and my comment reappears in the comment box. Then I’ll resubmit it and it goes thru just fine. At least, so far.
I wish there was a “War Refugee Day” honoring all those civilians who lost their lives or livelihood to the insane actions of governments all over the world.
All too often, this is the worst overlooked scar of war, and the repercussions are generational.
Hmmm… June 20th is “world refugee day”… but that doesn’t have the same impact. Maybe with the help of Amnesty International and the ACLU, this could get some traction.
Since I am now one of those technology workers that has lost his position due to poor planning and execution by the CEO where I worked (no, not Twitter… it’s endemic), I have some time on my hands.
@Tony W:
Can we get Elon by Fox News next? Please!!!???!!
@Beth: I would have thought it would take a while to make those payouts, maybe in installments. A million here a few million there… Can you tell I have absolutely no experience with money like that?
@Scott: Fortune favors the prepared mind.
@Liberal Capitalist: Sorry you lost your job. As a gypsy (union) carpenter I got used to being laid off. Eventually, the building is built. I learned to save a considerable chunk of every paycheck. Between that and my unemployment I never had a problem getting thru it (tho it did get nervous a time or 2). Most people aren’t prepared for it.
In the latest trumpian defeat (that’s like a Pyrrhic victory without the victory), much is being made that Benito’s hand-picked candidates did poorly, even when they won their race.
This brings to mind statements from a few people after the 2020 trumpian defeat. In particular I remember Christie wondering at the bad, terrible, no-good, quality of many of El Cheeto’s advisors and staff, seeing as how Benito purportedly only hires “the best people.”
At the time I joked that, “Hey, Christie. What does it mean he hired you?” Ha ha. But this points to a part of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Someone like Christie, and he’s not the only one, might validate the assertion “Benito hires only the best people,” by simply saying “Of course he does. He hired me.” Since it’s easier to see the mote in someone else’s eye than the beam in one’s own, then the Christies in Cheetoland are surprised to the point of actual shock the the terrible, horrible, incompetent, no-good, people the Head Cheeto picks as staff or advisors.
They seldom notice the beam in their eyes, though.
Last, keep in mind Harford’s dicutm: we may not all be card–carrying members of the Dunning-Kruger club, but we all visit the clubhouse from time to time.
@Kathy:
And if perchance Trump does, inadvertently, hire good people, he dumps them if they don’t kiss his ass, ass-kissing being the sole qualification for employment with Trump.
@Joe: An example of many good critiques of the hyperfocus on shareholder value:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2017/07/17/making-sense-of-shareholder-value-the-worlds-dumbest-idea/?sh=1dec89002a7e
@CSK: It helps for a woman to be easy on the eyes too.
Yet further proof of Trump’s endless racism and vulgarity: He called Glenn Youngkin “Young Kin” and added “sounds Chinese, doesn’t it?”
This was preceded by the standard infantile whine about how Youngkin owes all of his success to him, Trump.
I live in Washington (State) where balloting is all “by mail” and I looked at my County’s ballot returns by day and method received to evaluate the lag in reporting.
Bottom line: Ballots go out by mail, but the majority of voters (over 80%) use the (armored) ballot drop boxes rather than USPS to submit their ballot. There is a day delay in reporting voting results (so a ballot dropped off on Tuesday is reported as being dropped off, but the results aren’t reported/counted until the next day (Wednesday)).
The county has 551K registered voters, more than 5 or 6 states. On Tuesday election night, returns are reported for the mail ballots received up to some point that that day (maybe, could be day before), and for the drop boxes as of Monday night. The results do NOT include any of the ballots put into a drop box on Tuesday (election day) as the boxes (over 50) are emptied (with security, observers, etc) after 8PM and returned to the election HQ to be reported late the next day (4-8PM). On election day 63K ballots were received at drop boxes, and 8.5K by mail (obviously mailed prior) with 330K cumulative total ballots returned at that point.
Returns as a % of registered voters:
Nov 7 38.39% (82% drop box)
Nov 8 46.94% (77% drop box)
Nov 9 59.96% (88% drop box)
Nov 10 60.34% (additional all mail)
I believe a considerable number of the mailed ballots are military as the county has a very large Joint base.
* A few hundred handicapped voters go to the (one) election center for special assistance – so minor in-person voting.
Also most of the incumbent judges ran unopposed, but garnered 1.5-2% write-in votes.
@CSK:
The other thing I wonder is how they not notice how incompetent, ignorant, criminal, and all around deficient Benito is.
Some do, apparently. Mattis seems to. Tillerson did when he complained”He’s a fuc**ng moron.” But many more, inside and outside his circle, seem oblivious.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I think he has them around for scenic backdrop.
@OzarkHillbilly: This is a problem for me. In the past year, I have not received two bills resulting in not paying them and getting a dunning overdue statement the next month. I’m drawing up a schedule of my recurrent bills and checking to make sure that I’m not missing anything.
The US mail has been exemplary; is it deteriorated?
@Beth:
I have read that Jack Dorsey didn’t take a payout after the sell and instead reinvested in more Twitter stock. Wonder how many others on the board did as well??
@Kathy:
McMaster had unkind things to say about Trump, as did Gary Cohn, and John Kelly called him an idiot and referred to the White House as “crazy town.” Steve Bannon called him a 10-year-old.
I’m sure 99.9% of the people on staff, including his son-in-law, regarded him as a half–witted buffoon.
As for Melania, to her he’s just a permanent trick, although I assume his fucking days have dwindled down to almost nothing.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Yeah, but don’t shed a tear for my situation… I aggressively set aside money, so I fall into that multi-millionaire category.
However, not being 65, looking at health care, that could run me $90 K for me and the wife in just over 2 years.
And for that , as well as the new mortgage for buying the southern estate, I am giving serious consideration to returning to the workforce for a few years.
Lucky me that my skills are specific (like yours, as a carpenter) and there is usually a need for those with specific skills.
However… even with a huge buffer, hoping to live a long life become concerning as I have found that in semi-retirement money flows… no more correctly: just blows away like mad.
But I have this to say:
I was watching a re-run of Dharma and Greg, and in this episode, Dharma was building a relationship with Greg’s dying Grandmother.
It appeared that 1) Grandmother didn’t approve of her son’s choice of wives (which set up an interesting dichotomy with Darma and Kitty), 2) No one wanted to acknowledge the inevitability of Grandmother dying but instead talked around it, 3) Grandmother was loaded financially, and 4) Dharma was her usual bull-in-the-social-china-shop.
So I told you all that, so I could say this:
Grndmother, on her death bed, was having a conversation with Dharna, and they were talking about someone else who had millions. And she said:
“Oh Dharna… Just because you have a million dollars, that doesn’t make you a millionare.”
Call me insensitive and out of touch, but I know exactly what she means.
I will never break that glass ceiling between me and the “Millionaires”… I am frist generation money, and that means nothing more than living paycheck-to-paycheck. This is absolutely nothing compared to American generational wealth.
I can’t even say that I am wealth adjacent. Hell, I paid $100K in taxes in 2022… If I was really wealthy that NEVER would have happened!
But I have seen wealth, drove through the neighborhood. sat next to them on planes (they were slumming. the private jet was down).
funny that when we were kids we were spoon fed Scrooge McDuck and Richie Rich. It’s probably what kept us from killing the rich.
Yeah… weird mood. Now I gotta go call the IRS and politely ask why they still want some more $$$. Not saying I don’t want to pay the $500… just want to know where the miscalculation was made.
@Michael Cain: “Assuming a tiny majority in the House, January will be interesting when the Republicans are unable to agree on a Speaker.”
Since the entire House votes for the speaker, seems to me that if the Republicans don’t coalesce around one person, the Democrats could do some serious screwing around with them…
@OzarkHillbilly:
@BugManDan:
Yeah, I mean they can structure these things all different sorts of ways depending (mostly) on how they want the tax ramifications to play out. All that stuff is way above my paygrade though.
It’s also possible that some of them galaxy brained themselves by dumping money into company stock thinking Musk was going to do something profound.
What wouldn’t shock me is if Musk runs it into the ground and it goes to bankruptcy that Dorsey and some consortium buys it (and the wreckage of a bank or two fingers crossed) for pennies on the dollar. There’s some value to the Twitter brand and IP that someone could theoretically restore. It just won’t be Musk or some wild eyed idiot like him.
One thing I want to know is how badly this ends up hurting Tesla. Depending on his financing agreements and how bad this blows up his financing partners Tesla could take a substantial hit. Someone in my friends group also mentioned SpaceX, but I’m not sure he put up any of that stock or if anyone (NASA, Boeing, the other vanity rocket companies) would let that fail.
In the good, amazing, wonderful, news department, I received my insurance pre-approval letter last night. So as long as I don’t get Covid right before, I’m good to go for Surgery on 12/8. I can’t begin to express just how excited I am. Because insurance companies are required to be insane, the pre-approval included “Amputation Penis Complete – 1.0 Unit”. So, setting aside for a second that it’s not entirely an “amputation” it’s more of a, lets say, “upcycling”. Anyway, how many penises does Blue Shield think I need upcycled?
@wr:
Hm. If the entire House votes, then the Democrats should bow to the inevitable and agree to vote for a Republican.
Note how it’s been mentioned the Speaker need not be a sitting House member (you all see where I’m going with this). Therefore the Democratic leaders in the House should wrangle their party caucus to support Liz Cheney for the post.
@Slugger: Can’t you just feel DeJoy?
Seriously, ever since that asshole took over there has been a decided worsening of service there. (he made several changes, such as no more overtime, downsizing sorting facilities, etc) A friend of mine had a massive stroke while in Springfield for business. I sent her a card with some pretty pictures I had taken (she was very much an outdoorsy person). It took over a month for it to get to her rehab facility and by the time it did she had already been transported back to Sullivan where her home was. It was finally returned to me 2 months after that. So, in total it took 3+ months to travel the 150 miles down there and the 150 back.
I do most of my bill paying on line and I know when things are due. So I am not affected by a bill showing up late. I did get a surprise notice from a collection agency for a med bill I am certain I never received. At the time I put it down to the sloppiness of med industry billing procedures but maybe it was the USPS.
@Beth:
What gets me about this whole debacle is just how short-sighted Musk is being. He’s shooting himself in the foot (with a flame-thrower).
Early on in the process–aside from the “free speech” stuff–Musk laid out some interesting ideas of where to take the platform. If I recall, he said he wanted to turn it into the American version of WeChat–which would be amazing (If Google could ever get their act together, they could do it with {insert current chat name here}, they could absolutely dominate messaging).
While Musk is CEO of SpaceX, it’s actually run by Gwynne Shotwell. And she does a damn fine job of it. The smartest decision he made was putting her in that position, and making it stick.
Musk without a foil is just idiocy run amok.
@Beth:
Congrats!
Heh, thanx for that chuckle.
@Kingdaddy: The board saw the company sell for twice its value or more. That is a hell of a return for the shareholders. It’s a private company now. If it has a board still, it’s one that Musk chose.
@Slugger:
Funny that you mention TN, because I traded in a phone (shipped from CA on 10/21) and while it seemed to be moving along just fine when it hit TN it bounced around from one cities Annex/Processing site to another (at least 3 dif locations in TN) and seemed to get stuck there. No updates since 11/01, then yesterday I get an email from Google that they received my phone and I am getting the full trade-in value (this returned $350 to my card, hence why I was eager to for the return to be completed).
However, the USPS site is still stuck showing me (as of this morning): Moving Through Network In Transit, Arriving Late November 1, 2022
I blame Trump and the GOP’s efforts to fork over the USPS for why the updates on the USPS tracking page may not match the reality on the ground.
Happy Veteran’s Day folks, and have a wonderful Friday. I am working (from home), but hey, it is Friday so there is that. Take Care everyone and stay warm (it is finally chilly willy in the Bay Area)!
@OzarkHillbilly: I doubt golden parachutes factor into it. They sold the company. They had a duty to protect the shareholders interests and, I’m sure, they were shareholders themselves. The shareholders voted and agreed they were ecstatic to sell the whole shebang to Elon at the price he was offering. At this point the board is history and none of them has any responsibility to the new owner(s).
@Kathy:
There is no share price. Or rather, it’s whatever Musk can convince investors it is. But it’s no longer set in the trading floor.
There was news that Musk sold some Tesla stock the other day (about $4B worth). Since he is into the banks for som$12B, and the banks can’t peddle off those notes for much more than 50%, I wonder if Musk is going to buy some of that highly discounted debt. Financial engineering for fun and profit.
@Stormy Dragon: The board absolutely had a choice. If you expect Musk to ruin the company (which was widely forecast) then its obvious that driving the company into bankruptcy (which he is openly talking about a mere couple weeks after buying it) provides no value to shareholders at all. What good are shares worth $0? I’d argue their legal duty was to reject the offer when he changed his mind. I do not understand the thinking that says it’s a good idea to force someone to buy a company they don’t actually want (or many similar examples in our screwed up society). Why would anyone expect someone who doesn’t want the company to be a good steward of that organization?
That said, while I feel bad for Twitter employees and small shareholders, I still suspect the death of Twitter will be a good thing for our society overall. I just hope it doesn’t take SpaceX down with it.
Ukrainian forces are now in control of Kherson City centre.
Celebrations continue in darkness; with the graciousness and concern for civilians they are renowned for, Russian forces destroyed the electrical power lines on their way out.
@Kingdaddy: Whether planned or not…the destruction of Twitter closes off a huge injection point of Chinese and Russian malign influence into the US media market.
Thank You St Musk
@Mu Yixiao:
I’m not sure this is actually a good idea. The universal app is a thing in China because it’s nearly impossible to get new apps approved, so the only way to get new functionality is to graft it on to some already approved app. But absent that state imposed lack of competition, any app that tries to be everything to everyone will invariably end up doing nothing well and end up failing to a suite of apps each focusing on doing one of its pieces better.
@Stormy Dragon:
Done properly–with planning and solid integration–it could easily be done. Google already has (or had) most of the important parts of WeChat.
Social feed? Plenty of those
Messaging? Yep
Wallet? Yep
Location information? Yep
Sharing location? Google used to have it, but turned it off.
Shopping? Yep
Transport? Partner with Uber, Lyft, etc., to integrate (just an API)
Hotels and travel? Partner with Expedia, etc. (API)
@Just Another Ex-Republican:
If the company has already been sold (and at well above actual value) then the shareholders are no longer shareholders at that point, so whether it goes bankrupt at that point has no bearing on shareholder value.
Look, I agree that corporate boards SHOULD be responsible to other stakeholders (employees, customer, etc.) but at present they aren’t. And if you add in the fact Twitter was losing money even before Musk’s buyout, the board basically sold a white elephant for a huge premium and then left Musk and the banks holding the bag. The shareholders are probably ecstatic right now.
For what it’s worth, I have no idea the backup/basis for this:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/00e305e334f2f1ec3cb964463cb0ed3058cbfbe68b26b727277dd809f3274cf3.jpg
@Mu Yixiao:
Yes, it COULD be done. The problem is that I don’t think there’s actually a market for it, outside places where people are forced into using it by an authoritarian government. Even in places like Japan or Korea, where people do everything on their phones, the super apps haven’t caught on in free societies. Only in places like China, Singapore, etc.
@Stormy Dragon:
To put it blunt, if there were a US market for a super-app like WeChat or Grab, WeChat or Grab would already be filling it. The fact they’re not suggests to me they don’t think there is such a market.
@MarkedMan: I’m asking if twitter goes into bankruptcy, can they discharge those debts thru it. Legally, the language of their compensation deals puts Musk on the hook for them, but can he get out of paying them thru bankruptcy?
@Stormy Dragon:
Google just integrated their e-mail, chat, video chat, and group chat functions into one. They recently integrated new features into the payment platform, turning it from “Pay” to “Wallet”. It includes shopping, coupons, id cards, tickets, loyalty cards, and even digital car keys.
Google obviously thinks there’s a market for unified, bundled apps. It would be a small step to put the wallet inside the G-Mail app. With Twitter about to tank, it would be easy enough to add a social feed into there, too. And that’s probably already being discussed.
I’m not an apple user, but I’m betting that they have the same thing going on in their ecosystem.
@Kathy: “Therefore the Democratic leaders in the House should wrangle their party caucus to support Liz Cheney for the post.”
That would be fun, but pointless. But let’s say there’s a battle between Kevin and, say, MTG and neither has the votes in the congress to get across. Could the Dems find a handful of moderate Republicans who would coalesce around a sane Republican candidate and then take over the house with ten Republican votes and all the Ds?
@wr: No.
@wr:
They might not need 10–I saw a projection today that has the probable GOP majority at only five seats.
One hopes the internecine shitshow that’s sure to occur will fully occupy the Republicans and render them unable to inflict the full force of their imbecility on the nation.
@Just Another Ex-Republican: To repeat myself, the board that you are castigating sold the company at a tremendous price. An astounding price. At a time when it seemed that Musk, even as a shareholder, was driving down its value, day by day. To the now former shareholders, that board is comprised of heroes who saved their bacon. The new shareholders who, yes, are facing a $0 valuation are Musk and his personal investors. The original board is gone. If some members serve on a new board, they are now obligated to serve the new shareholders interests. Primarily Musk’s. He would have appointed them, in any case.
@wr:
No, then we’d have Pelosi back and the Republicans screaming. It would sound like heaven.
@OzarkHillbilly: I would assume their payouts were part of the acquisition. If there were any contingencies I would assume the funds were put in escrow. Only an idiot would have taken it in installments.
The flags fly in Kherson!
I may bore you a bit about this. Am currently swigging champagne, listening to the EFG London Jazz Festival, phoning cousins, and periodically shouting for sheer joy.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I texted a good friend about the good news. His response? “Make sure to leave a good tip for the Doctor!” I chortled.
@Kathy: Re: Scurvy.
The Age of Exploration is a subject which has always fascinated me, and perhaps I can add a bit. I haven’t seen the show you mentioned though.
Cook’s expedition was the one where the issue was largely solved, but not with lime juice. It was sauerkraut. However even then it wasn’t really clear. Cook demanded several things, like scrubbing the bilge, daily (if at all possible) airing of bedding, dancing in fresh air, and by less over-cooking of the standard salt-pork, beef, and whatever. However they knew from that voyage that at least one of those things most definitely worked and from there it was but a process of narrowing it down, but they didn’t know why sauerkraut, or lime juice, worked until 1932.
What seemed to have happened to Scott is the issue had been so long “solved” they gave no thought to it when planning provisions. It was all about packing light, so they carried no canned veggies or fruits. I really takes but a trace to prevent the disease. So small a trace that Eskimos dodge it simply by consumption of freah meat that has been barely, if at all, cooked. Scott, on the other hand, travelled with canned pemmican, the lightest per-calorie food available.
@Just Another Ex-Republican:
There ARE no small Twitter shareholders anymore. Musk took the company private. Every single person who owned shares of twitter prior to the close no longer owns them and got $54.20 per share instead.
The only people who still own Twitter shares are people who were part of Musk’s deal, and the board of Twitter had no duty toward them until after the deal closed.
To paraphrase what I said to Beth, “Can you tell I have no experience with these things?” I literally don’t know how “golden parachutes” work. I just know of their existence. I’m just a dumb ass carpenter who never got anything more than a final check and a spot in the unemployment line.
People who get golden parachutes live in a whole ‘nother world than the one I live in.
@wr:
The one declared contender is Scalise.
But, yes, what you propose could happen if ten or so sane Republicans served in the House.
@Beth: Heh. Again.
@Stormy Dragon:
I’ve no idea who owns what shares of Twitter any more. I know that 1) it’s no longer listed on any exchange, and 2) the board consists of St. Elon and his ego.
@dazedandconfused:
According to Harford, and I haven’t fact-checked it, the solution lay in lemons, not limes, as lemons have more vitamin C than limes.
Initially it seems the RN provided lemons grown in Sicily, then changed to limes grown in India by the XIX Century. Harford claims limes alone don’t prevent scurvy.
His thesis is that by then steamships dominated the Navy. Sail ships can be at sea as long as they have food and water. Steamships need to put in to port to replenish coal supplies (At least if you don’t want the ships to be enormous to be able to carry coal for voyages taking months).
Since ships went into ports for coal, they also got fresh food. Harford claims it was the more constant influx of fresh fruits and vegetables that kept scurvy at bay, rather than the lime rations while at sea.
Lastly, it seems Scott did bring lime juice for his trip. It just wasn’t enough to prevent scurvy, as they took a long voyage to Antarctica, and then on the trek over the continent to reach the South Pole.
@OzarkHillbilly: I can’t see how an argument for a fiduciary responsibility to entities other than shareholders and officers would work.
@Liberal Capitalist:
Wait…So, you’re saying Mencius Moldbug’s idea to have a CEO dictator dude running the country could go horribly wrong?
Gee, it sounded like such a promising idea.
Trump is such a moron. He’s just gotten himself into yet more legal trouble:
http://www.rawstory.com/trumps-startling-confession-made-it-into-a-florida-courtroom-in-only-24-hours-report/
He’ll never learn to keep his big, stupid mouth shut.
@CSK:
Cut him some slack.
You know when you have diarrhea you just have to go, whether or not it’s convenient? Benito’s is the oral type. he just has to go.
Poor man child. Such a chronic, permanent, lifelong, incurable condition.
@Beth: But don’t they need to use the tip?
I thought it was like the story of Native Americans using every part of the buffalo.
Anyway, I hope your 1.0 Unit is appropriately repurposed as required to build Genitals 2.0.
@Mu Yixiao:
And you’ll note that e-mail is the only thing on that list where Google is considered a major player. Tacking chat, video, group chat, etc. into G-mail hasn’t lured anyone away from the single purpose apps everyone prefers for all those other things.
@wr:
While I would love the Dems to pick some milquetoast back bencher Republican and inform him/her that they now have 210ish votes for speaker and then watch chaos unfold, I think it will not happen.
I could see a GOP/Q split, with about 20-40 moderate Democrats supporting McCarthy to keep the Q freaks sidelined. It depends on whether the Q caucus accepts half a loaf from McCarthy or tries to get a full loaf.
@Gustopher:
The skin and the glans are preserved. I assume the neural fibers and vasculature as well, at least in part.
@Kathy:
Ah! There’s the rub!
@Stormy Dragon: The non-Google options are dominant, and there’s no real need to move.
I do think that Google could brush off Google+ and release it now, and get a lot of traction because of the Twitter implosion.
But… I expect most of the services that G+ was built on are no longer there, as that was a decade ago. So, it wouldn’t be as easy as just redeploying it.
And the Circles were over complicated. Drop it to one circle and encourage multiple accounts.
(Circles was meant so you could expose different parts of your identity to different people through one account by defining your relationship(s) with them, and limiting visibility to friends, work-folk, etc. so if you do it right your nudes are not shared with your boss, just your office-crush and the cute barista or whatever. *If* you do it right.)
But if I were in charge there, I would have some engineers at least scoping out what it would take. A few of the core services that it was built on are definitely still there, or were replaced in a mostly backwards compatible way.
@charon: I wonder how Republicans will go about attempting to disenfranchise young voters?
Who would have thought that young people, particularly young women, would be so upset about having fewer rights than their parents? /s
Meant to say this much earlier but got distracted: Good for you.
Went thru shoulder surgery recently, several neural fibers got severed. Assume nothing.
@CSK:
That is hilarious.
I am not sure what is most amusing, the fact that he’s yet again provided courtroom fodder with his inane ramblings, or the fact that he’s managed to get himself into legal hot water by lying.
@Jen:
Yup. He just had to take credit for DeSantis’s win in 2018. Talk about going from the frying pan into the fire.
@Gustopher:
@Kathy:
@OzarkHillbilly:
Correct, they will use everything except the erectile tissue. I’m also going to require skin grafts from my leg and abdomen because there isn’t enough tissue. I was hoping to get a peritoneal pull through but I stupidly got a couple of minor hernias repaired a couple years ago and apparently the mesh and surgical techniques they use turn that hole area into a big scarred mess.
As for the nerves, I hope they don’t damage those. I’d really like some function post surgery. I’m hoping I get lucky like I did with my FFS and have wild but pleasant in my chin and mouth.
@Kathy:
The defeat of scurvy in sailing ships of the RN was well documented, so his theory strikes me as very shallow rubbish. It really only takes a trace of C to prevent the disease so limes v lemons? There’s no effective difference between the two. The cure for early northern land explorers and native Americans in the tribes around the Great Lakes, who were also afflicted due to lack in available foods of the region, was a tea made from the needles of white cedar trees, which contain hardly any C compared to either.
First, OTB is giving me error message when I just use the normal Google Chrome browser, but I am typing this from an incognito Chrome window (OTB was also working fine surfing on my iPad), not sure what to make of that.
Next, it looks like Boebert will win, but it also sounds like it is not the end of the world if she wins her race. I do agree with the pundits who are shocked that she may only win by a margin of less than 2,000 votes, which is what, the population of just a few small towns in most states in the U.S., nothing for her to crow about but I am sure she will do her best.
I am also resigned that the House will technically be in control by the GOP, I say technically because I think the assumption that McCarthy says Jump and all the GOP members of the House say how high in unison is overly optimistic, as I have heard it can be like corralling cats when it comes to getting everyone on your team to agree with your plans.
Not to mention, that Hunter Biden and Fauci are not Clinton (who just turned out to be an irresistible target for the GOP to go after), and in the case of Hunter Biden I think a small handful of GOP members of the House (and all that is needed is a small # to agree with what I am about to say) will find it to be a bad look to go after the son of a sitting President, who has very publicly supported his son through good times and bad, and it is just an icky look for the GOP. I think internal polling will also show that Fauci is way more beloved by the general public than the GOP believes.
I sincerely believe that behind the scenes there will be some folks who can get it through the GOPs thick skulls that going after Hunter Biden and Fauci is not the path to the White House that they think it is. Many folks in the GOP claim that they only support going after H Biden and Fauci to keep Trump happy, but with Trump’s influence and popularity in general waning, I think McCarthy should count to 10 before going all in opening up these investigations.
Trump is not as scary as folks think he is, and there is a feeling not just amongst Liberals, that he might actually end up indicted before the year is up. McCarthy should start to distance himself from Trump.
McCarthy has a chance to be able to make the ask of some of the Democratic members of the House to support him when it comes to introducing a bill to help Americans, ensuring the Bill passes the House and makes it to the Senates desk, he can do this or go all in on still trying to please Trump, such an odious figure in Politics, that as we have seen this week, some members of the GOP feel that it is just not worth their time to try and satisfy him, Trump is just worth it.
I think this realization is slowly dawning (like sloth slowly dawning, lol) on some folks but who knows, not even two days after 01/06, some GOPers who said and did the right thing on that day were shockingly quick to go back grabbing their ankles to make Trump happy (yes Lindsey Graham, I am looking at you).
I can’t say I saw it coming, but I’m not at all surprised impostors and pranksters are making rather good use of their $8 tribute payment to the world’s richest billionaire.
On other tech-related stuff, I might just migrate to the work laptop if a) the HDMI-VGA adapter works and b) the nice tech support man can get my passwords to jump from the PC to the laptop.
The latter was an issue a few of years ago when they switched to a solid state hard drive. I had been assured all my log in info and passwords would be in the new one, only to find out that this was through a Google account.
I have a Google account, I’ve used Gmail as my only personal email for a long time. But I don’t mix my personal and work accounts. In my work phone, the work email is on Outlook rather than Gmail as is company policy.
So I made up a work Google account. I hope that will work.
@dazedandconfused:
Harford overlooked one very likely explanation: the polar explorers didn’t drink their lime juice. I can’t say I’d find it appealing in very cold weather.
That’s why I want to check on his facts.
I have been getting the daily newsletter from the Atlantic. Excerpts from a David Frum interview:
snip
snip
DeSantis is only 44, he would likely want to pass on 2024 and wait for 2028. But Trump, most likely, wants a fight and DeSantis will not be able to do that.
@charon: Oops, wrong thread, I wanted this in the elections thread. Oh well.
So this is a bit bonkers.
Nina Totenberg was interviewing one of the cofounders of the Federalist Society. At the beginning of the interview, he told her that the board has instructed him not to identify himself as a founder.
All apparently part of an internal brouhaha because he signed on to a brief saying that the independent state legislature doctrine is horseshit (paraphrasing). https://twitter.com/lawofruby/status/1591165770653802497?t=xDiNJ-J63LUZDpNxKzUG0A&s=09
@Kathy:
Found a pretty deep dive into the subject of the Scott expedition and it’s scurvy problem. It’s a bit more complex than I had thought it to be. The report was relying on canned pemmican was true, but Scott was hip to that problem, but wasn’t able to keep the fresh seal meat which had solved it for them previously.
If they had lemon juice it’s not mentioned here. As everybody knew the lemon juice was the old prevention it seems unlikely had had it and simply decided not to use it. However there is an explanation as to why Scott might have decided to leave it behind. Sometimes knowledge is lost, and indeed partially because it ceased to be a problem on steamships, it apparently was. A new (and very wrong) theory had taken hold and it doomed them.