Happy Friday everyone! Hope you had a good week so far. It’s Veterans Day, so thanks to all who serve/have served.
This is my favorite song.
Judge orders Alex Jones to pay $473 million more to Sandy Hook families
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/11/10/alex-jones-sandy-hook-infowars/
Ongoing…
US midterm elections 2022: Senate and House remain in balance as counting continues – live
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2022/nov/10/midterm-elections-2022-results-senate-house-us-democrats-republicans-live-updates-latest-news
Ugh.
Colorado Republican Lauren Boebert locked in tight race against Democrat
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/10/colorado-republican-lauren-boebert-tight-race-against-democrat-adam-frisch-house
Watching Twitter burn in real time:
It’s like car crash you can’t help but look away from…
Elon Musk scraps Twitter’s work from home policy
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/10/elon-musk-scraps-twitter-work-home-staff
There is literally no point to all this other than feeding Putin’s ego.
Ukraine live briefing: U.S. says some 200,000 Russian and Ukrainian troops killed or wounded; Kyiv advances on Kherson
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/10/russia-ukraine-war-latest-updates/
Stonks!
Dow surges 1,000 points in biggest rally since 2020 after a lighter-than-expected inflation report
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/09/stock-market-futures-open-to-close-news.html
Sprots!
Brittney Griner moving to Russian penal colony; exact location unknown
https://www.espn.com/wnba/story/_/id/34982248/brittney-griner-moves-russian-penal-colony-exact-location-unknown
Ah Florida.
Bodycam video shows Columbia County deputy mistake cane for firearm, arrest visually-impaired man
https://www.firstcoastnews.com/article/news/local/body-camera-columbia-county-police-florida-blind-man-visually-impaired-cane-gun/77-104ddf1e-b362-414a-8efb-20c145085984
Have a great weekend!
In more Florida news, the Sun Sentinel summed up post-midterms Florida as a “crimson hellscape” before backtracking and rewording that as landscape. I think it’s refreshing when media give us the unvarnished truth.
Local perspective: Hellscape is, indeed, the correct term.
It was a very bad night for one Floridian, the Donald, and a very good one for another, DeSantis. On the one hand I hope he has the fortitude to crush Trumpism by the time 2024 rolls around. On the other, DeSantis is sane (if right-wing), young, energetic, no doubt has lots of ideas that would form a cohesive West Wing political program, so like Pence, he’s the far more dangerous of the two.
…I forget which bits of this we’ve sort of been over already…partly because it’s hard to keep up…it sounds like at this point they may have re-instated the “official” badge on some accounts since the verified-by-subscription thing went exactly like you thought it would
…mario giving everyone the finger was another good one…but I guess there’s a couple of ways it isn’t as funny to me…one being that (implausible as it seems as a principle motivation) the demise of kinja in the sense of the sub-blogs & the crowd they drew makes me sorry that probably the same thing happens to twitter…& I don’t really use twitter that way but that includes some genuinely useful networks of people doing good stuff…so that sucks…but there’s also this part?
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/10/does-twitter-have-any-employees-left-who-remember-that-the-company-is-under-a-strict-consent-decree-with-the-ftc/
…which when you add in the people headed out the door
…techbro dude seems to be in all kinds of a hurry to flood his dumpster fire with gasoline…& it’s not like the kinds of bad actors who might be in a position to take advantage of technical vulnerabilities don’t in some cases also have an axe to grind with some users of twitter in various places
…so I know it’s a good way into tinfoil-hat territory & all…but I’m finding the funny side kinda gets the shine taken off by the possibility that someone(s) getting hurt or killed behind this performative ass-hattery is…non-zero?
…I mean…I’d rather be a foil-hat than an asshat given the option…but a third choice would be preferable…so if that’s just me maybe that’s for the best?
Twitter’s data has proven to be more secure than, say, every right-wing wannabe replacement’s. So, I agree there’s a non-zero chance that someone could get hurt out of Elon’s corner cutting, I think that was always true to begin with on every social platform. This may raise that risk? But chuds also don’t usually have the financial power to go buy $20,000 worth of data, either, or the expertise to sort through it let alone understand what they’re looking for.
It’s really fascinating to watch two parallel conflagrations play out in real-time: Apartheid Clyde not realizing even for a second why verification was needed in the first place AND the crypto world falling apart so fast that thumb-sucking libertarians are shrieking for government help. I know the word “regulation” is basically a slur these days — thanks Reagan, hope hell is hot today! — but it’s amazing that they’re so ignorant of history to understand WHY some guard rails exist.
…I guess on the getting-hurt front I was thinking more like state-level bad actors…the saudis & the iranians as a for instance…they don’t give much of a fuck about rights, be they privacy or human…& they like to suppress dissent…& twitter is a place people have done (or organized) a bunch of that sort of thing
…but on the other thing…mr richest-fuckwit-in-the-world (&/or tesla) holds a bunch of crypto…including the supposed to be a joke doge coin…& just offloaded that extra $4billion of tesla shares that I guess fill the last part of the equity he sunk into the twitter deal…so thos are dwindling assets…plus he’s pulled staff out of tesla to do who-knows-what-the-fuck at twitter
…if I were the sort of person who owned stock in tesla I’d be talking to some lawyers about his fiduciary duty about now…twitter shareholders got a bigger payday than they had a right to expect but he’s been busily setting fire to tesla investors’ profits
…it might not be “worth it” but it would be truly satisfying if he got all his toys taken away before this is done burning out?
Gotcha, yeah, I’m sure that was part of their investment with Musk in the first place! But they also have billion-dollar budgets to suss that stuff out in far blacker markets, so I dunno how much it raises the threat profile.
…my guess would be that margin correlates pretty closely to the quality of the job those recently-laid-off-or-resigned engineers & security people were doing keeping people out of twitter users’ business
…I wouldn’t really be able to guage that…but it seems like the consensus was that there needed to be more of them rather than less to actually get that job done as fully as is practicable…so they were managing to do more with less in a way that suggests that may actually have been pretty good at what they did…& that isn’t getting done any more…so who knows who might have scraped what out of where…could just be me getting overly worst-case-scenario about it all…but I think it’s at least possible that it gave a leg up to people who wouldn’t be averse to using it to put boots on necks?
Lockheed Martini is sending me.
…the “Nintendo America” account that had mario flipping the bird was @nintendoofus…which I also thought verged on the sublime?
Since Elmo’s security team at Twitter quit yesterday, he’s in danger of violating an FTC consent order, which could mean millions in fines (possibly up to $1.5 billion).
It’s stunning to watch him flounder helplessly. From a PR perspective (much less a business one) demonstrating his incompetence is lethal. Much of Elmo’s personal wealth is predicated on his overinflated “genius” hype. Puncturing that bubble and reveal his inept bungling is going to hit him on a lot of levels.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/10/twitter-security-resignations/
Follow-up to the Columbia County arrest: Both deputies have been punished with suspensions and the sergeant has been demoted. They also have to go through mandatory civil rights training (which should be a prerequisite for the job, I would think, but rednecks gonna redneck). It’s not as extensive as it should have been but it’s something.
https://www.actionnewsjax.com/news/local/columbia-county/columbia-sheriff-deputies-involved-arrest-legally-blind-man-disciplined/TCNCHFVQPZCUPKM2W5JXRUPQ5Y/
I have to assume Mr. Hodges has retained counsel and plans to sue the fuck out of Columbia County, so there’s that, too.
…in the clip I saw he seemed like he was pretty squared away in terms of knowing his rights, their wrongs & the pertinent information
…assuming he got the badge & vehicle numbers he repeatedly requested I’m guessing whatever lawyer he could get would be starting from a decent brief?
Honestly the county is just going to have to write him a substantial check. You put this guy in front of a jury and he explains that he is an upstanding citizen who was leaving JURY DUTY when this completely unwarranted harassment started, and they are going to award him anything he wants. His lawyer just needs to call up and say “This is the number we want — overnight me a certified check.”
On one hand, I’m often surprised that police don’t have a handle on the most basic 4th Amd shit. On the other, I often think they’re hiring guys who intentionally ignore that stuff because criminals shouldn’t have rights or some bullshit.
TLDR, they’re hiring the wrong guys.
The whole exchange was stupefying. The deputy saying the man’s cane looked like a gun was bad enough (it didn’t) but at the point where he said he was visually impaired and it was his assistive device, any normal person would have said, “Oh, okay, I’m sorry to bother you.” But she kept doubling down, and then the sergeant threw gas on the fire.
There were so many off-ramps to avoid this, and both deputies always took the worst option.
Wait, that knucklehead paid $44b for a company that only bring in $5b/yr? No wonder he’s in a rush to slash payroll.
…I could be wrong but I believe on a net basis twitter has lost money more years than not for as long as it’s existed
…so…it might be arguably a dumber deal than even that makes it sound like?
What’s really, really dumb is that Tesla’s stock market value is overwhelmingly speculative, and the worse he looks the more likely that value craters. It’s based on a fever dream that he’ll own the EV market, but that’s not happening.
Tesla’s market cap is over twice as much as Toyota, even though Toyota’s total income is vastly higher — the last quarter Toyota’s net income was 100x greater. Toyota has vastly more physical capital, vastly more engineers, vastly more R&D capacity. And Tesla’s market power gets even tinier as multiple major players along with Toyota starting competing.
It wouldn’t take a lot to see Tesla’s earnings erode, and Musk’s self-destructive leadership and distraction with Twitter is going to make a lot of customers — especially fleet buyers — walk away from multi-year commitments and really start hurting the bottom line. Which would drive a lot of that speculation to switch to panic selling when people decide the stock is way overpriced. Tesla is headed toward something like a “merger” with someone like GM or Ford for a small fraction of its current value and Tesla becoming nothing more than a legacy name like Buick.
…I don’t have all the details…& the math would likely prove beyond me if I did…but I know enough of his tesla stock is leveraged against loans that they made it clear he’d hit the limit for using the stuff as collateral…on the basis it was a volume that risked enough destabilisation to collapse the stock price & tank the firm
…& as the stock price falls the amount that a given percentage could be converted to if they called the loan(s) drops…so depending on the paperwork he’d either have to find extra cash or sell a larger percentage than he had to stake to begin with…either of which is a forced sale of enough stock to move the price…& you’re back into “doom loop” territory
…so…there’d be sound reasons to suggest that forcing him out…or at the very least off the board & out of the CEO chair…would look a lot like the responsible thing to do if you’re invested (in any sense) in the survival of tesla
…but the over-valuation thing is a bubble of its own…there just aren’t that many things you can point to as a claim for the coefficient that jacks that up beyond better established competitors like your example of toyota…& at least one of them is “because, elon?”
…zaibatsu are (I guess technically were but mitsubishi is still around & functionally I think it & the likes of toyota pretty much qualify as modern-day equivalents) about as indestructible as businesses get…which would make them pretty much the diametric opposite of something like tesla?
Every heavy manufacturing company needs a lot of capital to launch new products, including Tesla. If they want to launch a new SUV in a couple of years, they need to borrow cash now for the factories, raw material contracts, etc.
Lenders are going to look at Morgan Stanley etc. getting stuck with billions in debt from the Twitter deal and start loading up conditions on every other financing deal with Tesla.
And I wouldn’t be surprised if part of those conditions is shunting him into a figurehead position or out of the way altogether. They’ll also be looking for ways to get first in line as creditors if the stock tanks, and leave him with crumbs.
Is “just because…….doesn’t mean” grammatically correct? Because that construction grates on my nerves.
…it’s certainly debatable
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/95964/grammar-just-because-a-doesnt-mean-b#:~:text=The%20clause%20%22Just%20because%20X,doesn't%20imply%20Y%22.
…but personally I’d advocate for the position that to be correct it would need to stop omitting the “that” before “doesn’t mean Y”…with an option on an “of” sometimes being appropriate between “just because” & whatever the X in the equation is?
I’m thinking along the lines of “The fact that (X) doesn’t mean that (Y)” or something, but that sets me up for one of my other grammatical peeves, the double “that.” Don’t get me started on the double “had.”
…I think you could get away with a single that…either “just because it seems like a suspicious construction that wouldn’t necessarily mean it’s incorrect” or “the fact that it seems grammatically suspect doesn’t mean the possibility it’s correct is ruled out”
…but…at least for my money “just because it seems like a suspicious construction wouldn’t necessarily mean it’s incorrect” or “the fact it seems grammatically suspect doesn’t mean the possibility it’s correct is ruled out” would both seem wrong to me?
I reject utterly your bourgeois concepts of “correct grammar”.
The Chicago Manual of Style…it’s a cookbook!
Twitter’s end is eerily similar to Gawker’s end – everybody trying to figure out where to go. And how to keep up with people they like.
I tweeted yesterday that people should join us here, but I feel like I’m shadow-banned as my last couple of tweets have gotten way less likes than I used to.
Did you tweet anything negative about Musk? Because I’m willing to bet real money that he’s told his people to suppress that shit. Otherwise what’s the point in owning the platform in his mind?
What people? They’re all too busy pulling copper wire from the walls and trundling it in wheelbarrows to the scrap dealer.
…the first pitch I remember for the payment-verified thing was that anyone without a checkmark was due to be buried at least “a few pages” down…so if you’re absent the checkmark you clearly deserve it would track?
…the idea being…supposedly…that promoting “verified” tweets/replies would keep the riff raff out of sight…which I guess would almost seem like it might made sense…if you knew basically nothing about how people use twitter?