Quick Election Update

I'm going to sleep, but it appears almost certain that the Democrats will take control of the House and Senate.

In Texas, it appears that Greg Abbot has been turfed out as Governor of Texas, and Ken "The Most Corrupt Motherf%$#er in Texas" Paxton has lost to James Talerico, and the Democrats have won pretty much all of the state wide elections there.

And Kansas. Hoo boy!  First Democratic Senator from Kansas since the Roosevelt administration. 

Also it looks like Susan "I'm very concerned" Collins has lost in Maine, Abdul El-Sayed has won in Michigan, and Dems flipped 2 Senate seats in the Carolinas, 

W00t! 

Of Course It Didn't Save Money

It appears that Mike Huckabee's efforts to merge smaller school districts and shut down schools to save money actually cost more money.

I'm not sure if McKinsey was involved with this, but it's certainly a McKinsey result. 

When Mike Huckabee was the Arkansas governor in 2004, he wanted government to be more efficient. He signed a law to shut down tiny school districts with fewer than 350 students.

Over the next decade, 85 school districts merged with others, triggering the closure of 105 schools, most of them high schools.

Families and teachers protested. Some students had bus rides so long that they couldn’t participate in sports and other after-school activities. A 2022 study found that the mergers had accelerated depopulation in rural communities and depressed property values; that same year another study found almost no academic gains.

At least there was one potential payoff: saving taxpayers money.

What economic sense does it make to maintain a superintendent and a district office to serve just a couple hundred students? Consolidating tiny districts seemed like an obvious way to eliminate administrative overhead.

But a surprising new analysis by researchers at the University of Arkansas finds that the savings never materialized. Reductions in administrative overhead were offset by rising costs for transportation and instructional staff.

The study, presented Sept. 26 at the annual conference of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness in Baltimore, followed the finances of Arkansas school districts for two decades. It found no overall cost savings from consolidation — not immediately after districts merged and not more than a decade later.

………

So where did the savings go?

Administrative costs did fall. The researchers estimate that consolidation reduced administrative spending by as much as $138 per student, on average, according to their preliminary, unpublished calculations. Some instructional costs, including spending on education technology and textbooks, also declined, by as much as $92 per student.

But those savings were eaten up by higher costs elsewhere.

Transportation costs rose $24 per student initially and continued climbing over the years, growing to an additional $63 per student annually. Instructional staff costs — including teachers and aides, as well as math and reading coaches — rose by as much as $179 per student. Pupil-support costs, including guidance counselors and social workers, rose by as much as $61 per student.

The basic problem is that merging two districts doesn’t eliminate the need to educate the same number of children. And larger districts may create new layers of management or add more support staff, such as instructional coaches, counselors and aides.

Also money spent on consultants, I'm sure.

Interesting Historical Data Point

During WWII, and for a few years after, sugar supply was tightly restricted in the UK.  It turns out that the people who grew up under this regime achieved significant health benefits.

Obviously, correlation is not causation, but this definitely bears more research. 

They were born into a Britain still recovering from the hardships of war. Though the air-raid sirens had fallen silent, many everyday foods remained rationed, including sugar. Adults were restricted to about 3 tablespoons (40g) a day to stretch between cups of tea, baking and desserts; children were limited to less than a tablespoon. Babies and very young children were expected to have little or no added sugar.

Then, in 1953, the brakes came off. Separate restrictions on sweets and chocolate were lifted in February, followed by sugar in September. By the second half of 1954, average sugar consumption had almost doubled.

The lifting of postwar sugar rationing inadvertently created a natural experiment, whose consequences scientists are only beginning to unpick. A flurry of recent studies suggests that spending the first 1,000 days of life under sugar rationing may have left traces on people’s health more than seven decades later.

“What makes the end of sugar rationing particularly interesting is the nature of the exposure,” said Dr Jiazhen Zheng at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Guangzhou, China, who worked on several of the recent studies. “In September 1953, sugar availability changed quite abruptly at the population level, largely because of policy rather than individual choice. In a sense, history created an experiment that we could never deliberately run over a human lifetime.”

The first of this recent wave of sugar rationing studies was published in the journal Science two years ago. Dr Tadeja Gračner at the University of Southern California and her colleagues used data from the UK Biobank to compare the health of people born shortly before and after sugar rationing ended in the UK. Some had been exposed to this low sugar environment only during their time in the womb; others remained exposed for months or years, while those conceived once rationing ended were not exposed at all.

Gračner found that the longer people had spent under rationing, the lower their risk of developing type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure in mid- to later life: those exposed throughout their first 1,000 days had a 35% lower risk of type 2 diabetes and a 20% lower risk of high blood pressure than those who had never experienced rationing.

This might explain Keith Richards' longevity. 

BB Rating?

Anthropic is expected to receive junk bond status following its IPO.

I believe that the term here is, "Dead Man Walking," not $2,000,000,000.00 initial public offering.

Anthropic expected to receive high ‘junk’ rating from credit agencies following IPO, FT report says

Anthropic is expected to receive a high “junk” rating from credit rating agencies following its initial public offering, according to a report from the Financial Times.

The FT says the investment giant Blackstone, the anchor investor in a recent $63 billion deal to finance Anthropic’s chips, told investors in the deal that it expects the AI lab to receive a “high” junk rating after its IPO. Previously, the FT notes, Blackstone had said the opposite: that the Claude maker would receive an investment-grade rating (indicating low risk for lenders) before 2027 rolls around.

Now Blackstone expects double B range rating, the top tier of speculative “junk” grade, according to the reporting.

Is it too early to call a Lehman moment?

 

Headline of the Day

Defund Musk!

—Robert Reich, explaining how the biggest welfare queen in history should not be allowed to feed at the taxpayer trough.

Works for me. 

Yeah, I've Always Been Tinfoil Hat About This

When the FBI declared case closed in the Anthrax mailer case following Bruce Ivins' suicide, I was dubious.

It appears that ProPublica (and McClatchy and Frontline) has similar doubts.

Months after the anthrax mailings that terrorized the nation in 2001, and long before he became the prime suspect, Army biologist Bruce Ivins sent his superiors an email offering to help scientists trace the killer.

Already, an FBI science consultant had concluded that the attack powder was made with a rare strain of anthrax known as Ames that's used in research laboratories worldwide.

In his email, Ivins volunteered to help take things further. He said he had several variants of the Ames strain that could be tested in “ongoing genetic studies" aimed at tracing the origins of the powder that had killed five people. He mentioned several cultures by name, including a batch made mostly of Ames anthrax that had been grown for him at an Army base in Dugway, Utah.

Seven years later, as federal investigators prepared to charge him with the same crimes he'd offered to help solve, Ivins, who was 62, committed suicide. At a news conference, prosecutors voiced confidence that Ivins would have been found guilty. They said years of cutting-edge DNA analysis had borne fruit, proving that his spores were “effectively the murder weapon.”

To many of Ivins’ former colleagues at the germ research center in Fort Detrick, Md., where they worked, his invitation to test the Dugway material and other spores in his inventory is among numerous indications that the FBI got the wrong man.

What kind of murderer, they wonder, would ask the cops to test his own gun for ballistics?

To prosecutors, who later branded Ivins the killer in a lengthy report on the investigation, his solicitous email is trumped by a long chain of evidence, much of it circumstantial, that they say would have convinced a jury that he prepared the lethal powder right under the noses of some of the nation’s foremost bio-defense scientists.

PBS' Frontline, McClatchy and ProPublica have taken an in-depth look at the case against Ivins, conducting dozens of interviews and reviewing thousands of pages of FBI files. Much of the case remains unchallenged, notably the finding that the anthrax letters were mailed from Princeton, N.J., just steps from an office of the college sorority that Ivins was obsessed with for much of his adult life.

But newly available documents and the accounts of Ivins’ former colleagues shed fresh light on the evidence and, while they don't exonerate Ivins, are at odds with some of the science and circumstantial evidence that the government said would have convicted him of capital crimes. While prosecutors continue to vehemently defend their case, even some of the government’s science consultants wonder whether the real killer is still at large.

Prosecutors have said Ivins tried to hide his guilt by submitting a set of false samples of his Dugway spores in April 2002. Tests on those samples didn’t display the telltale genetic variants later found in the attack powder and in sampling from Ivins’ Dugway flask.

Yet records discovered by Frontline, McClatchy and ProPublica reveal publicly for the first time that Ivins made available at least three other samples that the investigation ultimately found to contain the crucial variants, including one after he allegedly tried to deceive investigators with the April submission.

I do not know if Ivins did it, but in any case, this was not the slam dunk that the DoJ said that it was.

When the Experts Warned Us About a Cyber Apocalypse

Not one of them said a word about comically poorly protected freezers in supermarkets.

The internet of sh%$ strikes again.

Dozens of supermarkets across seven European countries have been hit by a cyber-attack affecting their refrigerators and freezers.

Around 40 Delhaize supermarkets in Belgium and Luxembourg were affected, while a smaller number of shops were hit in Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands, Estonia and Finland.

Sabcobel, a Belgian company that manufactures some of the affected refrigerators, said the units' evaporators were switched to defrost mode, causing them to warm up, in what is believed to be the same method used in last month's incident that hit hundreds of French supermarkets.

Millions of euros worth of food had to be thrown away in October, local media reported at the time

Internet connected appliances are a bad thing. 

.

Damn

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) has been hospitalized for a stroke.

Sen. Chris Murphy is being hospitalized following a stroke, an aide to the Connecticut Democrat said Sunday.

“Yesterday afternoon, Senator Murphy started experiencing numbness in his arm while at his son’s hockey game. He was taken to a local hospital, where it was discovered he had experienced a stroke,” Allison Herwitt, Murphy’s chief of staff, said in a statement.

“He was transferred to Johns Hopkins for further monitoring and is responding well to treatment. The doctors are encouraged by his progress, he is awake and alert, and we are optimistic he will make a full recovery,” she added.

Go Utah?

Normally, I am not a fan of the state government of Utah.

Generally, when something newsworthy comes from Salt Lake City, it is bone-headed reactionary bullsh%$.

That being said, I approve of Utah going postal on Kalshi for illegal gambling in the state.

Utah is escalating its legal battle with prediction market platform Kalshi.

Utah Attorney General Derek Brown filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Kalshi, several of its subsidiaries, and two financial trading firms that work with the company, accusing them of violating the state’s anti-gambling laws.

In the lawsuit, the state compares Kalshi to a “back-alley gambling den,” arguing that the company facilitates bets and takes a percentage of the money that’s bet on its platform.

Utah is asking a court to block Kalshi from offering wagers in the state. It also wants the company to use a court-approved geolocation service to prevent Utah residents from placing bets on the platform. And the state is seeking to recover millions of dollars the company allegedly made from illegal gambling. According to the lawsuit, Kalshi has collected an estimated $30.6 million to $61.2 million in fees from wagers placed by Utah users.

Utah is the latest state to take legal action against Kalshi as the company and rival Polymarket face a growing wave of lawsuits over allegations that they are operating illegal gambling businesses. 

………

The Trump administration, meanwhile, seems to be backing prediction markets, with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) pushing back against states trying to regulate the industry.

………

In Utah’s case, the state argues there is little difference between Kalshi’s event contracts and traditional gambling. 

More of this.

I Like This

Turn About is Fair Play

At a city council meeting, someone opposing the construction of data centers played the loud noise emitted to the council members, who found this noise unbearable, but since they won't live next to the data center, they are still likely to approve the projects.

A fiscal court meeting in Carroll County, Kentucky grew contentious when local residents started playing the sound of a data center to county officials. Spoiler: they didn’t seem to like it.

As local news station WHAS11 reported last week, Carroll County is the planned location for two separate data center projects, each of which will likely be around 800 megawatts and will overtake hundreds of acres of Kentucky land. At that size, the data centers are considered hyperscalers.

“I believe they talked about 800 megawatts, so it is a hyperscale unit,” Scott Nab, a magistrate on the fiscal court, told WHAS11 of one of the projects. “It’ll be multiple buildings. It’ll spread over 1,000 acres when completed.”

As the news station notes, a data center of that size would consume the equivalent of 560,000 average homes.

Nab is among the data centers’ proponents, arguing that data is the industry of the future. Local residents of the rural region, however, are pushing back. One of their strategies? Subject county officials to the horrible, 24/7 screech that large data centers emit. 

This is not a bad 

Vote Blue No Matter ……… Never Mind

So the losing candidate in the Michigan US Senate Democratic Party Primary has endorsed the Republican in the race because she wanted the winner, Abdul El-Sayed, to condemn an ad that he had nothing to do with.

In related news, the bulk of her congressional staff resigned and condemned her.

Congresswoman Haley Stevens, who lost the Michigan Democratic Senate primary to Abdul El-Sayed, endorsed his Republican rival, Mike Rogers, in an extraordinary rebuke of her party’s nominee on the eve of the midterm elections.

Her endorsement came in a video posted to X after she attended an event with Rogers at the predominantly Black Perfecting church in Detroit on Sunday. Stevens’s endorsement was the culmination of an escalating feud between the former primary rivals – primarily over support for Israel – that has roiled one of the most fiercely contested Senate contests of the cycle.

The endorsement was met with immediate pushback from Democrats, who condemned Stevens for her “betrayal”.

Actually, that was noted Israel-hater Chuck Schumer, who called her endorsement a, "Despicable betrayal."

It appears that this was precipitated by members of the Michigan Democratic Party establishment, most notably Debbie Dingell, told her to stop grand-standing and STFU. 

Best Day of the Year

Is tomorrow, November 1 this year, because we go back to standard time from Daylight Savings Time, which sucks like 1,000 Hoovers all going at once.

I hate Daylight Savings Time. 

 

Headline of the Day

Google Eats Its Own Tail (and Profits) With AI Summaries as Stock Price Plunges

—Gizmodo, discussing how Google f%$#ed itself and its revenue through its embrace of AI.

Engineer, meet petard.

Big tech firms have poured an infinite amount of money into artificial intelligence development and rolled out tools without any consideration as to whether consumers actually want them or not, all based on the theory that eventually they’ll figure out how to turn a profit. Instead, early returns seem to suggest they’ve simply figured out a way to eat their own profits without an obvious way to replace that revenue stream.

That is at least the case for Google, which, on a Wednesday earnings call, revealed that its “AI Mode” has cut into its traditional search and advertising business. Philipp Schindler, chief business officer at Google, said that the AI-generated responses that Google now overwhelmingly serves to users whenever they search for anything have made it more difficult for Google to monetize results, cutting into its usually extremely profitable advertising business and contributing to the company missing its revenue projections in its latest earnings call.

When even Google cannot generate revenue from AI, it's game over.

Since I've Already Voted, as Is My Duty

Can I go and live in a cave for the next week?

I am so f%$#ing sick and f%$#ing tired of the f%$#ing elections. 

Elon Musk, Sooper Jenius!

It looks like Elon's rather bloated concept for a lunar mission is running into the laws of physics like a Cybertruck using full self driving.

NASA does not have, nor want, nuclear weapons. But when it comes to a particular metric that is part of the Artemis Program to land people on the Moon, NASA guards a particular number like it is trying to prevent outsiders from cracking nuclear codes.

I am speaking of the number of Starship launches required to fuel a Starship-based lunar lander in low-Earth orbit such that it can fly out to the Moon, land there, and return to lunar orbit.

………

On Thursday, the NASA Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel held its quarterly meeting, during which panel member Charlie Precourt (a former NASA astronaut) spoke about risks associated with the Artemis Program and landing humans on the Moon.

“With respect to Artemis IV, however, we’ve got a large number of firsts that reduce the likelihood of mission success,” Precourt said. “We need to keep our eyes on numerous required fuelings for the lander. I think the last estimate is around 22 flights.”

Precourt did not name Starship, but he could only be referring to the SpaceX vehicle. NASA’s other lunar lander for human missions, Blue Origin’s Blue Moon, will not be using orbital refueling as part of its initial mission design. The safety panel almost certainly would have obtained this estimated number of refuelings, 22, from discussions with NASA officials as part of its deliberations during quarterly meetings.

After I posted Precourt’s estimate on social media site X, SpaceX founder Elon Musk replied that NASA’s safety panel estimate was not accurate. “That’s way too high,” Musk said. “Actual number will be more like 6 to 8.”

6 to 8 is too many, but I would be willing to bet that 22 is closer to reality.

Musk's landing module weighs north of 100 tons, and the whole thing returns to lunar orbit.  

This contrasts with the Apollo LM which on descent weighted 16 tons, and the separate ascent module weighted less than 2 tons.

This is what happens when engineering choices are made by someone who gets their technical ideas from Tom Swift children's books. 

New GDP Figures

And the economy grew 3.4 annualized rate in the 3rd quarter, even if it doesn't feel that way.

As Dean Baker notes, the overall picture is nowhere so rosy:

1) Investment growth is almost entirely an AI story;

2) Consumption growth is strong, but is driven by stock gains;

3) The trade deficit is soaring due to AI-related imports;

4) Housing construction continues to fall;

5) The Iran War is leading to double-digit growth in military spending;

6) State and local government spending is stagnating.

The AI boom is as close to a real-world example of Keynes' (snarky) thought experiment as I've ever seen.

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing. 

The numbers belie the lived experiences of most of us.

U.S. economic growth was robust over the summer, as businesses poured money into artificial intelligence and consumers kept spending despite high prices that have soured their mood ahead of midterm elections next week.

Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced in the country, increased at a 3.4 percent annual rate in the third quarter, adjusted for inflation, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said Thursday.

That was an acceleration from the 2.2 percent rate in the spring, and was the fastest growth in a year. Consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of economic output, grew at a 3.8 percent rate.

The strong spending and growth figures contrast with the poor marks that many voters are giving the economy as they head to the ballot box for next week’s midterm elections. Polls consistently show that Americans are frustrated with the high cost of living and hold President Trump and congressional Republicans responsible for failing to deliver on their promises to improve affordability.

Those frustrations are grounded in reality. Consumer prices were up 3.5 percent in the third quarter from a year earlier, driven in part by high gas prices that are the direct result of Mr. Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran. Americans are increasingly dipping into their savings to keep up with rising costs. Households, in the aggregate, saved just 4.1 percent of their after-tax income in the third quarter, the lowest rate in nearly four years. After-tax income, adjusted for inflation, rose in the third quarter as a whole but fell in September.

 

Not Murdered Yet

Married 32 years ago today,and Sharon* has not murdered me yet.

Heck, she hasn't even attempted to murder me. 

Trust me when I say that she has had ample justification over the years, but no knives, poison, nor even our big cast iron skillet.

Have I mentioned that my beloved is a saint? 

^*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

Any Bets On This List?

Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson has ordered the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™ to tell him who was involved in ordering the torrenting of pirated works in order to train their AI.

If I had a guess, my guess would be that their name rhymes with Lark Buckerberg.

Meta will have to name the people who greenlit its torrenting of pirated books. A federal magistrate judge has ordered the company to identify everyone who approved sourcing books from LibGen and Anna’s Archive. This goes beyond the employees who ran the downloads and includes whoever decided whether to seed the books to others. 

Last month, Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson ordered Meta to hand over the command histories of the servers it used to torrent pirated books.

………

The server logs could reveal what happened on Meta’s machines. However, publisher Entrepreneur Media also wants to know who approved the torrenting activity.

Entrepreneur Media, which publishes Entrepreneur magazine, filed one of the related lawsuits where it accuses Meta of contributing to piracy by uploading (seeding) works to third parties, similar to the authors’ contributory infringement claim.

To find out more, the publisher asked Meta to identify everyone who “made, authorized, or approved” the decisions to obtain the shadow library datasets, and to do so via BitTorrent.

Meta’s answers named several people who are believed to have been involved in data-related decisions. However, Meta said it couldn’t identify anyone who “formally” made or approved decisions to acquire or use books for its first two Llama models. Those decisions were often the result of team consensus, Meta argued.

When it came to the torrenting itself, Meta pointed to the employees who ran the downloads, describing their choices as technical decisions.

………

Meta added that the acquisition of data from Anna’s Archive went through an internal legal review in early 2024, which involved its in-house lawyers. 

That bit about, "Technical Decisions, "is bullsh%$.  It does not go through legal unless someone senior approving this whole scheme.

While seeing Mark Zuckerberg frog-marched out of his office in handcuffs over something as prosaic as this would be a bit disappointing, they got Al Capone for tax evasion.

There is precedent. 

Even the Liberal The New Republic………

Understands that the consultants tied to the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) are an impediment to the success of the Party.

To paraphrase Matt Taibbi before he went insane, the Democratic Party consultant class is a  is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of the its base, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Only about 27¢ out of every dollar makes it past the consultants when you donate in response to those frantic emails.

Your phone buzzes with a frantic text message. “DEMOCRACY IS ON THE LINE.” It’s not the first time you’ve gotten a fundraising text like this from the Democratic Party and its candidates. Nor the first time you’ve rolled your eyes. But the ask makes sense. Democracy really is on the line. You have asked yourself what you would have done if you had lived under the authoritarian regimes of the past, and volunteering some time and money seems like the least you could do. You click the ActBlue link and donate $100. The country must be saved, after all.

………

We’re here to tell you that this view is wrong. The Democratic Party is being devoured by an ecosystem of consultants. Mostly out of view of the party’s voters and activists, political consultants are paid to raise the money, place the ads, and set the strategy. And they’re paid regardless of whether the party wins or loses.

………

A political party is a vehicle for groups in society—voters, activists, and politicians—to come together to elect representatives who will change the world through public policy and governance. It’s a collective enterprise in which different groups debate and negotiate the direction of the party in primary elections and then come together to take control of government and implement that negotiated agenda. The problem is that the incentives of the Democratic consultant class are not aligned with these goals.

This class—and we use the word “class” intentionally to mean the firms, consultants, and strategists paid millions of dollars by Democratic campaigns to raise money, place ads, and set strategy—is extractive, and this extraction is central to many of the party’s pathologies. Just as a private equity firm buys out a corporation and strips it for parts, the consultant class installs friendly operatives, charges fees, raids the party’s long-term assets, and gives strategic advice that ultimately serves itself over the long-term health of the party.

Our thesis is a simple one: Campaign consultants are businesses that act to maximize profits, and this profit-seeking is often at odds with what’s best to defeat American authoritarianism.

Nice to see someone at an establishment media outlet has finally noticed the obvious.

I Know That This is Contrarian Bullsh%$, But I Agree

Over at The Atlantic, they have published an essay calling for putting an end to high school sports.

It works for me. 

Every year, thousands of teenagers move to the United States from all over the world, for all kinds of reasons. They observe everything in their new country with fresh eyes, including basic features of American life that most of us never stop to consider.

One element of our education system consistently surprises them: “Sports are a big deal here,” says Jenny, who moved to America from South Korea with her family in 2011. Shawnee High, her public school in southern New Jersey, fields teams in 18 sports over the course of the school year, including golf and bowling. Its campus has lush grass fields, six tennis courts, and an athletic Hall of Fame. “They have days when teams dress up in Hawaiian clothes or pajamas just because—‘We’re the soccer team!,’ ” Jenny says. (To protect the privacy of Jenny and other students in this story, only their first names are used.)

By contrast, in South Korea, whose 15-year-olds rank fourth in the world (behind Shanghai, Singapore, and Hong Kong) on a test of critical thinking in math, Jenny’s classmates played pickup soccer on a dirt field at lunchtime. They brought badminton rackets from home and pretended there was a net. If they made it into the newspaper, it was usually for their academic accomplishments.

Sports are embedded in American schools in a way they are not almost anywhere else. Yet this difference hardly ever comes up in domestic debates about America’s international mediocrity in education. (The U.S. ranks 31st on the same international math test.) The challenges we do talk about are real ones, from undertrained teachers to entrenched poverty. But what to make of this other glaring reality, and the signal it sends to children, parents, and teachers about the very purpose of school? 

You do not have to think about the signal it, "Sends to children, parents, and teachers about the very purpose of school," you just have to understand the purpose.

They sacrifice teenagers, to the tune of 100-150 deaths annually, to the altar of college sports, who in turn sacrifice 20-somethings to the altar of professional sports, who sacrifice slightly older athletes to line the pocket books of the worst people in the world, sports team owners. 

It is an exploitative and abusive system, and it should be ended. 

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And I am very confused.

Initial claims fell again, despite what is clear about the current economy, while continuing claims rose again.

I have no bloody clue what is going on here.

Applications for US unemployment benefits fell to a three-month low last week, underscoring the stability of the labor market.

Initial claims fell by 6,000 to 194,000 in the week ended Oct. 17, according to Labor Department data released Thursday. The median forecast of economists polled by Bloomberg called for 200,000.

Continuing claims, a proxy for the number of people receiving benefits, rose by 25,000 to 1.73 million in the previous week, a six-week high.

You Call THIS a Line?

Pull the lever Kronk!It's the last day of early voting in Maryland.

I've been in line to cast my vote for the past 90 minutes. 

I've still not made it into the room with the ballot boxes.

This is nuts for a mid term election.

Posted via mobile.

(On edit)

It was about 2 hours in total, and I had to add The Emperor's New Groove meme once I got back to my computer. 

Fed Stands Pat

This is not a surprise. It's less than a week before the mid-term elections, and anything beyond holding rates steady would be perceived as meddling in electoral politics.

On the other hand, to quote Rusk, "If you choose not to decide You still have made a choice."

U.S. Treasury yields went in different directions Wednesday as markets reacted to the Federal Reserve’s widely expected decision to hold rates unchanged and to Chairman Kevin Warsh’s press conference.

The 10-year yield increased to 5.036% from 5.020% before the rate decision was announced. The two-year, however, fell to 4.702% from 4.770%, according to Tradeweb.

The disparity came as Warsh avoided forward guidance, while stating that fighting inflation shouldn’t mean stopping economic growth. He said productivity has been moving higher. “And so economic growth is higher. But that doesn’t tell me that economic growth is somehow causing inflation, making our job harder,” he added.

The dollar, in turn, changed direction and weakened during Warsh’s remarks. The WSJ Dollar Index, was down 0.1% following the press conference, after rising slightly before.

Following the monetary policy decision, odds of an interest rate increase in December reached 83%, up from 78% yesterday, according to CME. Gross domestic product data and the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, the PCE, are due Thursday and could change the outlook for interest rates.

I'm not gonna make predictions, because I foresee that any such prediction would be wrong. 

Headline of the Day

Bolsonaro Escape Jet Tied to Alleged Cocaine Trafficker

—Payday Report

To quote Zathras, "At least there is symmetry."

Trump, of course, has welcomed him with open arms.

Maybe if You Weren't Ineluctably Evil, You Might Get Laid

Women Don't Want to Date Douche Bags

Wired has a story about how tech bros has a sad because women will not f%$# them after they find out that they are working for Tesla or Palantir. 

You know, you are f%$#ing the whole world, why do you need to also f%$# one woman. 

Engaged in a flirtatious conversation at a bar in Manhattan, 23-year-old Gary stood with a Guinness in hand as he explained to a woman why he took an engineering job at Palantir, the data analytics company cofounded by Alex Karp and Peter Thiel. Raking in a $250,000 salary would allow him to help pay off his parents’ mounting medical bills, he explained.

Gary wasn’t met with sympathy. Medical debt, the woman told him, was “not an excuse to work somewhere like that.” She was referring, of course, to Palantir’s controversial work with governments, including the US and Israel, which use the company’s surveillance tools for law enforcement and military operations.

 But wait, there's more:

………

Gary has resorted to saying he works in AI. “Even that gets some pretty bad responses sometimes,” he says. His Hinge profile doesn’t mention his employer. And sometimes he makes up stories out of thin air to justify working for Palantir—like that line about the medical debt. His parents don’t have any, nor are they ill. 

(emphasis mine) 

Seriously, it's no wonder that women would rather be alone in the woods with a bear as opposed to being alone with a strange man or a bear.

You sir, are pond scum, and I hope that you die alone. 

Well, That Only Took 40 Years

Canada has finally released a report showing how the Central Intelligence Agency resettled Nazis to Canada.

Gee, hoocoodanode?  (Well, me, as well as anyone who has followed the saga of the Nazis on the Victims of Communism Memorial,  [also here and here] a Ukrainian Nazi SS member was honored in parliament on live TV, and [of course] Chrystia Freeland's family history.)

Is anyone surprised that the CIA was running a ratline to Canada?

After 40 years the Canadian government has finally released a nearly fully unredacted version of historian Alti Rodal’s investigation into alleged Nazi war criminals in Canada.

The previously redacted sections reveal that the CIA was actively involved in resettling alleged Nazis in Canada after the Second World War, that the CIA deceived Canadian officials, and that a leading CIA officer in charge of resettlement operations was later the CIA’s representative in Ottawa.

“It was a ratline,” said historian Jared McBride, referring to the escape routes used by the Nazis and their collaborators to flee Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. “In an operational sense, this is what a ratline is.”

While the newly unredacted version of the Rodal Report doesn’t name the specific individuals who gained entry into Canada, it does reveal that Canadian visa control officers posted in Stockholm were aware of falsified documents coming from American sources as early as 1953.

Further, former RCMP deputy commissioner W.H. Kelly was informed in early 1954 of suspicious applications for security screenings coming from the U.S. zone of occupation in postwar Germany.

………

[UCLA historian Jared] McBride noted that the Canadian government has consistently sought to bury the story rather than demanding transparency from the United States.

“The lack of self-respect amazes me,” said McBride. 

The new version of the Rodal Report is not completely unredacted: there remains one censored line that appears to explain why, according to Oscar Holtz, the United States wouldn’t accept known Nazi collaborators, even though there was a standing provision to permit entry to as many as 100 per year at the time. 

McBride told The Maple he wonders what individuals would have been so disreputable they would be considered inadmissible for entry to the United States, but still valuable enough — or such a security risk — they merited resettlement in Canada instead. 

I'm not amazed at all, Dr. McBride.  Canada has served as a toxic waste dump for the detritus of American empire for well over a century.

The Joys of Privatization

Water rates in the United States are 62% more then they were in 2016, well above the rate of inflation.

Maybe selling off government owned water systems to private for a few magic beans was not a good idea.

US households are paying 62% more for drinking water than they did a decade ago – outpacing inflation, grocery prices and household incomes, according to a new study.

Food & Water Watch, a Washington DC-based non-profit, analyzed 2025 billing data from the 500 largest community water systems in the US, which together serve about 155 million people, or 45% of the country’s population. The analysis compared current rates with data from a similar Food & Water Watch survey conducted in 2015. The study does not include wastewater or storm water charges, which are often billed separately from drinking water service.

In 2025, the average household using 60,000 gallons of water paid $531 for drinking water service, according to the study. However, costs varied widely, with annual bills ranging from $133 at the cheapest system to $1,416 at the most expensive.

Water prices rose 1.6 times faster than overall inflation between 2015 and 2025. Consumer prices increased 39% during that period, compared with a 62% jump in water bills, according to the study. Water costs also rose more than twice as fast as groceries, which increased 30%, and eggs, which rose 28%.

………

The study also found a major disparity between publicly owned and for-profit water systems.

Corporate-owned utilities charged the average household $823 a year, compared with $494 for publicly owned systems – a difference of $329, or 67%. Corporate systems accounted for just 11% of the 500 systems the study analyzed but represented 44% of the 25 most expensive systems. The study added that 70% of the top 10 were owned by for-profit corporations.

Outsourcing a public to a bunch of contemptible greed-head sociopaths was such a good idea.

Like Father, Like Son

Failed Brazilian Presidential Candidate Flavio Bolsonaro has had his passport confiscated and has been forbidden from leaving the country.

The allegations are involvement with paramilitaries and financial irregularities, just like his dad.

For more than twenty years, Flavio Bolsonaro has served as a state or federal legislator. Under Brazilian federal law, all legislators have immunity from prosecution.

To run for President, Bolsonaro decided not to run for his Senate seat. Now, after losing the Presidential election, he no longer has legislative immunity when his Senate term expires in January 2027.

Many have already speculated that Bolsonaro could face prosecution for his connections to paramilitary gangs and various financial dealings.

………

Now, a day after Flavio Bolsonaro lost the Brazilian presidential election, the Brazilian federal police have confiscated his passport out of fear that he might flee the country to seek asylum from the Trump Administration. Apparently, Flavio had been leaving a visit to his father, Jair Bolsonaro, who is under house arrest for attempting a coup after Lula lost the last election.

 

Why Yes, This IS Completely Mental

Trump is now threatening to ban Norwegian immigrants because of his butt-hurt over not getting the Nobel Peace Prize.

Ignoring the obvious, the Nobel Committee is a private charity, the fact that Donald Trump has kidnapped a world leader, assassinated another world leader, and started and is losing a war with Iran, would seem to mitigate against Trump getting the award.

He has the FIFA Peace Prize.  Isn't that enough? 

Linkage

Science says your boss should talk less in meetings (Ars Technica) Don't fix meetings, eliminate meetings.

Man’s Meta Muse Agent Sends Him Message So Bizarre That He Permanently Quits (Futurism) He quits using Muse, not quitting his job.

‘We Didn’t Do This Perfectly’: American Fork Police Chief’s Understatement Now Anchors A Civil Rights Lawsuit By Reckless Ben’s Helpers (Techdirt) Corrupt dirtbag admits to being a corrupt dirtbag.

Whoops: Grok Bot Spills Tech CEO’s Bank Data In Public Slack (Techdirt) Clearly, AI is the future.

Maybe There Was an Egg Cartel After All (POLITICO) Of course there was.

Musk and Thiel are Evil Demagogues. What Sustains Them? (Ann Pettifor⁠) Because they are deeply evil psychopaths?

Record Viking Hoard Yields a Coin Not Found in Over 100 Years (Gizmodo) Over 4,000 coins.  Kind of a big deal.

Max Miller gives us a historical near beer recipe. I've had Kvass and rather like it. Unlike many other non-alcoholic malt beverages, it's not too sweet.

Meanwhile in Serbia

Aleksandar Vucic Concedes his election defeat, ending his 14-year run as Prime Minister and President of the Balkan nation.

Serbia’s longtime nationalist strongman, Aleksandar Vucic, conceded defeat Sunday in a general election held after his once-tight grip on power was weakened by nearly two years of student-led street protests.

Serbia’s vote for a new Parliament came just six months after voters in neighboring Hungary rejected their own populist nationalist leader, Viktor Orban, a close ally of Mr. Vucic. The Serbian leader had adopted many of the Hungarian’s authoritarian methods — and, at the end, his gracious acceptance of defeat, as well.

“It is clear that we have lost these elections,” Mr. Vucic said in a surprisingly early speech congratulating the victors, a new political grouping called Student List-Students Win. He said that the slate of candidates selected by protesting students had won at least 135 seats in Serbia’s 250-member legislature, compared with around 105 for his own party.

A rather interesting observation here, neither party is big on joining the EU, and , "European Serbia, the only party that openly campaigned for speeding up Serbia’s stalled application to join the European bloc, failed to reach the 3 percent threshold of votes needed to enter Parliament."

Lula Wins in Brazil

It was close, but not extremely so, with a margin of more than 3%, 51.79% to 48.21%.

This is good news, even if Bolsonaro is refusing to concede and demanding that the results be annulled.

I expect the younger Bolsonaro to flee the country shortly, as his immunity as a senator is expiring.

Headline of the Day

Shellie Flockhart, Who Said a Democrat Endangers Kids, Pleaded Guilty to Endangering Kids

—The Washington Post, discussing how a Republican featured in an attack ad drove drunk with her kids in her car.

Every accusation from these folks is a confession. 

A Republican woman in a campaign commercial gave a grave warning about Sarah Trone Garriott, the Democratic candidate in one of Iowa’s most competitive House districts.

“When it comes to our kids, Sarah is just plain dangerous,” says Shellie Flockhart, a Dallas Center city councilwoman identified in the ad by her first name.

Flockhart, 55, pleaded guilty to charges related to child endangerment and driving under the influence after authorities said she drove drunk with two of her children in the car in 2017. Flockhart provided a one-page statement to The Washington Post with conditions for its use that would violate The Post’s editorial standards.

Sick Burn

He’s Got the White House Looking Like Saddam Hussein Opened a Cheesecake Factory

—Barack Obama, on Donald Trump's White House Aesthetic

I cannot stand Obama.  I believe that his steadfast support of the banksters led directly to Donald Trump, but you have to admire the use of language here. 

Former President Obama poked fun at President Trump’s various Washington, D.C., renovation projects during a campaign stop in Cleveland, Ohio, where he was stumping for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton and Senate candidate Sherrod Brown (D).

In his speech, Obama zeroed in on the changes Trump has made to the White House during his second term, saying he believes Trump is more focused on renovating the White House than on the issues voters care about.

“He seems very focused on home renovations. He should be on HGTV,” Obama said of Trump’s White House construction efforts. The Trump administration is expected to spend at least $900 million on the renovation projects.

“What’s with the gold? … He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” the former president quipped.

(emphasis mine)

Cotton and Alfalfa? Seriously?

There is a water crisis in the American southwest, and it's getting worse.

As a result many farmers are drawing more heavily on groundwater, and exceeding the carrying capacity of this resource.

The good folks at FT start their report on this with an interview with a farmer who is letting fields lie fallow as a result of the falling water table.

So, what does this farmer grow?  He grows cotton and alfalfa. (alternate link)

These are among the 2 most water intensive crops out there, and this farmer is attempting to grow this in Arizona, just south of Phoenix.

………

“We don’t have enough groundwater or enough pumps,” said Miller, a fifth-generation farmer who grows alfalfa and cotton. Some wells have gone dry, said the 35-year-old, who has had to leave some of his land fallow. 

5 generations of growing water intensive crops in a f%$#ing desert?

Sounds like 5 generations of idiocy.

Given that more than ⅔ of water consumption in the west is agricultural, perhaps the real story is that US agricultural policy is incentivizing farmers make insane choices.

No, Just No

Ewwww!!!!

I'm not the most laid back guy, but in terms of behavior that only effects yourself, or yourself and a consenting partner, I generally do not care.

That being said, there are some lines that should not be crossed.

I am not saying that I would take physical action to prevent the aforementioned line crossing, nor am I suggesting that society should establish formal sanctions through regulation and law to prevent this.

However, when one is brewing an alcoholic beverage using Mountain Dew as the primary ingredient, this is an affront to the universe itself. 

This will not end well. 

2nd Amendment Time

The Trump administration has filed a lawsuit to prevent certification of the US Senate in Alaska if Mary Peltola wins because there are 2 Dan Sullivans on the ballot.

The thing is that Alaska's election are conducted through instant runoff voting, so even if some people vote for the wrong guy as first choice (Unlikely as the incumbent will be clearly labeled as such on the ballot), their 2nd choice would be the correct Dan Sullivan.

Also, there is no precedent for this sort of federal meddling in an election. 

The U.S. Department of Justice filed suit against the Alaska Division of Elections late Thursday, seeking to block the division from certifying the result of the state’s U.S. Senate election if the Democratic challenger, Mary Peltola, wins.

President Donald Trump told reporters on Friday in Florida that he ordered the lawsuit be filed.

“I’m the one that said, ‘do it,’” he said.

Peltola is the leading opponent to incumbent Republican Sen. Dan S. Sullivan, and polls show her with a small lead over Sullivan, but the race also includes two other people — Republican Gerald Heikes of Palmer and undeclared candidate Dan J. Sullivan of Petersburg. In the complaint, the Department of Justice claims that Dan J. Sullivan’s candidacy is “frivolous,” and was intended solely to confuse voters and benefit Peltola.

Until there is an investigation to determine the extent of that confusion, the Department of Justice argues, Alaska should not be permitted to certify the result of the ongoing Senate election.

Legal experts immediately dismissed the federal argument as bunk. ……… 

On the general election ballot, the two Sullivans are listed distinctively, as “Sullivan, Dan S. (Registered Republican) Incumbent” and “Sullivan, Daniel J. Jr.” The state’s Division of Elections does not list a party affiliation for the Petersburg Sullivan, and he is listed as an “undeclared” candidate, a kind of independent, in current records.

In addition, Alaska uses ranked choice voting in general elections, meaning that any remaining confused voters could simply rank both Sullivans in either order.

If none of the four Senate candidates receive at least 50% of the first-choice votes, the lowest finisher will be eliminated and their votes redistributed to voters’ second choices.

This is a part of Trump's ongoing coup attempt.

World's Smallest Violin

Comcast has a sad because, with the increased availability of competitors in the broadband market, what is arguably the most loathed company in America is losing customers.

Merciful heavens!  It appears that these companies are charging prices that are too low.

Comcast reportedly plans significant job cuts in its cable division as the firm continues to lose residential broadband and TV customers. Comcast lost 144,000 residential broadband customers in Q3 2026, up from a 91,000-customer loss in the same quarter a year ago, the company said in its earnings report today.

Comcast historically capitalized on a lack of competition for high-speed wired broadband. But now it faces stronger competition from fixed wireless providers and from fiber providers in parts of its cable territory.

“Fixed wireless remains aggressive and continues to take share, while fiber construction remains elevated, with pockets of irrational pricing and promotional activity,” Comcast co-CEO Mike Cavanagh said today in an earnings call.

Comcast CFO Jason Armstrong said “irrational pricing” from fiber operators includes $30 to $40 monthly broadband offers “in specific markets in the third quarter.” He said $30 to $40 pricing is irrational because deploying fiber costs $1,500 or more per home, and is “getting more expensive with construction costs up as you get into more suburban and rural areas.”

The first, and most obvious, point here is that Comcast co-CEO Mike Cavanagh and Comcast CFO Jason Armstrong are contemptible greed-heads who should have been drowned at birth by their parents.

The second point is that Comcast clearly does not have a handle on the actual installation costs for fiber. 

………

After the latest quarterly drop, Comcast has 28.3 million residential broadband customers in the US. Comcast said it has a plan to turn things around.

“We’ve embarked on the most significant operating and cost transformation in our company’s history, with an opportunity we believe will ultimately amount to billions of dollars over time,” Cavanagh said. The organizational changes will result in a “significant charge” of over $1 billion to be applied in the fourth quarter earnings report, Armstrong said.

It appears likely that job cuts will affect Comcast’s famously frustrating customer service division, replacing some number of humans with AI agents that already handle some customer interactions. “As personal AI agents reshape how consumers discover, purchase, and manage services, we’re positioning Comcast to capitalize on that shift,” Armstrong said.

When a company says that adopting AI to improve their customer service they are lying.

In order for to even remotely approach viability, their existing customer service would have to be so horrifically bad that ……… Oh, right Comcast.

For them, AI might actually be an improvement. 

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ………

Initial unemployment claims fell to 194,000 from 200,00 last week while continuing claims rose by 25,000 to 1.73 million.

I have no f%$#ing clue as to what is going on.

Applications for US unemployment benefits fell to a three-month low last week, underscoring the stability of the labor market.

Initial claims fell by 6,000 to 194,000 in the week ended Oct. 17, according to Labor Department data released Thursday. The median forecast of economists polled by Bloomberg called for 200,000.

Continuing claims, a proxy for the number of people receiving benefits, rose by 25,000 to 1.73 million in the previous week, a six-week high. 

Something profoundly weird is going on. 

Bringing a Gun to a Gun Fight

There are allegations that Mary Petola's campaign was involved in recruiting the second Dan Sullivan in the Alaska US Senate race.

Given that the Republicans ran a convicted felon incarcerated in New York State in 2004 (See also here), I have to say that turnabout is fair play.

Alaska Democrat Mary Peltola’s campaign was behind an effort to recruit a challenger with almost the same name as the Republican US senator Dan Sullivan, both of whom will appear on the ballot in next week’s midterm elections, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.

Republicans have condemned the presence in the race of two candidates named Dan Sullivan – one the two-term US senator, the second a retiree living in south-eastern Alaska with scant political experience – calling the newcomer a ploy by Democrats to cost the incumbent re-election by splitting his supporters.

Peltola’s campaign has denied involvement with the other Dan Sullivan, but the Times reports that her officials together with the party’s campaign arm, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), worked to find other people named Dan Sullivan in Alaska, and encourage them to run. Their reporting is based on interviews with Peltola’s former campaign manager and other sources, together with documents and text messages related to the recruitment effort.

“Alaskan voters need to know,” Elisa Rios, whom Peltola fired in August, told the Times, which added that she later tried to retract her interview with the outlet.

This is not exactly Sean Connery describing the, "Chicago Way," in The Untouchables, but it is a good start.