Wednesday, March 29, 2023

Lunch

eat

8 Can't Wait

Quality of Life

I don't assume all younger people have Atrios-approved politics, but I do know red state politicians are trying very hard to make their states uninhabitable for them. Not abnormal for some young people to want to flee wherever they are from, but these politicians are ensuring it.

Who Is On Your Side

I do my best not to pretend I am the official micromanager of The Democrats, but national Dems have been, generally, a bit too quiet on what are erroneously dubbed "culture war" issues lately.

Morning

Wriggle wriggle

Tuesday, March 28, 2023

Tuesday Night

Choose your own video.

Happy Hour

Again

Systemic Risk

System Risk, you see, is when a rich guy might lose a yacht, then all the people who work on his yacht might lose their jobs.

Effective Altruism

Add alleged bribrery to the tools used to prevent the robot apocalypse.

The Pundit Candidate

Journalists are once again trying to make Chris Christie a thing, a totally standard practice for governors who leave office with 15% approval.

Lunch

eat

Innovation

SV guys still love to talk about all the INNOVATION they do but it's been years since I've seen hype around even "reinventing the bus for the 7th time" type products. The innovation has all been innovations in various kinds of financial fraud and some of that is starting to unwind a bit. Still most of them will keep their yachts because Larry Summers will make sure of it. What if fake money, but you get a cartoon ape???

The NFT "craze" - and the number of Very Serious People who pretended to think it was a real thing because you don't get to be a Very Serious Person by ever questioning what rich people are saying - was the stupidest thing since Colin Powell held up his vial of baby powder.

Heads I Win, Tails The Government Bails Me Out, And I Also Win

15 years after the global financial crisis, we are still doing this. "Me" being the "me" that is a billionaire, not the actual me, of course.

That Larry Summers, who is responsible for more human misery in the United States than maybe any other prson alive, gets to keep being the top lobbyist for reach people with little pushback either from his media sycophants or the assholes in the Biden administration (they aren't all assholes, the ones who are) is maddening.

Gonna put on a tricorne hat and throw some tea into the harbor.

Free Money For Billionaires

Larry Summers is up to his thick neck with the Silicon Valley scammers, and I should've known that when he went on TV and said "oh, everything will be fine, AS LONG AS EVERYBODY [friends and business partners of Larry] GETS ALL THEIR MONEY BACK" that the fix was in. Shame on all the journalists who ran their PR-placed OH NO A SMALL BUSINESS IS WORRIED ABOUT MAKING PAYROLL stories. Those small businesses never had anything to worry about, and "we" only worry about such things when a billionaire might lose his 3rd yacht.

Morning

Still wriggling.

Monday, March 27, 2023

Monday Night

Rock on.

Happy Hour

Enjoy

Works Every Time

I remember when Scalia's Heller decision came down, and many Very Sensible Liberals argued that it was actually a good thing. The reasoning was that by clarifying the existence of an individual gun right, the Gun Nuts would stop being such paranoid lunatics and would chill. Since the decision did make clear that some regulation was perfectly constitutional, everybody wins! Gun nuts are happy, liberal gun regulations are happy! Right! Everybody's happy, right!

Needless to say the gun nuts are never pacified, no "compromise" (to the extent that one could imagine that in any sense was) is fixed. Clear moves to the right are just turns of the ratchet when everybody who matters keep accepting them.


Don't See How

Will we ever find out if all the 'indictment' talk last week came from anything other than Trump seeking attention? Great week for journalism.

Zients Zucks

Sadly predictable.
Perhaps that’s no surprise: These Obama-style policies have coincided with a major change atop the White House hierarchy of personnel. In late January, progressive ally Ron Klain announced he’d be stepping down as chief of staff; he was replaced by former corporate consultant and Obama apparatchik Jeffrey Zients. Zients has also brought Obama alums Anita Dunn and Steve Ricchetti—both effectively former lobbyists who have been criticized for evading the ethics constraints put on lobbyists—into greater decision-making positions.

Lunch

Your choice.

Not A Priority

No idea about all the behind the scenes stuff at the Texas Observer, but I do know that supporting a legacy liberal publication costs about as much as one quickly forgotten ad buy in a mid-tier Senate race and yet...

To the extent that anyone with money throws it at "media," rich donors like shiny new things which they usually quickly forget about, and hate anything with any tiny chance of being effective because they can't 100% control the message.

One rich guy, dubbed "The Real Thing" by one substacker, did throw a lot of money at some media outlets recently. His name was Sam Bankman-Fried.