Friday Night

Rock on.

Happy Hour

Made it to Friday. Holiday weekend!

Elon Musk Is A Big Dumb Racist Asshole

Good everyone knows that now, but really there are never any rewards for being "prematurely correct."

What Is Money, Daddy

Was chatting with a woman who does various education initiatives for family learning, and she said that, increasingly, children don't really know what money is. I don't mean that in the sense that they don't appreciate the cost of things, I mean that they have little exposure to bills and coins and therefore don't really grasp the concept of money.

Parents don't pay for stuff in the supermarket by counting out bits of colored paper, they just tap with a card. The bills and coins fit in with age appropriate learning like counting back in the dark ages (5 years ago). And slightly older kids don't even pay for things themselves they once would have - like school lunches - it's also just tapping a card or some other similar method.

Anyway, interesting!

Jerbs

A few crazy people were screaming about how the Great Recession didn't have to be so, well, Great, and I think we've been proved fucking right.

The prime-age employment rate is now higher than the pre-recession peak.

And it did so in record time, despite starting from a lower base.

It's been a historically rapid and complete recovery. Took over 12yrs to get back to pre-recession peak following the Great Recession pic.twitter.com/RK6EvwHuUb

— Skanda Amarnath (@IrvingSwisher) April 7, 2023

Still they treat the villain (one, not the only) of the story, Larry Summers, as an oracle.

Lunch

eat

Maybe Somebody Else Should Do Something

Really this is the most absurd application of that I have ever seen.

Speed Running The Tech Bullshit Cycle

Something I don't think people understand about TECH is that a big requirement is that they are more precise than people, not less. That's actually the selling point, as they will inevitably fail in other ways. A calculator/spreadsheet program which gives the right answer to a simple addition problem 99% of the time is actually much much worse than useless even though you can say IT'S MORE ACCURATE THAN PEOPLE.

They designed programs which are very good bullshitters. That's funny! The only people they are likely to replace are The Annoying Guys in your Ivy League classes who won't shut the fuck up about things they don't know anything about. Elite liberal education also trains people to be good bullshitters (this is not all bad).

Funny that this is about Turley though, as I see no constitutional prohibition of robots accusing law professors of horrible crimes.

I Think Clarence Thomas Should Investigate Himself

Sure why not.

.@SenWhitehouse, a senior Democrat on Judiciary Cmte, calls on Chief Justice Roberts “to launch an ethics investigation into Justice Clarence Thomas’s extensive billionaire-funded luxury travel habits and other outstanding allegations of misconduct by Justice Thomas,” per office. https://t.co/Od4lMjMF5j

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) April 6, 2023

Will be as thrilling as the Dobbs leak investigation.

Morning

Go

Happy Hour

Finally

THE MAJESTY OF THE INSTITUTION

Can't have people lose respect in powerful, corrupt, accountability-free institutions!

Clarence Thomas deserves a full Senate investigation and possible impeachment, but Congress likely doesn't have the appetite for that.

As one Democratic House member tells me via text, "Public trust in SC is already bad. A big circus would destroy it completely."

— Max Burns (@themaxburns) April 6, 2023

Ghouls And Do-Gooders

When obviously bad people insert themselves into a policy debate, there's no reason to listen to them. Do-Gooders might not be right all the time, but people who would put your kids in a wood chipper for a second yacht probably don't care too much about kids.

I know I'm repeating myself on this general subject here, but I'm continuing my lonely war on the horrible DC culture of everyone pretending the worst people are operating in good faith when, in fact, it's a city filled with paid liars.

There are also do-gooders, of course, but most of them don't get paid 6+ figures, don't have large microphones, don't have the ear of the WaPo editorial board, and don't have regular seats at the big tables.

Congressional staffers at the bottom of the pay scale have strict ethics rules they have to follow, unlike some.

Can't Practice Medicine Under These Circumstances

Doctors are more mobile than most people.

The legislature has confidently steered the state, which already had the fewest active physicians in the country, into an unprecedented shortage of doctors. This situation also has alarming repercussions for its neighbors who have already had to deal with the consequences. During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, Inslee complained about Idaho patients “clogging up” Washington’s hospitals.

Beginning with the establishment of a trigger ban in 2020 in anticipation of Roe v. Wade being overturned, Idaho’s health care providers saw what they would be up against. Many doctors have decided not to gamble with the risks inherent in treating pregnancy complications.

In March, Bonner General Hospital in the northern Idaho town of Sandpoint shut down its obstetrics department, citing issues including decreases in annual deliveries as well as the loss of pediatricians to handle various stages of perinatal care including immediately before and after delivery. Attempts to secure other active and retired medical professionals on an on-call basis did not yield any workable solutions.

Lunch

You only get an hour.

Dobbs

Abortion rights have always been more popular than the centrist dipshits in DC believed,* but that they are a big motivator for voters (Wisconsin) should be obvious even if it wasn't before.

I don't think national Dems, generally, are very quick to understand this as 'safe, legal, rare' type messaging has been emdedded in the culture for 30 years. Need some champions. 

*Abortion polling generally gave people 3 options (ban, some restrictions, no restrictions) and people would happily choose the 'some restrictions' one to make them feel like morally superior humans, but that disguised support for the reality of abortion rights, not the debate club version.

Creeping Corruption

I never like to imagine some sort of golden age. Some things get a bit better, some worse, norms adjust. But I really think the degree of obvious corruption that is accepted just goes up and up and up and up.

For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from the Dallas businessman without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vacationed on Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.

The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.

I always knew "Thomas the RV man" was bullshit. Yah, Ginny and Clarence fucking love Wal-Mart parking lots.

“I don’t have any problem with going to Europe, but I prefer the United States, and I prefer seeing the regular parts of the United States,” Thomas said in a recent interview for a documentary about his life, which Crow helped finance.

“I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There’s something normal to me about it,” Thomas said. “I come from regular stock, and I prefer that — I prefer being around that.”

2007:

One of his passions is the 40-foot motor home he and his wife use to explore the United States in their downtime. The U.S. marshals who protect Justice Thomas wouldn't let 60 Minutes show the outside for security reasons, since he has been known to put up overnight in Wal-Mart parking lots.

Thomas finds this pastime relaxing. "It's a way from the sort of, the meanness that you see in Washington and you get here with just the regular folks. And it's so pleasant."

Ah, yes, the regular folks [not pictured].

2020:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has never been afraid to turn right when his colleagues turn left, or in any direction really as long as there’s a place to plug in his 40-foot (12-meter) refitted tour bus at the end of the day.

Thomas is the only justice with a second home on wheels. And while it’s unclear how he’s using it during the court’s break, he still might be the envy of his colleagues during this pandemic-limited summer.

ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS

I keep thinking about this one. Do we think the WaPo editorial board knew how dishonest they were being? Do we think that they came to this one by themselves, or did one of their lobbyist buddies at the Ayn Rand Perpetual Suffering Think Tank just feed it to them and they didn't check it? Or did they somehow manage to make multiple "mistakes" that all ran in the same direction?

tl;dr: They advocated means-testing disability benefits for veterans. The piece said benefits would start phasing out at $170,000 of individual income, when in fact they would start phasing out at $125,000 of household income.

Is it worse if they are this stupid or this dishonest?

Wednesday Night

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Happy Hour

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