New Year’s Eve [DOT 31/12/22]

31/12/22 MegMegMcGee 29

Happy New Year’s Eve everyone! I hope you are having a great holiday and that 2023 keeps you happy and healthy.

Wow

Man arrested and charged with murder over Idaho student murders
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/30/man-arrested-pennsylvania-idaho-student-murders-report

Interesting

House panel releases Trump tax returns in another setback for former president
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/12/30/trump-tax-returns-congress/

Summary of the report: https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/c8237563-7a71-4e1c-b7b3-4d38e648a67a.pdf?itid=hp-top-table-main_p001_f003

I would like to not hear about this dude ever again…

Controversial internet personality Andrew Tate and his brother detained for a month in Romania
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/30/europe/andrew-tate-detained-romania-human-trafficking-intl-hnk/index.html

LULZ

Elon Musk Becomes First Person Ever to Lose $200 Billion
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-30/elon-musk-becomes-first-person-ever-to-lose-200-billion

What a man!

‘I had to do it to save everyone’: Man breaks into school and shelters more than 20 people from blizzard
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/30/us/blizzard-new-york-rescue-school-break-in/index.html

Happy Caturday!

Happy New Year!

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29 Comments

      • He has a lot of friends in conservative politics, although he and they recognize that open ties would be a problem for both. Pretty much any time you see a right winger attacking the psychiatric profession, though, there is a connection.

        It’s one of those weird cases where there are plenty of legitimate criticisms to be made, in the same way that there are for the medical profession, but they almost always choose wrong, bonkers attacks.

    • It was *I* who allowed the Alliance to know the location of the shield generator. It is quite safe from your pitiful little band. An entire legion of my best troops awaits them. Oh, I’m afraid the deflector shield will be quite operational when your friends arrive.

      • He was Cheney to John Paul 2’s Bush. He was the guy who turned a lot of rotten impulses into action.

        They were both responsible for a terrifying degree of the Church’s coverups of child abuse not simply as a matter of indifference but as deliberate policy. And I can guarantee that there will be a push to make Benedict a saint as a direct challenge to people wanting to open the books on child abuse — it will be a blunt power play designed to emphasize how much the reactionary wing can get away with.

    • …I wish I knew as little about this asshole as I did a week ago…but he’s basically an interchangeably misogynist grifter from the school of “I’m a white guy – the world is supposed to cater to my whim”…they’re hard to tell apart, to be honest

      …I have much the same problem understanding why anyone would listen to them…much less throw money at or seek to emulate them…as I did/do with the dotard…& yet I know a perfectly nice bloke who still thinks it’s not fair that people talk shit about joe rogan

      …so…I assume it starts with some sort of thin end of the wedge kind of thing & slides into the proverbial slippery slope…with a lot of re-framed & misconstrued terminology thrown in along the way to make it less likely they’ll understand rebuttals…how else do we live in this kind of a brave new world?

      • It’s pretty telling how the NY Times went through backflips to avoid giving him even the mushy modifier “conservative” but had absolutely zero problems with the extreme characterization of “genius.”

        What’s especially bad is the evidence for conservative is easy, while the evidence for putting him in any kind of top sliver of intelligence is very, very elusive.

        But for the Times, basic rules always collapse when it serves their editorial slants. Maggie Haberman insisted that the very core of journalistic integrity demanded that they avoid addressing whether Trump’s lies about Mexicans and Obama were blatant lies. Maggie Haberman also insisted that characterizing as lies the thinnest threads of a Vogue photo shoot was the absolute core of journalistic integrity.

        Yesterday they filed a tut-tutting piece with the passive voice gem “Mr. Musk, once hailed as a genius” without once admitting they themselves called him a genius, over and over again. They may have quibbled at times over the degree and direction, but wouldn’t challenge the myth.

    • …not for nothing…but a bunch of that stock slide for tesla was nudged along as he cashed out enough of his stock over the year to nearly equal what he paid for twitter

      …in the process of putting about $40billion in cash in his hands $500billion+ fell off the value of the company

      …it’s not certain the last few billion was stock he had to sell to stave off margin calls…but he had at one point something in the region of half of his 20% stake in the company leveraged against loans…think there’s been at least a stock split since then so I don’t know how much that sold stock represents of the original 10% or so he’d be free to sell…or where the tipping point sits that doom loops his position between tesla & twitter

      …but in real-actual-spendable-cash terms rather than loan-me-cash-for-this-collateral terms…that number isn’t looking anywhere near as big as his ego…though even odds both are still wildly over-inflated

      …I’m not trying to predict he’ll wind up broke & homeless…but I’m still optimistic that in years to come the phrase “totally musked that shit up” may yet get broken out on occasions when screwing the pooch just doesn’t do the scale of fuck up justice

      • Your point is valid. I know from witnessing former classmates and hearing stories of their coworkers go through similar stock collapses and financial slides on margin calls during the first internet bubble.

        I learned a few painful things from my former classmates and their coworkers:

        1 Using stock as loan collateral/down payment on a big expensive house in SF is not a fucking smart idea. Or over paying for Twitter.

        1.1 Cash is king.  Better to take the tax hit and SELL then using said funds to aquire items (only my close friend did, and he’s the only one I know who made out with anything substantial… his very nice home.)

        2 What goes up fast must go down fast.

        3 Most of those who lost big still looking to recover 20 years later. (I “only” lost 1/3 of my pension. If I think about it too much I would lose my mind.)

    • Not even slightly. I can’t believe people just turned him away without helping. I’d have busted into that school in a heartbeat. I probably would have left more detailed contact information so I could pay for damages, but I can see why he’d be wary.

      I totally see not letting him sleep in my house with my family but damn. I’d have figured out some way to help him. Sleep in the garage? A shed? Siphon some gas from your car for him? Let him stay and just sit up all night with him?

      I will say I’m a bit bewildered by the people who apparently were just wandering around in this storm. I get having your car get stuck, but it seems like some people just walked out on foot without adequate clothes or anything. Did they just not know? I know there was one mentally disabled guy and I assume he just didn’t understand, but there seemed to be a lot of others who were completely unprepared and just didn’t stay home, like the guy with the pregnant wife.

      A hurricane isn’t the same thing but the process is. Buy food. Store drinking water. Fill your tank with gas. Don’t go outside when the storm is overhead. I just find it bizarre that so many people were outside.

      • I think it is just impulse/panic buying. I don’t get a lot of peoples decision making either, but my conscious would get the better of me and leaving them to freeze to death would haunt me for the rest of my life.

        • So many people, especially in Buffalo which is very low-income, are living paycheck to paycheck. And until the governor declares a state of emergency, they have no protection against retaliation if they call the boss at Target or wherever and say “hey it’s too dangerous to come in.” Guarantee they’ll see their shifts cut for a few weeks as punishment. My managers did that to people back when I worked retail in my twenties.

          People also can be so food insecure at home that they might need to go out and get supplies to stay in once the blizzard hits. I think a lot of Buffalo residents also thought eh this will be a shitty blizzard for a few hours, no big deal we get that all the time.

      • I blame at least some of it on businesses that stayed open and insisted on their employees coming in. I read about a young woman freezing to death in her car because she was stranded driving home from work.

    • …the millennial thing is interesting…the proof is in the pudding & all but it makes sense that a lot of the things that tended to push previous generations toward the right haven’t held true for that one…& the pitch from that side of the aisle hasn’t shown a lot of signs of much beyond being happy to throw them under the proverbial bus to help those previous generations pull the ladder up behind them…so it seems like it might be solid…not to mention that student debt relief has to be up there with less-than-usurious healthcare as an electoral carrot the other side could profitably dangle?

      …as for the worst kept secret rural voters apparently can’t make out…a good bit of it relies on the same sort of bias that beau of the fifth column guy was talking about regarding misplaced blame following narratives designed to target demographics that aren’t responsible…or indeed relevant as often as not…so my guess would be it’s up there with that keyzer söze thing about the greatest trick the devil ever pulled…& snopes says it really was lyndon johnson who called it way back when

      https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-lowest-white-man/

      …kicking down makes some people feel better about themselves…even when all they’re kicking against is a bunch of hot air…but the turning out their pockets part never ceases to dumbfound me?

      • Johnson spent the late 1940s railing against the “hordes of barbaric yellow dwarves” in East Asia.

        Buying into the stereotype that blacks were afraid of snakes (who isn’t afraid of snakes?) he’d drive to gas stations with one in his trunk and try to trick black attendants into opening it. Once, Caro writes, the stunt nearly ended with him being beaten with a tire iron.

        Like the snake coming back to bite him in the ass, LBJ’s hordes of barbaric yellow dwarves nearly got him in WW2. He “volunteered” as a member of Congress in the Navy and went on a “fact finding mission” to the South West Pacific Theater where he nearly died at the hands of an Imperial Japanese Navy Fighter Ace, Saburo Sakai.

        “I attacked the B-26s. One, two, three planes. When they were coming towards me, I shot. My bullets hit one of the planes, and its bomb exploded. I flew black through the smoke. The Americans thought that we collided. I looked back. I attacked another plane, but there were clouds, and the plane that I attacked flew into the clouds together. That was the plane Lyndon Johnson was in. His plane had a lot of bullet holes but they managed to land. Each time I went to America, I was asked, why didn’t you shoot at Johnson’s plane first and not the other one? If I hit that plane, there would have been no President Johnson.”

    • I read this article a couple of days ago about how different life was for boomers (full disclosure — I am technically frequently classified a boomer although I was born on the cusp). I have difficulty accepting unsourced information, but most of the salary stuff is documented.

      https://www.buzzfeed.com/shelbyheinrich/reddit-boomer-grandmother

      It’s pretty interesting, particularly if you’ve ever struggled to make ends meet on two salaries. It also makes a pretty good case for why millennials trend liberal — I didn’t have it this good, and millennials certainly don’t. It’s easy to see why we’re concerned about social safety nets and other progressive initiatives. 

      • My grandfather was a butcher and could pay cash for a large new ranch house in the suburbs in 1960. Three bedroom house, like 1500 sq ft, garage and basement. 4 kids, the 2 older ones went to private school.

        Single income.

      • I think we Gen Xers were the first generation to be fucked, but many of us could still managed to buy a home (with help from the family, low interest rates and/or internet stock options.)

        Millenials and the younger Gens are totally fucked.  No matter what they do, they can’t buy a house… or even a condo.

        I don’t do what some of my friends do which is moan and bitch about the Millenials/younger generations being lazy.

        There are lazy as fuck ones, but every generation has those (raises hand on being a “slacker.”) A lot of them realize that an affordable home is almost out of the question. If I had a kid then I’d expect the kid to live with me till I die.

        I’m probably one of the last who owned a home one mostly a single income but even then I had my former friend/renter help out for a few years and got some help from the parents for the down payment so I can’t even proclaim being a pull up my bootstraps guy. Almost everyone I know did something similar.

        • Same. For the house we’re in now I got a small loan from my father-in-law at his insistence for the down payment. I had originally bought one small house a few years after getting married, and it was awful. The only thing we could afford was a run-down ancient old house built in 1928. Fortunately I’m reasonably handy, but damn that was awful. When I finally got a professional job and had to move we couldn’t sell it and it was an albatross that nearly bankrupted us. I had to bring money to closing to get rid of it. We rented happily for years until my daughter came along.

          My FIL insisted that we buy another house after my daughter was born, and we’re still in it. It’s old and shabby (built in the 80s and never renovated). Again, I bought what I could afford, which was good. I’ve never been in danger of losing it, even during the housing crash (not dumb enough to get a variable interest rate or balloon payments). Once my daughter gets out of school we’ll sell this place. The only way anyone will buy it is if they’re a flipper and they’re able to gut it to the studs and completely renovate. That’s what happened to most of the houses in my neighborhood.

          Now I’m just in a race against time. I don’t want to put any more money into it — I replaced the roof, AC, and all the doors about 17 years ago and I’m terrified I’ll have to buy another roof for a place I don’t even want. But while I could sell it in a heartbeat right now, I wouldn’t be able to afford any place this big. Rent for a one-bedroom here is more than my mortgage. And I still owe money so I’m not going to walk away with enough for a sizeable down payment.

          The reality is that I’d like to just say goodbye to Florida and go somewhere else. But that somewhere is going to be tricky.

  7. never thought i’d say this…..but im a little bored of fireworks now……its been non stop since about 4pm…..and its not been small stuff either… cant even hear the tv most of the time

    midnight is going to sound like the world ending

    hope someone warned all our freshly traumatized refugees….some of them are probably not having a great time right about now

     

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