Comments, observations and thoughts from two bloggers on applied statistics, higher education and epidemiology. Joseph is an associate professor. Mark is a professional statistician and former math teacher.
Celsius remained unable to make any public statements due to legal advice, but people with knowledge of the situation told The Block the firm was looking to avoid lengthy bankruptcy proceedings. Sources said Celsius believes much of its retail clientele would prefer the firm avoid bankruptcy and that users could show their support by engaging "HODL Mode" in their Celsius account, a security feature that keeps users from withdrawing or sending funds while activated, in the hopes that the legal team would see the strength of feeling existing among users. Celsius did not respond to requests for comment at that time.
"Strength of feeling" is a telling phrase. Culture (with emphasis on the first four letters) always plays an outsized role in almost all web3 businesses. While many crypto investors are simply in it because it superficially looks like a good deal, a substantial segment are there not just because they think they'll get rich but because they see themselves as warriors willing to face financial ruin to advance a noble cause.
For these investors, "HODL" is an emotionally charged term of great power. The idea of making that into a feature is inspired in an incredibly evil sort of way. Just imagine what Ponzi or Madoff could have done with it.
There's a lot more ugliness in the Celsius story. The always reliable Coffeezilla walks us through the latest twists and turns.
Mentally, a lot of Democrats are in a strange place these days. They... hell, let's be honest, we won (since I'm clearly taking sides here). We control the White House and, to a lesser degree, congress. The upcoming election is challenging but, at least for the moment, polls have been trending in our favor and the Republicans have given us a lot to work with.
Given the stakes of the next two elections, this would seem to be a moment for focus on the poor quality of Republican candidates and on issues where the GOP has locked itself into incredibly unpopular positions (particularly reproductive rights, the insurrection and the attack on Social Security and Medicare).
But instead of focus, we are all too often seeing despair and panic, or at the very least, a sense of helplessness.
Take this reader letter that Josh Marshall ran along with approving comments in his editor's blog recently. [Emphasis added.]
Just read your latest piece. I still think you are correct on the
Codify Roe promise. But every single day that goes by without explicit
promises, in living rooms and cars, the energy wanes. The right to
abortion (and the right to privacy in general), affects many, many
people. The actuality of it, on a day to day or week to week basis,
doesn’t.
We saw a lot of think pieces a couple of months ago arguing that the electoral impact of repealing Roe would be limited since the new laws and their impact would largely be confined to strongly anti-abortion states. (Something we pushed back against at the time.)
In defense of NYT and the rest, in May it was still possible that the outrage would fade and the impact would not go much past women who sought abortions in these states and did not have the option of traveling somewhere that the procedure was available. A serious (arguably unprecedented) roll back of civil rights, but with little political consequences.
We now know how wrong that view was and the horror stories -- underage rape victims, ectopic pregnancies, life-threatening miscarriages, denial of vital medications, travel restrictions -- will only continue to multiply affecting all women between 8 and 55 who may at some point find themselves even temporarily in states with a Republican legislature, and the families of those people and their employers.
Among Republicans, all but the Flavor Aid drinkers are obviously aware of this because they are desperate to change the subject.
(And too many Democrats are eager to oblige them.)
This woman in Texas had started to miscarry, but her doctors couldn’t perform an immediate abortion because the fetus still had a heartbeat. She lost liters of blood and had to be put on a breathing machine as a result: AP. pic.twitter.com/5CctgIQkOE
A Louisiana doctor prescribed Cytotec to make the insertion of an IUD less painful. Walgreens called the physician to ask if the prescription was for an abortion, she told them it was for an IUD & the pharmacist still refused to fill it. https://t.co/YGir1Skf3r
In Texas, dispensing methotrexate to someone who uses it to induce a miscarriage after 49 days of gestation is a felony; that makes pharmacists hesitant to fill such prescriptions for almost anyone with a uterus. A new total ban on abortion in Tennessee will effectively criminalize any medication that could disrupt pregnancy past the point of fertilization, with strict exceptions for a patient who will otherwise die. And in Virginia, confusion over rules about who is permitted to prescribe drugs “qualified as abortifacients” may be blocking access to the medication.
“That’s what was shocking to me,” said Schwarz, a 27-year-old who lives in Tysons Corner, Va. “In a state where I thought I was relatively protected regardless of what the Supreme Court decided, I found out I wasn’t.”
Methotrexate was originally developed as a chemotherapy agent more than 60 years ago. But in low doses, it has proved to be one of the safest, least expensive and most effective treatments for roughly a dozen autoimmune conditions, from juvenile idiopathic arthritis to Crohn’s disease.
“It’s one of the most common medications that I prescribe,” said Dr. Grant Schulert, a pediatric rheumatology specialist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. “It’s really a mainstay of our practice.”
...
In one case, a pharmacist initially refused to dispense methotrexate to an 8-year-old girl in Texas. In a note the child’s doctor shared with Edens, the pharmacist wrote, “Females of possible child bearing potential have to have diagnosis on hard copy with state abortion laws.”
...
“The majority of rheumatic diseases affect females at substantially higher rates than males,” Edens explained. “The prevalence of rheumatoid arthritis in women to men is 3 to 1. For lupus it’s 10 to 1. And so rheumatology is a very female-predominate patient population.”
This post by Robert Reich is very good. Worth reading in full. He makes good points about the health issues that arise with age:
It’s not death that’s the worrying thing about a second Biden term. It’s the dwindling capacities that go with aging. "Bodily decrepitude," said Yeats, "is wisdom." I have accumulated somewhat more of the former than the latter, but our president seems fairly spry (why do I feel I have to add “for someone his age?”). I still have my teeth, in contrast to my grandfather whom I vividly recall storing his choppers in a glass next to his bed, and have so far steered clear of heart attack or stroke (I pray I’m not tempting fate by my stating this fact). But I’ve lived through several kidney stones and a few unexplained fits of epilepsy in my late thirties. I’ve had both hips replaced. And my hearing is crap. Even with hearing aids, I have a hard time understanding someone talking to me in a noisy restaurant. You’d think that the sheer market power of 60 million boomers losing their hearing would be enough to generate at least one chain of quiet restaurants
But this is absolutely the wrong time to be having this conversation.
Why would the Democrats projects weakness ahead of the 2022 congressional races?
With a 50-50 senate there are currently five toss-up races (Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). Losing the senate is obviously terrible. Even more aggressively, this is a context where the Democrats strategy is to try and add two senators. That means winning all five toss-up races, barring a surprise. It goes without saying that if South Carolina is competitive then things are going really well, but political strategy is not usually based on the other party completely collapsing.
It is also worth noting all of the key powers holding congress gives. The ability to have the Jan 6th committee is based on holding the house. The ability to appoint judges, including any surprise supreme court vacancies, is based on holding the senate. There are other nice features, like the ability to pass reconciliation bills that can't be held hostage that are based on congressional control. This stuff is important.
Based in the 2020 timelines, events that you need to be ready for start around February of the election year. Lynden Johnson dropped out of a president race on March 31, 1968 -- the same year as the election. So if Joe Biden had a thoughtful conversation over the summer of 2023 that would be plenty of time for the 2024 elections. But more importantly, unless he is about to actually resign and have Kamela Harris be the incumbent, how does talking about it now help?
Even if you wanted Kamela, would it not make sense to wait for 2 years to fully pass given the 22nd amendment to maximize possible future options. Keep in mind, this argument is about the future of the candidate and not his present.
Finally, would it even be good politics for Joe Biden to retire? I think that the jury is definitely out. Keep in mind that it is possible that Donald Trump will run in 2024. Obviously, Biden versus Trump is a known good match-up. The age issue is less salient politically when two candidates of similar ages are running and Biden has a style that is very good at kicking Trump off of his rhythm. If it is a different candidate then maybe calculations need to be made but the key issue is how Biden is holding up health-wise, and that is not an easy criterion to evaluate externally.
But no matter how you look at it, the mid-terms are a crucial piece of information about a decision that is currently not even remotely time sensitive. There are actual years before the decision would need to be made and all a premature decision would do is bring about lame duck status even faster and make things look bad before the midterm elections. How does this help?
Crypto is
basically the phenomenon one gets if you cross Enron + Scientology +
Amway. It synthesizes the characteristics of each to create a novel form
of predatory investment to extract money from the public.
"web3 users are going to have equal say in how a television show is made and will collectively create the next Marvel universe" is literally, hands down, one of the dumbest ideas I have ever heard. https://t.co/5V7NAzUpy0
The level of gross negligence one would have to have as a portfolio manager to dump the pension fund's money into crypto is quite staggering. Even more so when it's the retirement funds of public servants. https://t.co/Agp5IWjHQb
A Louisiana doctor prescribed Cytotec to make the insertion of an IUD less painful. Walgreens called the physician to ask if the prescription was for an abortion, she told them it was for an IUD & the pharmacist still refused to fill it. https://t.co/YGir1Skf3r
I was the ONLY reporter in the courtroom this morning as the man accused of raping a 10-year-old girl, impregnating her, leading to an abortion in Indiana, was arraigned.
Ohio AG: "Every day that goes by the more likely that this is a fabrication. I know the cops and prosecutors in this state. There's not one of them that wouldn't be turning over every rock, looking for this guy and they would have charged him." https://t.co/9TANfvRqZP
Anyway now that this has been confirmed to have happened perhaps the people who said it was a hoax will address whether a 10-year-old rape victim should be able to legally get an abortion?
Texans are being warned to prep for power outages with temperatures in the 100’s, so here’s your reminder that after the grid failed in 2021–Abbotts campaign made an additional $4.6 million from energy industries. That includes $1 million from an energy tycoon.
— Olivia Julianna π³ (@0liviajulianna) July 11, 2022
Breaking: ERCOT has issued an alert for possible rolling blackouts Monday from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. "A projected reserve capacity shortage with no market solution available." Additionally, ERCOT has issued a call for energy conservation Monday.
— Phil Jankowski π (@PhilJankowski) July 11, 2022
Tried to call my mom to see if she had power (she’s 25 miles away in Austin) but Verizon also had no service. I did not try 911, but I’m guessing it also didn’t work. This is what happens in the 10th largest metro in the country that is known for “tech.” pic.twitter.com/uBkGl5mM5a
— Emily Porter, M.D. (@dremilyportermd) July 14, 2022
Have to have some political tweets.
It sure seems
that a bunch of people forgot that Hillary Clinton in her 2016 campaign
said that Roe was on the line and a lot of people decided they didn't
care. And now want to pretend they didn't do what they did in 2016. https://t.co/G2uF79BQme
Any time MSNBC or CNN starts talking about 2024, turn it off, and then go on social media and let them know why you turned it off. No one wants to hear about something as far away as 2024 when we’re focused on the 2022 elections. It’s all about the midterms!
The Biden
administration is finally telling the idiots on our “side,” who spend
all their time hyperbolically attacking the Democratic Party, to
basically go fuck themselves – and it’s about time. These types do
incredible harm and need to be called out.
Alyssa Farah Griffin says Mark Meadows told her not to resign from the White House because Trump was going to be staying in power after losing the election. pic.twitter.com/YHie3hkQEI
When I read about Paul Ryan supposedly sobbing on January 6, 2021, I think of the cynical comment of Frederick of Prussia about his accomplice in the carve-up of Poland, Maria Theresa of Austria. "She weeps, but she takes her share - and the more she weeps, the more she takes."
It's not often I sympathize with DJT, but not being able to talk about the one actual accomplishment of your presidency because it pisses off anti-vaxxers would suck.
Trump: But we did so much in terms of therapeutics and a word that I'm not allowed to mention. But I'm still proud of that word… We did that in nine months, and it was supposed to take five years to 12 years. But I'm not mentioning it in front of my people, pic.twitter.com/uiNoExjUmL
After all these years, how can gray water be something many Californians haven't heard of? Is our disinterest in solutions really that profound? https://t.co/SqMnL4keh1
Didn't know you could commit treason against a person.
Navarro: The reason why I think the Pence is guilty of treason to at least Trump and perhaps in this country is that he acted on the basis of a flawed legal opinion pic.twitter.com/qq9YiL9bkG
1/ So... Jordan Peterson thinks that not only is Russia attacking Ukraine because the US is 'degenerate,' but that they are justified in doing so. This is getting kind of scary, and not just because of the supervillain routine he's doing in his vids lately. pic.twitter.com/Bpp6C8HYqN
Gasoline prices peaked in mid-June (down 30 cents per gallon since then) and wholesale gasoline futures point to a much larger drop in coming weeks. This implies that headline inflation will begin to moderate in the July reporting period. pic.twitter.com/OgdWhdqWIH
Just days after sending the emails above, Musk wrote and published the blog post that launched and defined his personal PR campaign: The Top Secret Master Plan. Positioning himself for the first time as a world-saving altruist genius, it set the blueprint: https://t.co/4OQx0BtCkS
— Chris Bergin - NSF (@NASASpaceflight) July 11, 2022
When StarShip explodes, it will happen in 1/24th of a second. These are consecutive frames from the video yesterday. It's an instantaneous explosion, and this minor pop was felt six miles away. RUD on the pad will be a disaster scenario. pic.twitter.com/lbtgJNkvTt
— Turner Novak ππ§’ (@TurnerNovak) July 13, 2022
Unbelievable story from India today. A group of farmers and unemployed youngsters have been busted for running a fake Indian Premier League, and conning Russian punters into betting on it.
YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK — Last year and the year before, in an unprecedented environmental disaster, wildfires in California’s Sequoia National Park and nearby national forests roared through treasured sequoia groves in the Southern Sierra Nevada, generating flames hundreds of feet high and killing nearly 20% of all the giant sequoia trees left in the world.
But the Washburn fire burning now in Yosemite National Park, licking around the edges of the roughly 500 giant sequoias in Mariposa Grove — some over 200 feet tall and more than 2,000 years old — so far hasn’t killed a single one of the massive old-growth trees there.
A big part of the reason, experts say, is that park officials completed 23 projects at the grove since 1971 to thin brush and set controlled burns to remove dead wood and vegetation that had built up over more than century of fire suppression.
That left less dead material on the forest floor, and fewer shrubs and small trees like firs that can make fires burn hotter. As a result, the forest was restored to a more natural condition, experts say, similar to the way it would have looked centuries ago when lightning strikes and burning from native tribes sent low-impact fires through the Sierra every 10 years or so.
With a few notable exceptions (ProPublica, Reveal, Marketplace, NPR), the national coverage of the California wildfires has been, terrible. Sadly ecstatic disaster porn, with superficial coverage of causes and no interest whatsoever in solutions, which is especially sad because this is one of the few crises where we know what we need to do.
Yes, there’s been talk across the U.S. Forest Service and California state agencies about doing more prescribed burns and managed burns. The point of that “good fire” would be to create a black-and-green checkerboard across the state. The black burned parcels would then provide a series of dampers and dead ends to keep the fire intensity lower when flames spark in hot, dry conditions, as they did this past week. But we’ve had far too little “good fire,” as the Cassandras call it. Too little purposeful, healthy fire. Too few acres intentionally burned or corralled by certified “burn bosses” (yes, that’s the official term in the California Resources Code) to keep communities safe in weeks like this.
The increasingly self-serving ethics of journalism
(As usual, Brad DeLong gets credit for
spotting this one)
Just to recap, I've been complaining
(whining, moaning, bitching, etc.) about the state of journallism
for a while. Many of those complaints assume (explicitly or
implicitly) that journalism is forming a dangerously insular and
cohesive group identity (I'm writing outside my field so my
terminology might be a bit off -- if a social scientist out there has
any notes, I'm open to suggestions).
Assuming I'm on to something here, one
of the things we would expect is an ethical code that has notably
different standards of behavior inside and outside of the group.
Intra-group crimes (like plagiarism where the primary victim is
another journalist) would be viewed as grave while offenses against
subjects and readers would be seen as less serious. This difference
would be particularly notable where journalists and non-journalists are
mutually responsible for an offense.
Which takes us to the example of the
day. As you probably know, the recent health care decision has
produced as usual amount of leak-driven coverage. This has deeply
offended Charles Lane of the Washington Post. Here's are some of the
phrases that Lane uses when discussing the leaks and leakers:
"slimy"
"oozing slime"
"Cassius and Brutus inside the
court, creeping up behind the chief justice with their verbal
daggers"
"shame on the treacherous
insiders"
And here's how Lane talks about Jan
Crawford, the reporter who published the leaks,
"a fine journalist"
"kudos to Jan Crawford for a nifty
little scoop"
According to Lane, Crawford's story
damages the Supreme Court and misleads the reader, but the
responsibility is apportioned so that all of the blame falls on the
sources for passing the story on to the reporter. He even goes
further and praises the reporter for passing the story on to us.
I suppose it might be possible to come
up with a situation where two parties knowingly work together to
produce something bad for society and yet one party shoulders all of
the blame while the other is praiseworthy but Lane is no where near
making that case here, nor does he seem to realize that he needs to.
Elon Musk talks a lot about humanity, and his love of humanity, and his need to save humanity in a way that isn't at all creepy or indicative of a messiah complex.
Musk's latest mission is to save humanity from the dangers of population collapse (a notion Joseph rebutted in the previously mentioned post). Part of this concern might have been meant to deflect media attention from the news that Musk had impregnated a direct report.
— Suspected Saboteur (@ShortingIsFun) July 9, 2022
When you get into the conversation around population collapse alarmists, you quickly notice that the concern focuses specifically on the collapse of certain populations (the US, Europe, Japan). Africa and Latin America don't get a lot of attention. While we don't want to paint with too broad a brush, much of this is definitely great replacement adjacent.
There is also a strong eugenics lite quality here, further emphasized by some of Musk's comments about the right people having children.
"Contrary to what many think, the richer someone is, the fewer kids
they have. I am a rare exception," Musk said. He returned to that thread
several times over the next month, adding on June 14, "I mean, I'm doing my part haha."
On June 17, Musk tweeted
the opening scene of "Idiocracy," the 2006 Mike Judge comedy depicting a
world in which highly intelligent people are reluctant to reproduce
while those with low IQs continue to have large families, dumbing down
the Earth's population. "When I ask my friends why they're not yet
having kids (very few are), it sounds exactly like the movie," he wrote.
Mike Judge used a somewhat cringey premise (which was the main thing Musk seemed to take away from the movie) to set up a satirical take on 2006 America. That premise was basically an update of "the Marching Morons," a classic science fiction story with a memorable ending.
The elite have tried everything rational to solve the population problem, but the problem cannot be solved rationally. The solution requires a way of thinking that no longer exists – Barlow's "vicious self-interest" and his knowledge of ancient history.
Barlow derives a solution based on his experience in scamming people into buying worthless land and knowledge of lemmings' mass migration into the sea: convince the morons to travel to Venus in spaceships that will kill their passengers out of view of land. The story predates the moon landing, and the safety of space travel is summed up in a description of a rocket that crashed on the moon. Propaganda depicts Venus as a tropical paradise, with "blanket trees", "ham bushes" and "soap roots". In a nationalistic frenzy, every country tries to send as many of their people to Venus as possible to stake their claim.
Barlow's help includes using his knowledge of Nazi propaganda tactics: postcards are sent from the supposedly happy new residents of Venus to relatives left behind, describing a wonderful, easy life, in the same way as fraudulent postcards were sent to relatives of those incinerated in the Nazi death-camps.
But Barlow is duped by his erstwhile assistants. Barlow does not realize that the elite despise him, as they despise all people from the past for not having solved The Problem earlier. In the end, Barlow is placed on a spaceship to Venus to share the fate of his victims and realizes that crime does not pay, just before he dies.
Given Musk's fondness for classic science fiction, perhaps he has a copy.
It seems to me that this whole sorry saga misses several important points. Let us consider them.
One, the key to raising children is not being the sperm donor, which while a necessary step is far from a sufficient one. The real effort is the bearing of the children and taking the time to properly do tasks like childminding and educating children. One rich person having children with many women (Musk has 10 children by 3 different mothers) is not really doing much to address the fertility crisis.
Two, Earth reached a population of one billion people around 1804 CE. That is 218 years ago. Recorded history goes back to at least 3200 BCE. That means we had 5,000 years of successful human civilization with less than a billion humans. I think we can start getting worried about underpopulation when we hit one billion going the other way. Until then, I think concerns about whether there are enough people seem odd.
Finally, having children with a subordinate at work seems like a suboptimal decision. It is hard to ensure that there was a proper balance of power in the relationship. While the person in question, Shivon Zilis, seems to have a lot of agency in their career, it is always a concern in these cases.
So I would say that this strategy was not the optimal way to handle concerns about a population crisis. It might be fine for Musk and he likely has the resources to support this eccentricity, but I think that is what we need to call if it we are honest.
There are good pro-natalist policies that could be considered. My personal hint is that there is no way to understate the importance of childcare and that a positive childcare experience probably helps people match the number of children they prefer with the number of children they have. But I think these should be considered in the context of human happiness and not because we think we might be going extinct as a species.
Back in 2017, we had a thread discussing a series of predictions Arthur C. Clarke made in 1964 about life in the year 2000, in particular, the suggestion that what we would now call telecommuting or "work from home" would make cities obsolete. The creative class/utopian urbanists' school was even stronger five years ago than it is today, so the standard take on why Clarke got this wrong was that he underestimated the vitality and appeal of cities.
But I think a third factor may well have been bigger than either of those two. The early 60s was an anxious but optimistic time. The sense was that if we didn't destroy ourselves, we were on the verge of great things. The 60s was also the last time that there was anything approaching a balance of power between workers and employers.
This was particularly true with mental work. At least in part because of the space race, companies like Texas Instruments were eager to find smart capable people. As a result, employers were extremely flexible about qualifications (a humanities PhD could actually get you a job) and they were willing to make concessions to attract and keep talented workers.
Telecommuting (as compared to off shoring, a distinction will need to get into in a later post) offers almost all of its advantages to the worker. The only benefit to the employer is the ability to land an otherwise unavailable prospect. From the perspective of 1964, that would have seemed like a good trade, but those days are long past.
For the past 40 or so years, employers have worked under (and now completely internalized) the assumption that they could pick and choose. When most companies post jobs, they are looking for someone who either has the exact academic background required, or preferably, someone who is currently doing almost the same job for a completely satisfied employer and yet is willing to leave for roughly the same pay.
When you hear complaints about "not being able to find qualified workers," it is essential to keep in mind this modern standard for "qualified." 50 or 60 years ago it meant someone who was capable of doing the work with a bit of training. Now it means someone who can walk in the door, sit down at the desk, and immediately start working. (Not to say that new employees will actually be doing productive work from day one. They'll be sitting in their cubicles trying to look busy for the first two or three weeks while IT and HR get things set up, but that's another story.)
Arthur C Clarke was writing in an optimistic age where workers were on an almost equal footing with management. If the year 2000 had looked like the year 1964, he just might have gotten this one right.
Obviously, we have since had a chance to try out some of these ideas. We've had a huge disruption of the office model at a time when demand for skilled workers is comparable to conditions when Clarke was making his predictions.
Businesses are currently trying to decide what the new standard will be. At the moment, the hybrid model seems to be winning but what calls there are for a return to completely office based work seem to be coming from management,
It's possible that workers will come around and we'll see a return to the old model though things seem to be moving the other way as lots of companies are starting to downsize their office space and saving a tremendous amount of money in the process.
Whenever a metric maxes out it creates
problems. Back in my teaching days, I used to try in vain to explain to
colleagues and particularly to administrators that a test where anyone, let
alone numerous students, made 100% was a bad test. A "perfect" score meant you didn't actually know how well that student did. Did they just barely
make that hundred or could they have aced a much more difficult test?
Worse yet, if more than one student make 100%, we have no way of ranking
them. When we start calculating final grades and averaging these
tests, we invariably give the same amount of credit to two students who
had substantially different levels of mastery.
This
was especially problematic given the push at one big suburban district (not coincidentally my worst teaching experience) to define an A at 93 and above
rather than grading on some kind of a curve. Since there was little
standardization on the writing of the tests for the most part and
arguably even less in the grading of any even
slightly open-ended questions, the set cut-off made absolutely no sense.
Trying to tweak the difficulty level of the test so that the students
doing A level work fell within that eight-point range was nearly
impossible and pretty much required writing exams where the top of the
class was likely to max out the instrument.
This
Mitchell and Webb radio sketch looks at the same underlying question
from a different angle and while I would probably argue that the one
year interval is a bit short, I can't entirely dispute the logic. While this specific example might make people a bit uneasy, substitute in zero shoplifting and the reasoning would actually be fairly sound.
Ohio girl, 10,
travels to Indiana to get an abortion because Ohio bans abortion at 6
weeks and she’s 6 weeks & 3 days pregnant. https://t.co/qtw8FEzIVA
What I like
about this clip is to watch it on mute - because that moment when the
anger overtakes her at the failure of journalists to raise abortion as a
presidential debate issue…I feel @HillaryClinton on this one.
I've felt for a long time that commenters and possibly political scientists have underestimated the role that resentment and the need for attention ("I owned the libs") plays in the 21st Century right.
According to one of his law clerks, as reported by @nytimes in 1993, Justice Clarence Thomas privately said, "The liberals made my life miserable for 43 years, and I'm going to make their lives miserable for 43 years."
You can't judge a movement by its most extreme manifestations, but the consistency with which iIsee conservatives express their vision of winning in terms of liberal pain reveals something.
To quote a friend of mine, “ We fight the battle in front of us with the cards we have. That battle is an election in five months. Everything else is noise.”
There is a profound difference in the development process between systems in which failure means you don’t get all the posts you expect for a search and systems in which failure means people die and civilizations burn.
In a functional democracy, the Texas GOP would pay a much greater cost for the power grid than the Democrats would for inflation.
Power is out for 4th time this week in Leander neighborhoods. @GregAbbott_TX and his guaranteed electric grid have failed again. 3 hours till our AC is up again.
Marge Greene tonight says that Putin just wanted to be our friend and ally, but we blew the opportunity by supporting Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/ZU9sKBRu48
— Ron Filipkowski πΊπ¦ (@RonFilipkowski) July 2, 2022
Yet again,
Marjorie Taylor Greene's comments are being used by Kremlin
propagandists on Russian state TV. State TV host and State Duma member
Evgeny Popov is interpreting her statements to mean that she wants
Americans to help Putin win in Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/nYLntOYdtb
Meanwhile on Russian state TV: State Duma member Evgeny Popov, who is also the host of the state TV show 60 Minutes, says that Scotland, seeking to hold a referendum on Scottish independence, "should reach out to Russian hackers for help —after all, they helped to elect Trump." pic.twitter.com/3bhV220qlH
Russia is betting that Republicans take over in 2023. They know that Trump @mattgaetz @RepMTG will cut of funds to Ukraine. Leaving it defenseless. pic.twitter.com/tzHENKY25k
An embrace of this independent state legislatures theory would be the equivalent of a coup to steal elections from the rightful winners. Allowing outrageous partisan and racial gerrymandering for state legislatures is part of the plan. https://t.co/6FdhVVnp3Z
"About 21% of
crypto-investors said they’ve used a loan to pay for their
cryptocurrency investments. Personal loans were most popular, but payday
loans, title loans, mortgage refinances, home equity loans and leftover
student loan funds also have been utilized." – DebtHammer
The weird
distortions this stuff is having on the venture market can't be
overstated. How many legit companies will never get built because they
don't sell a token is profoundly embarrassing.
The good people at Marketplace have a sharp Independence Day spin on a big ongoing story.
Jeffrey Williamson: In 1774, the top 1 percent of households got 9.3 percent of income.
Compare that to America today, when the top 1 percent is bringing in about 20 percent of income. Nine percent, versus 20 percent. Wow.
Williamson: Wow.
Even when you include slaves, Williamson says America was actually the
most egalitarian country in the world when it came to the difference
between rich and poor.
So what did the founding fathers have to say about that? I called up a guy who should know.
Clay Jenkinson: Hello my dear citizens, this is Thomas Jefferson.
Actually it's Clay Jenkinson, a historian and Jefferson impersonator.
And he says the writer of the famous phrase -- "All men are created
equal" -- thought a lot about income inequality. In a letter to a friend
describng the 13 colonies, he wrote "The great mass of our population
consists of laborers. The rich, being few and of moderate wealth..."
Jenkinson (Quoting Jefferson): Can any condition of society be more desireable?
I realize that we shouldn't treat the writings of the Founding Fathers as sacred text but you know, they had their moments...
No connection to any to any of our ongoing threads, but if you're interested in sketch comedy, you really need to see this series from That Mitchell and Webb Look. I'm at a loss for something else like it.
You can find find darker sketches (though "mummy won't wake up" does set the bar rather high), but few where the characters in the increasingly horrifying situations are so sympathetic. In that way, they remind me a bit of the Carol Burnett Show's Eunice sketches, which grew remarkably cruel toward the end, but those were long form pieces that could alternate between comedy and drama (and eventually go purely with the latter). The Quiz Broadcast is an exercise in world-building in 3-minute bites, and one that's become a bit more relevant recently.
3. San Francisco is not adjacent to or even particularly near Silicon Valley. Instead it's around fifty miles away. There are people who live in SF and commute to SV but it's a wasteful and completely unnecessary practice. San Jose is nearer and cheaper.
$5.3 billion: San Jose to San Francisco high-speed rail costs balloon by over 200%
Eliyahu Kamisher
Plagued
by years of funding shortages and spiraling costs, California’s
beleaguered high-speed rail project suffered another unexpected blow
this month in a new report that more than tripled the cost estimate for
the San Francisco-to-San Jose segment to a staggering $5.3 billion.
The new price tag is part of a report that completes a years-long environmental clearance
process for the 48-mile corridor that would carry bullet trains down
the Peninsula on electrified Caltrain tracks at 110 miles per hour and
eventually on to Southern California. It outlines three stops, a
controversial rail yard in Brisbane and money allocated to everything
from protecting Monarch butterflies to restoring Bent-flowered
fiddleneck habitat.
But the environmental document released last week also includes the new price tag
for the recommended route through the Peninsula, which is more than
three times the figure penciled into the High-Speed Rail Authority’s 2022 business plan.
As for the project itself, I have mixed feelings. California could certainly use more passenger rail, but there are places that need it more and are not as well served by public transit, some of which would probably be cheaper.
But whatever the merits of this line may be as infrastructure, it is an absolutely first rate reminder that most of the California housing debate consists of people (mainly from New York) demanding that we build housing 50 miles from where the Bay Area housing crisis is most severe.
This remarkably nonchalant New York Times piece on executive compensation deserves a deep dive (and not in a good way), but for now, I want to zoom in on one number in particular.
Jeff Green, chief executive of The Trade Desk, a digital advertising company, reported compensation of $835 million last year, making him the top-paid executive in the Equilar survey, which encompasses 200 companies, all of which have revenue over $1 billion. Mr. Green’s pay in 2021 was the third-highest amount that Equilar found in its past five annual surveys, which are based on companies’ pay disclosures; Mr. Musk’s deal in 2018, which Tesla valued at $2.3 billion, is still the biggest in those years.
...
For Mr. Green of The Trade Desk to qualify for the options in his package, valued in the proxy statement at $828 million, the company’s stock price must climb well above current levels, but there are no business goals for The Trade Desk to achieve.
Melinda Zurich, a spokeswoman for The Trade Desk, said the stock price targets in the company’s award were ambitious and noted that its stock was up several thousand percent since its initial public offering in 2016.
“Jeff has played an integral role in driving that growth, and is key to the company’s future growth agenda,” she added.
These deals are complicated and it's possible that Mr. Green will walk away with less than $835 million, but given the numbers, it's almost impossible to come up with a scenario where the man won't wildly overcompensated if the stock lucks (or is manipulated) into a good run. If so, all of the profits for the next six plus years will go to installment payments for the CEO's 2021 compensation package.
It is true that TTD had revenue greater than $1 billion which big money, but $835 million takes up an obscenely large chunk of that $1.2 billion. The number is even more striking when you look at income. Whether you use operating or net, Green's compensation package for 2021 is, at least in theory, more than six times the company's income for that year.
TTD appears to be a healthy company with a history of solid growth (though its 2021 income was sharply off from the previous year), but there is no reason to expect this thirteen year old operation will suddenly experience explosive growth in the near future, and if it doesn't, (assuming the stock still has a good run) this pay package would fall under the category of, for lack of a better word, looting.
Green came into this a billionaire going into this. He can
afford to take an all or nothing bet, particularly when the expected
value is this high.
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