Interesting Concept

People are looking into using metals for reaction mass in electrical spacecraft propulsion. (Alternate link)

We are talking about things like Hall Effect Thrusters, Ion Drives, and Plasma Drives.

They are looking at replacing various noble gasses, like xenon, krypton, and argon, with cheaper and denser metals, like zinc, bismuth, and the like.

I do recall that cesium was favored as a reaction mass a few decades ago, but that is corrosive and difficult to handle:

Move aside, xenon, krypton and argon. There is a new, heavier-weight class of spacecraft propellant: metals.

This year, several startups are testing electric thrusters that run on metal propellants. The companies say the hard stuff packs a greater punch for its volume and is cheaper and easier to handle than conventional gases.

In March, propulsion company Benchmark Space Systems launched its Xantus plasma thruster system, which uses molybdenum as a propellant, on Orion Space Solutions’ 12U cubesat. In August, Neumann Space and the University of Melbourne announced the successful completion of on-orbit tests of the Neumann Drive, an ion thruster that also uses molybdenum, on a nanosatellite. And in January, Starlight Engines plans to test its Crucible Hall-effect thruster on orbit using zinc propellant.

Metal propellants work inside electric propulsion systems in a similar way to gaseous propellants: After being vaporized, they are ionized and then accelerated out the back of the system using an electrical field. Because metal propellants have greater atomic weight, the elements require less storage volume to generate equivalent thrust.

Typically such systems provide very low thrust, from the 10s of micronewtons to a few millinewtons, but they provide somewhere between 4 and 10 times the ISP (Fuel efficiency) meaning that for station keeping in orbit or long duration missions, they can offer significantly better performance once in space.

I'm keeping my eye on this.

Best Healthcare System in the World?

Nope.

At least according to a study by the Commonwealth Fund, which showed that the US has the worst healthcare outcomes of any of the world's wealthiest nations:

The United States health system ranked dead last in an international comparison of 10 peer nations, according to a new report by the Commonwealth Fund.

In spite of Americans paying nearly double that of other countries, the system performed poorly on health equity, access to care and outcomes.

“I see the human toll of these shortcomings on a daily basis,” said Dr Joseph Betancourt, the president of the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation with a focus on healthcare research and policy.

Gee, you mean turning healthcare over to contemptible greed-heads and overpaid managers is a bad thing?

Hoocoodanode?

………

The Commonwealth Fund’s report is the 20th in their “Mirror, Mirror” series, an international comparison of the US health system to nine wealthy democracies including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the UK, Sweden and Switzerland. The foundation calls this year’s report a “portrait of a failing US health system”.

But if the government spends more on healthcare, we won't be able to buy the hyper-expensive and under performing F-35s or the cruise missile magnets known as aircraft carriers.

Wut, you some of commie pinko?

You know, I generally hold the position that we as a society cannot arrest our way out of serious problems, but I think that frog marching healthcare executives out of their offices in handcuffs might help.

So would the establishment of a UK style National Health Service.

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Unemployment


Existing Home Sales
The weekly unemployment numbers came out today, with initial claims falling by 12,000 to 219,000, better than the consensus forecast of 230,000, while the less volatile 4 week moving average fell by 3,500 to 227,500, and continuing claims fell by 14,000 to 1.829 million.

Additionally, we have news regarding home market, with home sales fell 2.5% month over month and 4.2% year over year with median home prices rising 3.1% year over year.

I would note that a bit of that price increase is due to a significant decrease in the sales of less expensive homes over the past year.

When you take out the low end, the remaining sales look increasingly pricey. 

This is not a surprise.  First time and less expensive home buyers are much more sensitive to housing costs, of which interest rates are a major component.

I would note that this does work its way up the market over time, because there are fewer people trading up to bigger and better houses.

That is probably why the fed cut rates by 1/2% yesterday.

Nice to See, Even Though It Will Fail

It's an old story, neoliberal French President tries a hail Mary by calling snap parliamentary elections, French President's party gets destroyed by the right wing fascists in the first round, collaborates with the left in the second round, defeating the right wing fascists, but with his party coming in third.

Then the aforementioned neoliberal French President delays in appointing a Prime Minister, and then ignores the fact that the left has the most seats in parliament and appoints a right-wing party apparatchik in alliance with the Fascists that he campaigned against, and then impeachment proceedings are initiated against the scumbag French President.

What's more, the first step of the impeachment passes through almost immediately.

Impeaching a French President is a very involved process, and this is only the first of somewhere around a dozen steps, but it is a well deserved slap in the face for Emanuel Macron:

The radical left La France Insoumise (LFI) party's effort to remove Emmanuel Macron from office passed a first crucial step on Tuesday, September 17. The bureau of the Assemblée Nationale, the institution's top decision-making body, validated the admissibility of the procedure initiated by LFI, with the support of the Greens, the Communists and even the Socialists.

Since the lengthy late-night session at the installation of the 27th legislature on July 19, the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) coalition has held a majority of 12 of the 22 seats on the bureau of the Assemblée, which is chaired by Assemblée Nationale president Yaël Braun-Pivet, a member of Macron's Renaissance party.

This new majority has emboldened LFI, which on August 17 threatened Macron with impeachment if he did not appoint Lucie Castets, the NFP candidate for prime minister. After Macron decided not to name Castets, LFI put their money where their mouth was and submitted their text.

………

Introduced by the 2007 constitutional amendment, this procedure for the impeachment of the president has never been successful and requires a two-thirds majority in Parliament to form a High Court. The procedure is limited to a single reading in each chamber, all within a fortnight. Article 68 of the Constitution stipulates that the president can only be removed "in the event of a breach of duty manifestly incompatible with the exercise of his mandate."

This ambiguous definition allows lawmakers to assess for themselves what constitutes a breach of duty by the president. The sanction is, above all, political, as the president remains immune from criminal, civil and administrative liability while in office.

It's clear that Macron sees the right wing as the opposition, but the left wing as the enemy, and it's also clear that he sandbagged them throughout this process.

If there is a lesson to be learned, it's that the left should never trust the center (centre?) anything .  They would rather, as Boise Penrose noted, "Preside over the ruins."

I expect Marine Le Pen to be the next French President, because the center prefers mass deportations and race riots than the prospect of even the smallest restoration of the welfare state.

Walkie Talkies Now?

Yesterday, it was pagers, todays, it's Walkie-Talkies detonating.

 As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know."

I hate reruns:

Hezbollah was hit Wednesday by another wave of exploding devices, as Israel signaled it was moving toward more aggressive military action against the Lebanese militant group.

Walkie-talkies used by the group blew up in homes, cars and in operatives’ hands across the country, people familiar with the matter said, just a day after thousands of pagers carried by Hezbollah members exploded at roughly the same time. The new attack killed 20 people and injured more than 450, after Tuesday’s bombings killed 12 and injured more than 2,800 people, according to Lebanon’s government, which blamed Israel.

The militant group was scrambling to assess the extent of the two days of explosions. Details emerging from investigations into Tuesday’s massive attack pointed to a complex plan carried out by Israel, in which explosives were planted in thousands of devices destined for Hezbollah members and then detonated by a remote signal.

………

Wednesday’s blasts widened the scale of an already unprecedented attack. Israel has faced criticism for triggering a wave of untargeted explosions that put civilians at risk. Tuesday’s attack filled many hospital emergency rooms to capacity and left two children among the dead.

Hezbollah members said some explosions on Wednesday were stronger than those in the pager attack, which left victims with severed hands, damaged eyes or gashes in their hips and sides.

………

Senior officials from the militant group ordered an immediate, broad investigation to identify how the attack happened and understand its implications. Hezbollah was also looking at the possibility of insider collaborators who might have leaked information about the procurement of the pagers.

It was the General Secretary of Hamas, Hassan Nasrallah, who publicly announced this earlier this year.

Solved it for you.

One major concern for Hezbollah is that the attack has exposed the identities of many of their operatives and commanders. The group has been struggling with information leaks and informants on the ground, a security gap that has helped Israel kill hundreds of Hezbollah militants since exchanges of fire began last October.

I am worried about the conflict across Israel's northern border further escalating.

That being said, the fact that Hezbollah's operations and communications have been profoundly and deeply and disrupted does not worry me at all.

Today in Bad Ideas

There are bills in the Senate Judiciary Committee that would restore patents for software and genes, because ……… a f%$# tonne of lobbyists and corrupt campaign contributions I guess?

I don't think that this Supreme Court has done much good, but their work in reining in excesses of our current IP regime is good.

The current regime is a license for parasite rent seekers.

It creates massive inequality and it destroys innovation when some patent troll can shake you down at a moment's notice:

The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to consider two bills Thursday that would effectively nullify the Supreme Court's rulings against patents on broad software processes and human genes. Open source and Internet freedom advocates are mobilizing and pushing back.

The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (or PERA, S. 2140), sponsored by Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Chris Coons (D-Del.), would amend US Code such that "all judicial exceptions to patent eligibility are eliminated." That would include the 2014 ruling in which the Supreme Court held, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing, that simply performing an existing process on a computer does not make it a new, patentable invention. "The relevant question is whether the claims here do more than simply instruct the practitioner to implement the abstract idea of intermediated settlement on a generic computer," Thomas wrote. "They do not."

Yeah, Clarence f%$#ing Thomas got this right. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  

That case also drew on Bilski v. Kappos, a case in which a patent was proposed based solely on the concept of hedging against price fluctuations in commodity markets.

………

Software and Internet advocates have taken notice. This week, the Linux Foundation, working with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), announced an expanded partnership with Unified Patents, intended to defend open source software against what it gamely calls "non-practicing entities" (NPEs), but most people would term patent trolls. "As the risk and volume of frivolous litigation against open source projects grows, the need to provide accessible protection from NPEs has become crucial," the Linux Foundation writes.

In interviews with The Register, leaders at CNCF and Unified Patents described patent trolls as actively chasing any widespread technology, aiming for settlements over the cost of trials. Nearly 98 percent of NPE claims are settled, according to Unified Patents, but NPE claims challenged at the US Patent and Trademark Appeals Board lose 67 percent of the time.

Challenging patent claims, however valid, could get tougher under the PREVAIL Act, the other bill being considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. PREVAIL would, among other changes, limit patent challenge petitions to 14,000 words, hampering attempts to debunk complex patents. The Act would also eliminate clearance patents, which companies can use to clear any infringement claims prior to their own products' release.

………

Another wrinkle in the PERA bill involves genetic patents. The Supreme Court ruled in June 2013 that pieces of DNA that occur naturally in the genomes of humans or other organisms cannot, themselves, be patented. Myriad Genetics had previously been granted patents on genes associated with breast and ovarian cancer, BRCA1 and BRCA2, which were targeted in a lawsuit led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The resulting Supreme Court decision—this one also written by Thomas—found that information that naturally occurs in the human genome could not be the subject to a patent, even if the patent covered the process of isolating that information from the rest of the genome. As with broad software patents, PERA would seemingly allow for the patenting of isolated human genes and connections between those genes and diseases like cancer.

This is a horrendously bad idea. 

Shut it down

Delighted to be Wrong

I was wrong, the Federal Reserve has cut its benchmark interest rate by 50 basis points (½%) rather than my prediction of a 25 basis point cut.

I think that this was more of an accommodation of market expectations than it was concerns about employment:

The Federal Reserve voted to lower interest rates by a half percentage point, opting for a bolder start in making its first reduction since 2020. The long-anticipated pivot followed an all-out fight against inflation the central bank launched two years ago.

Eleven of 12 Fed voters backed the cut, which will bring the benchmark federal-funds rate to a range between 4.75% and 5%. Quarterly projections released Wednesday showed a narrow majority of officials penciled in cuts that would lower rates by at least a quarter point each at meetings in November and December.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s decision to trim rates by a larger amount than most analysts anticipated until just a few days ago moved the central bank unwaveringly into a new phase of its inflation battle: It is now trying to prevent past rate increases, which last year took borrowing costs to a two-decade high, from further weakening the U.S. labor market.

“We are committed to maintaining our economy’s strength,” Powell said at a news conference. “This decision reflects our growing confidence that with an appropriate recalibration of our policy stance, strength in the labor market can be maintained.”

In its policy statement, the Fed said the decision reflected “greater confidence that inflation is moving sustainably toward 2%” and that the central bank “judges that the risks to achieving its employment and inflation goals are roughly in balance.”

………

Some Republicans are upset that a rate cut might boost sentiment ahead of the November election. The rate cut is a sign the economy is “not good. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to do it,” Trump said at a town hall on Tuesday night. Powell has said the Fed doesn’t take political considerations into account.

I'm surprised but pleased.

Covid F%$#s Up Your Immune System

Public health officials in Kansas are wondering why a spike in Covid infections has been accompanied by a spike in tuberculosis infections.

Once again, I need to remind people that Coronavirus infections tend to compromise their victim's immune systems for a long time, perhaps forever. 

People try to ignore this, but we saw this with RSV, and Acute flaccid myelitis (AFM), MPox, etc.

I would also note that Measles infections have a similar effect, wiping out prior vaccine acquired immunity.

It's Covid, and it ain't over:

As the Kansas and Missouri medical communities prepare for respiratory illness season, health officials grapple with an early COVID-19 infection spike and higher-than-normal tuberculosis infections in Wyandotte County.

COVID positivity rates have been steadily increasing in Kansas, Missouri and across the country since July. The increase is higher than last summer’s rates and similar to the surge in infections seen this January, doctors said during a Friday morning medical update from the University of Kansas Health System. 

………

However, the level of COVID-19 activity detected in wastewater systems throughout Kansas is on the rise, as is the case regionally and nationally, according to the channel. Monitoring wastewater can offer early warning signs that infections are increasing or decreasing in a given community without relying on whether people present with symptoms, according to the CDC’s website. 

………

Kansas has recorded 82 confirmed cases of active tuberculosis this year, which is almost double last year’s total of 46 cases. All of the active cases are being treated to limit the spread, Jill Bronaugh, a spokeswoman for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, said in an email. More than half of this year’s cases, 57, originated in Wyandotte County, and six were reported from Johnson County.

“TB is an infectious disease that most often affects the lungs and is caused by a type of bacteria,” Bronaugh said. “It spreads through the air when infected people cough, speak, or sing.”

Two people have died from tuberculosis in Kansas this year. A cause for the increase this year has not been identified. Bronaugh said the state and county health departments are working with the CDC to monitor and prevent the spread of tuberculosis.

I know that I am an engineer, not a public health expert or a doctor, dammit,* but it's pretty clear that the damage has something to do with the latest, and still active pandemic.

Efforts to dismiss this Covid as "Over" or "Endemic" serve only to interfere with efforts to remediate the spread of the disease, and make the problem worse.

Not only are there spikes in many contagious diseases, but in cancer in young adults.

It's Covid.

Wear your f%$#ing mask.

^*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

This Is 2 Years Old, but New to Me

Douglas Rushkoff, writing in The Guardian in September 2002, describes a bizarre seminar with rich tech bros in which they were asking him how to make sure that their security detail doesn't just kill them and take their stuff in the event of an apocalypse.

By apocalypse, we mean a situation where currency, and Bitcoin, and possibly even a Honda with a trunk full of silver, are less important to survival than ammunition and canned goods.

His suggestion was that they start making friends with their security team now, but these self described genius billionaires could not wrap their heads around the idea of being decent human beings.

What a surprise:

As a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives, I am often mistaken for a futurist. The people most interested in hiring me for my opinions about technology are usually less concerned with building tools that help people live better lives in the present than they are in identifying the Next Big Thing through which to dominate them in the future. I don’t usually respond to their inquiries. Why help these guys ruin what’s left of the internet, much less civilisation?

Still, sometimes a combination of morbid curiosity and cold hard cash is enough to get me on a stage in front of the tech elite, where I try to talk some sense into them about how their businesses are affecting our lives out here in the real world. That’s how I found myself accepting an invitation to address a group mysteriously described as “ultra-wealthy stakeholders”, out in the middle of the desert.

………

The next morning, two men in matching Patagonia fleeces came for me in a golf cart and conveyed me through rocks and underbrush to a meeting hall. They left me to drink coffee and prepare in what I figured was serving as my green room. But instead of me being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, my audience was brought in to me. They sat around the table and introduced themselves: five super-wealthy guys – yes, all men – from the upper echelon of the tech investing and hedge-fund world. At least two of them were billionaires. After a bit of small talk, I realised they had no interest in the speech I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come to ask questions.

………

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?

The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time”.

I tried to reason with them. I made pro-social arguments for partnership and solidarity as the best approaches to our collective, long-term challenges. The way to get your guards to exhibit loyalty in the future was to treat them like friends right now, I explained. Don’t just invest in ammo and electric fences, invest in people and relationships. They rolled their eyes at what must have sounded to them like hippy philosophy.

They are sociopaths, and it is literally impossible for them to put themselves in another person's place.

The best that they can do is pretend to have empathy.

………

These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Now they’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch. Will it be Jeff Bezos migrating to space, Thiel to his New Zealand compound, or Mark Zuckerberg to his virtual metaverse? And these catastrophising billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy – the supposed champions of the survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fuelling most of this speculation to begin with.

What I came to realise was that these men are actually the losers. The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules. More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where “winning” means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.

………

That’s because it wasn’t their actual bunker strategies I had been brought out to evaluate so much as the philosophy and mathematics they were using to justify their commitment to escape. They were working out what I’ve come to call the insulation equation: could they earn enough money to insulate themselves from the reality they were creating by earning money in this way? Was there any valid justification for striving to be so successful that they could simply leave the rest of us behind –apocalypse or not?

Or was this really their intention all along? Maybe the apocalypse is less something they’re trying to escape than an excuse to realise The Mindset’s true goal: to rise above mere mortals and execute the ultimate exit strategy.

Once again, I feel compelled to quote John "Kung Fu Monkey" Rogers about all of this, who has the final word on Rand and her Randroid followers like these losers:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

We need to find a way to deal with the sociopaths who are running large swaths of our economy and our society.

I'm thinking broken window zero tolerance law enforcement, with lots of arrests.

Headline of the Day

There Are So Many Armed Cops on Subways That Now They’re Shooting Each Other

—The Intercept

New York City Mayor Eric Adams' electoral strategey largely consists of attempting to scare the hell out of New Yorkers over crime, and then over-policing in response. (Also turning a blind eye on police and fire department destruction, but that's for a later time.)

Well now, NYPD officers pursuing a turnstile jumper unleashed a volley of bullets at a turnstile jumper, shooting one officer and an innocent bystander, and using as a justification that said miscreant carried a knife: (Said knife has conveniently gone missing)

In a Brooklyn subway station on Sunday afternoon, police shot and injured three people and a fellow New York Police Department officer over a $2.90 fare. This is what safety and security looks like in Mayor Eric Adams’s New York, where problems of poverty and hardship are met with policing and state-sanctioned violence.

At around 3 p.m. Sunday, at the Sutter Avenue stop in Brownsville, Brooklyn, a 37-year-old man allegedly evaded paying the subway fare. According to reports, two police officers pursued this man up three flights of stairs and confronted him on the station platform. Police say the man pulled out a knife. Both officers opened fire on the man, piercing him with several bullets, while also striking two bystanders; one of the officers was hit with friendly fire. One of the bystanders, a 49-year-old man, is in critical condition in the hospital from a bullet wound to the head.

This is what happens when you flood a major transit system with a government-sanctioned, taxpayer-funded armed gang coated with official impunity and prone to violent escalation.

Yeah, firing into a crowd is not a good way to handle a turnstile jumper.

Hizonner Adams has no problem with that, because, in his world, if the NYPD must be allowed to engage in all sorts of corrupt and abusive sh%$, we will have anarchy.

My First Thought was, "Who the F%$# Still Uses Pagers?

Warning, graphic violence

It appears that Israel planted explosives in thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah and set them off today, killing at least 9 11 people, at least 8 of whom were senior Hezbollah operatives.

I do understand that Hezbollah chose to use pagers to maintain communications security, but this was largely undermined when, "Earlier in the year, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah warned the organization to stop using smartphones as these could be compromised and advised switching to pagers." 

Publicly announcing a change in communication protocols simply confirms a new attack surface for your adversaries:

Israel carried out its operation against Hezbollah on Tuesday by hiding explosive material within a new batch of Taiwanese-made pagers imported into Lebanon, according to American and other officials briefed on the operation.

The pagers, which Hezbollah had ordered from Gold Apollo in Taiwan, had been tampered with before they reached Lebanon, according to some of the officials. Most were the company’s AR924 model, though three other Gold Apollo models were also included in the shipment.

The explosive material, as little as one to two ounces, was implanted next to the battery in each pager, two of the officials said. A switch was also embedded that could be triggered remotely to detonate the explosives.

At 3:30 p.m. in Lebanon, the pagers received a message that appeared as though it was coming from Hezbollah’s leadership, two of the officials said. Instead, the message activated the explosives. Lebanon’s health minister told state media at least 11 people were killed and more than 2,700 injured.

I will note that this is an impressive bit of spy craft, and compared to the normal death toll from rockets or precision guided munitions, remarkably precise.

It also has the effect of completely disrupting Hezbollah communications for weeks, if not months.

………

The devices were programmed to beep for several seconds before exploding, according to three of the officials.

So the idea was that someone would have it in their hand when it went off.

I am impressed. 

A lot of moving parts all had to come together for this to happen.

Way to F%$# Up a Good Idea

The US Department of the Treasury has proposed a new rule that would require large corporations to pay at least 15% of their profits in taxes.

This rule was authorized under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) , and the IRA was came into effect in ……… August 2022.

Gee, only 2 years to draw up the rule.

Well, I guess that this is better than the "Never" that a Republican administration would take to promulgate a rule:

The Biden administration on Thursday proposed a new rule that would require the largest U.S. companies to pay at least 15% of their profits in taxes.

Treasury Department officials estimate that about 100 of the biggest corporations — those with at least $1 billion in annual profits — would be forced to pay more in taxes under a provision that was included in the administration’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Democratic members of Congress, including Elizabeth Warren, a senator from Massachusetts, have urged the White House to implement the tax.

Similar to the alternative minimum tax that applies to mostly wealthier individuals, the corporate AMT seeks to ensure that large corporations can’t use tax loopholes and exceptions avoid paying little or no taxes on extensive profits.

The tax is a key plank administration’s’ “agenda to make the biggest corporations and wealthiest pay their fair share,” the Treasury Department said.

Gee, that's nice.  Why did it take 2 f%$#ing years?  Why?

Given that the Congressional Review Act gives 60 LEGISLATIVE days to pass such a rule, it could be subject to repeal after the next President is sworn in.

Seriously, I have to conclude that the Treasury decided to drag its feet in the hope of completing a complete cluster-f%$#.

Either that, or outright cowardice, or maybe both.

I Think that I See Your Problem

It appears that the New York Times idea of supporting a diversity of views is to have a few center right OP/ED writers, a similar number of hard right OP/ED writers, and right wing moonbat guest writers.

So, of course, as noted by Atrios, the so-called journalists pretend that it doesn't matter, just like deceptive headlines don't mater, just like looking at the first paragraph doesn't matter, etc.

This is how one ends up with nakedly transphobic from the Gray Lady:

If you read yesterday’s [September 11] New York Times, you likely came across a feature headlined “‘Trump Brought Darkness; Harris Brought Light’: 14 Writers on Who Won the Presidential Debate.” If you read it closely, you might have noticed that of the 14 writers in question, eight work directly for The New York Times and six are outside contributors. The eight Times employees include a relatively even mix of liberals and conservatives. The six outside contributors, on the other hand, are 100 percent conservative.

Wild, right? Well, we’re just getting started.

The New York Times published similar features after each night of the Democratic convention last night. Four nights, four pieces, a total of 13 appearances by outside contributors with clear ideological backgrounds or affiliations … all 13 of them conservatives.

And we are not done yet!

In July The New York Times did the same thing for the Republican convention: Four nights, four pieces, a total of 17 appearances by outside contributors with clear ideological backgrounds or affiliations … all 17 of them conservatives.

All together these nine opinion roundups feature 36 appearances by outside contributors with readily-apparent ideological backgrounds or affiliations — and all 36 are conservatives. (To be clear, there are fewer than 36 people involved; the Times turned to most of the right-wing writers multiple times.)

Yeah, your liberal media at work.

………

The Times’ own roster of columnists is relatively ideologically diverse. Not perfectly so, and I have plenty of objections with the paper’s decision to give such a platform to consistently dishonest writers like Bret Stephens, but the roster in general and as featured in these “X writers react to Y” roundups is fairlydiverse. But the fact that the outside voices the paper turns to for these roundups are exclusively conservative speaks volumes about the paper’s biases and agenda.

Yes, it does, and it why Atrios calls the paper, "That F%$#ing Newspaper."

The problem is that the Times is far more SELF important than it is important.

The Technical Term, is, "Death Spiral"

Intel has decided to spin off their chip fab lines as an independent subsidiary.

The theory is that they will be able to attract investors better that way, but this sounds like Underpants Gnome reasoning to me.

Why would someone be more likely to invest in a failing part of a business that gets hives off into a separate entity is beyond me.

Intel will spin out its Foundry division as an independent subsidiary with its own board, in the hopes of bringing in new sources of capital for the ailing business unit.

The decision, announced in a Monday letter penned by CEO Pat Gelsinger, comes just months after Chipzilla made the Foundry division a separate line item on its financial disclosures.

Gelsinger, who has taken considerable flak for Foundry's mounting losses in recent quarters, claims the decision to establish the division as a subsidiary will offer multiple benefits.

"It provides our external Foundry customers and suppliers with clearer separation and independence from the rest of Intel," he wrote. "It also gives us future flexibility to evaluate independent sources of funding and optimize the capital structure of each business to maximize growth."

The move also provides a more immediate benefit for Intel's shareholders: getting the division's operating losses off Intel's books. In Q2 alone Intel Foundry racked up $2.8 billion in operating losses. That dismal performance has spurred multiple class action lawsuits alleging Gelsinger and CFO David Zinsner misled investors about the health of the business unit.

While Intel Foundry will function more like a standalone business, Gelsinger stressed the subsidiary's leadership who will continue to report directly to him.

So, it's just financial engineering.

Maybe instead of spending time and effort on financial engineering, you would spend time ane effort on actual engineering.

I'm just saying.

Headline of the Day

CEO of “Health Care Terrorists” Faces Contempt Charges After Senate No-Show

—Ars Technica

About 3 weeks ago, I wrote about the aforementioned terrorist, Ralph de la Torre, CEO of Steward Health Care System, who looted the hospital chain.

Apparently he had decided that he is too rich to testify before Congress.

I think that frog marching off of his yacht in handcuffs is called for.

Best healthcare system in the world, huh?

I am Clearly in the Wrong Timeline

When antivaxxer, hypocrite, bat-sh%$ insane fruit loop, and former Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announces that he is under federal investigation for beheading a dead beached whale, all of use are clearly in the wrong timeline:

Robert F Kennedy Jr has said that he is being investigated by federal authorities for collecting the head from a decapitated whale carcass.

During a campaign event on Saturday for the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, in Glendale, Arizona, the former independent presidential candidate said: “I received a letter from the National Marine Fisheries Institute saying that they were investigating me for collecting a whale specimen 20 years ago.”

He added: “This is all about the weaponization of our government against political opponents.”

Kennedy, who endorsed the former president after dropping out of November’s election, fell under scrutiny in recent weeks after the resurfacing of a 2012 interview that his daughter Kick gave to Town & Country in which she addressed the whale in question.


Recounting how the creature washed up on a beach near Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, she said: “[He] ran down to the beach with a chainsaw, cut off the whale’s head and then bungee-corded it to the roof of the family minivan for the five-hour haul back to Mount Kisco, New York.

“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet. We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day to day stuff for us.”

Seriously?

I don't know what's coming next in this year's parade of dysfunction, but if I had to make a prediction, it would be that RFJ, Jr. would be outed as a sadistic equestrian necrophiliac, but that's probably beating a dead horse.

Headline of the Day

Hedge Fund Manager Thinks Just About Anyone Not Named ‘Murdoch’ Would Do A Better Job Running News Corp.

—Dealbreaker

Yeah, pretty much.

Given that the choice at this point is which incompetent nepo-baby gets to run the publishing empire, as opposed to whether an incompetent nepo-baby should succeed Rupert Murdoch, it is not unreasonable to conclude that there are some significant gaps in News Corporation's management structure and management culture.

No Blogging Tonight

Went to an SCA event in Culpeper County, Virginia, about a 250 mile round trip, I just got home,  and my brain is fried.

Posted via mobile.

Headline of the Day

An Endorsement from Dick Cheney is Nothing to be Proud Of

—Current Affars

This is undoubtedly true.

For the last third of the 20th century, and for the first 15 years of this century, you would be very hard pressed to find a more perfidious font of incompetence, hypocrisy, and evil in national politics in the United States.

That, and he is a war criminal as well.

Henry Kissinger without the charm.

And It Is On

So, following an overwhelming vote against the Boeing offer, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers is on strike.

Heard a bit of coverage on NPR today, and once again, they were subtly anti-union in their slant, as they always are.  Remember that at pledge time. 

The numbers are kind of mind boggling, 94.6% voting to reject the contract, and 96% voting to strike.

The IAM members clearly have no f%$#s left to give.

While a lot of this is about the fact that the last deal was not a good one, there were a lot of concessions, I also think that a lot of this is that the rank and file want to make airliners, and they feel that management is an impediment to their doing so.

Boeing Machinists union members voted Thursday by an overwhelming majority to reject management’s contract offer and go on strike.

Boeing’s 33,000 blue-collar workers were instructed to walk out at 12:01 a.m. Friday and stay out indefinitely.

International Association of Machinists District 751 President Jon Holden, who on Sunday urged members to accept the deal, announced the result to raucous cheers and chants of “Strike! Strike! Strike!” to about 80 Machinists late Thursday at the union headquarters in South Park.

“This is about respect, this is about addressing the past and this is about fighting for our future,” Holden told the crowd. “We strike at midnight.”

He said 94.6% voted to reject the contract and 96% voted to strike, more than the two-thirds majority required by union rules to authorize a walkout.

At a news conference after the announcement, Holden said “I’m proud of our members, proud of them for standing up and fighting for more, for each other, for their families, for the community.”

………

Even before Holden delivered the result, a team of union officials outside was busily cutting holes in large metal barrels, carving the initials “IAM” into the side of each and adding a cylindrical chimney on top. They’ll be used as “burn barrels,” with fires lit inside to keep pickets warm in the nights and days ahead.

Inside the hall, buckets were filled with premade “On Strike” signs.

Votes were tallied from polling places across the Puget Sound region, as well as in Moses Lake; Portland, Ore.; Victorville, Calif.; and Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California.

………

They did not even accept that Boeing’s stated wage increase was really 25% over four years as the company presented it, since the Machinists at the same time lost their annual bonus, which might have been worth around 4% each of those years.

Do the math:  25% -(4%  x 4 years) = 9% over 4 years.  Given the Federal Reserve's target of 2% inflation, that is awfully close to running in place.

Brandon Phelps, 35, a former U.S. Air Force mechanic who installed weapons systems on Boeing F-15s in Afghanistan and is now a team lead in the Renton 737 assembly plant, said the increase is just over 10% over four years once that takeaway is considered.

Boeing's, has been very conciliatory since the walkout, with its CFO saying that the aerospace giant is eager to return to negotiations.

Boeing's new CEO is actually in the process of moving to the Seattle area, where he bought a home in the tony Broadmoor gated community, a move likely intended  to mollify the palpable anger of Pacific Northwest employees.

The workers are in the drivers seat here.  Boeing has been hemorrhaging cash for some time, and its credit rating is currently Baa3 according to Moody's, one step above junk bond status, so it is NOT in a position to raise money easily or cheaply.

They need to get their assembly lines up and running quickly, particularly the lucrative 737 lines.

Quote of the Day

My spicy view about just why some billionaires - people who seemingly have everything they could possibly want and are almost entirely unaffected by anything that actually happens to the rest of us - are so into converting the country into a neo-feudal hellscape is that there are a couple of things that, despite their unimaginable wealth, they would have a hard time getting away with anywhere in the world.

Specifically, they want literal slaves, including child slaves, with all that implies.

—Atrios

Obviously, Mr. Black intent here is to be provocative, but that does mean that this is not true.

In fact, I would argue that this is, to quote Charles Dickens, "True ……… as turnips is. It was as true ……… as taxes is. And nothing’s truer than them."

Billionaires want to be God Kings who are exempt from the ordinary norms of human decency.

This is not a good or a healthy thing.

It would be best for society to arrest them, deport them to China, and force them to work at a Foxconn.

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Initial claims and firing


Continuing claims and hiring


InflationInitial unemployment claims were basically flat, up 2,000 to 230,000, which is basically statistical noise.

The same can be said for continuing claims, which rose by 5,000 to 1.850 million.

We also got the producer price index numbers, and it was 1.7% year over year, which is pretty good:

The number of Americans filing new applications for unemployment benefits increased marginally last week, suggesting that layoffs remained low even as the labor market is slowing.

Other data from the Labor Department on Thursday showed producer prices rising slightly more than expected in August amid a rebound in the cost of services. The combination of a fairly stable labor market and still-high inflation further diminished the chances of the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates by 50 basis points next Wednesday, when the U.S. central bank is expected to start its long-awaited easing cycle.

The reports followed data this month showing the unemployment rate retreated in August from a near three-year high touched in July and underlying inflation indicating some stickiness last month. Financial markets have slashed the odds of a half-point rate reduction to less than 15%.

I still think that we are in the midst of a downturn, and I still think that the Fed will only cut rates by ¼%, but opinions are like assholes, everyone has one.

Speaking of the Positive Effects of Unions

Amazon is raising pay for its drivers by 7% year over year in an attempt to forestall unionization.

Even when unions don't win, the threat of unions produces a win: 

Amazon.com is putting billions of dollars toward the drivers that deliver its packages following union organizing activity among such workers.

The company said it is investing about $2 billion into its delivery services program this year, and that the money will result in average national pay for drivers delivering Amazon parcels to reach nearly $22 per hour, a 7% increase from last year.

Amazon has been delivering most of its own packages with the help of small businesses around the country since 2018. The average pay for drivers was $20.50 last year.

………

Amazon’s investment follows union organizing activity and changes to how labor officials view its drivers.

Officials with the National Labor Relations Board have recently designated Amazon a joint employer of drivers who are contracted to deliver packages for the company at facilities in Palmdale, Calif., and Atlanta. The rulings could change how the agency views Amazon’s relationship with drivers and could force Amazon to bargain with those workers if they unionize.

Of course Amazon is a joint employer:

• Amazon surveils the drivers with their own cameras.
• Amazon dictates the metrics that result in a driver being hired or fired. 
• Amazon dictates the specific root that these drivers take.
• Amazon dictates how often the drivers can pee.  (Hence the bottles)

Nice to see Amazon being forced against its will to do the right thing.

Now arrest Jeff Bezos for bad hair or something.

Nice to See a Win

The United Auto Workers Union has won the union election at the Ultium battery factory in Spring Hills, Tennessee.

This is the second victory at Ultium and the first in the historically union unfriendly South:

"The new jobs of the South will be union jobs," said Tim Smith, a regional director for the United Auto Workers, after the union announced Tuesday that 1,000 workers at Ultium Cells in Spring Hill, Tennessee had voted to form a collective bargaining unit.

The vote made the electric vehicle battery plant the second Ultium Cells workplace to join the UAW, and the second auto industry plant in the U.S. South to vote in favor of unionization following the launch of a major $40 million organizing effort in the region this year.

Anti-union companies such as EV automaker Tesla have eyed the South as a region to make a manufacturing push, due to its historical antagonism toward labor and low levels of unionization.

But Smith said the vote at Ultium Cells proves that "in the battery plants and EV factories springing up from Georgia to Kentucky to Texas, workers know they deserve the same strong pay and benefits our members have won. And we're going to make sure they have the support they need to win their unions and win their fair share."

The first Ultium Cells battery plant to join the UAW was the Lordstown, Ohio location, where employees ratified a contract in June that included a 30% raise over three years for production workers, an immediate $3,000 bonus, and health and safety protections.

The lesson to be learned from this is that success begets success. so the victory against the big 3 (2½) last year is responsible for much of this success.

For decades, unions have been trying to minimize their losses, and have come across as losers.

You lose every fight that you run away from.

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

We’d like to announce that while we are not a hotel, we are a concept of a hotel.

— Four Seasons Total Landscaping (@TotalSeasons) September 11, 2024

This is the best snark of the Presidential campaign so far. 

Hell this may be the best snark of ANY Presidential campaign EVER.

Glorious.

Welcome to the Handmaiden's Tale

Corrupt Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing to override HIPPA so that he can prosecute women for going out of state for abortions.

Yeah, the party of small government wants to be able to pry into a woman's most private and personal decision:

Texas has sued to block federal rules that prohibit investigators from viewing the medical records of women who travel out of state to seek abortions where the procedure is legal.

The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in Federal District Court in Lubbock, targets medical privacy regulations that were issued in 2000, and takes aim at a rule issued in April that specifically bans disclosing medical records for criminal or civil investigations into “the mere act of seeking, obtaining, providing or facilitating reproductive health care.”

Texas bans abortions in almost all circumstances. Women are not subject to criminal prosecution for obtaining abortions, but state law imposes penalties of as much as life in prison for those who aid in obtaining abortions.

The lawsuit claims that the privacy rules ignore federal law that lets states view medical records “for law enforcement purposes.”

In a statement on Wednesday, Texas’ attorney general, Ken Paxton, called the April rule “a backdoor attempt at weakening Texas’ laws.” He added: “The Biden administration’s motive is clear: to subvert lawful state investigations on issues that the courts have said the states may investigate.”

………

The April regulation came in direct response to abortion bans enacted by many Republican state legislatures after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. A number of those states, including Texas and Alabama, have signaled their interest in extending those bans to include women who cross state lines to get an abortion.

The lawsuit filed on Wednesday also asserts that the rule covers “hormone and drug therapy for gender dysphoria, surgical procedures related to gender dysphoria, and gender experimentation.” Texas bars minors from obtaining gender-transition surgery and related care like hormone therapy.

Whether Texas investigators have sought records of women who traveled out of state for abortions is unclear. But Mr. Paxton, a Republican, has demanded records on gender-transition care from organizations in Washington State and Georgia. In March, a judge temporarily blocked Mr. Paxton from forcing an L.G.B.T.Q. organization to turn over documents.

People like Ken Paxton are not the opposition, they are the enemy.

Tech Bros in Europe

It's not going well with the European Union, what with Google having to pay €2.4 billion in fines for monopolistic behavior:

The European Union's Court of Justice (ECJ) has dismissed Google's appeal of a €2.4 billion ($2.65 billion) 2017 antitrust ruling, finding it had abused its dominance in favor of its own Google Shopping service, diverting traffic that would otherwise have gone to rival comparison services.

The 2017 decision at the time was the culmination of a years-long antitrust investigation that began in 2010.

Alphabet already attempted, and failed, to get the 2017 decision overturned on appeal in 2021, when it claimed before the EU General Court that its treatment of searches on Google's shopping comparison service wasn't unfair. At the time it argued the consequences of the practice to the rivals were not so dire, pointing to differences in search traffic, which it claimed were not "substantial." But the General Court wasn't buying this, stating: "Those arguments take account only of the impact of the display of results from Google's comparison shopping service, without taking into account the impact of the poor placement of results from competing comparison shopping services in the generic results."

Google then appealed to Europe's top court, the ECJ. The final smackdown, in a decision delivered over 14 years after the probe began, dismissed all of Google's grounds of appeal, saying, among other things, that the search giant had "failed to meet the legal test for a duty to supply access to comparison shopping services."

Also, you see Apple having to pay Ireland €13 billion in back taxes, which the government of Ireland did not want to collect what amounts to about €2,450.00 for every person in the country.

If you are wondering why Ireland is on Apple's side in all of this, it's because the business model of the Irish state is to profit off of a race to the bottom.

Basically, they have decided that their role is to be a colonial possession of multinational corporations that operate in the EU.

The EU competition authority ruled that this was an illegal subsidy, and the ECJ, made that ruling final:

Apple has suffered a significant defeat after the EU’s top court ruled that the iPhone maker must pay 13 billion euros in back taxes, overturning an earlier decision in the Big Tech group’s favor.

The ruling relates to a 2016 case when the EU’s competition chief Margrethe Vestager said that Ireland had given the company an illegal sweetheart deal, amounting to a tax rate of less than 1 percent.

The European Court of Justice said on Tuesday in its final ruling that it “confirms the European Commission’s 2016 decision: Ireland granted Apple unlawful aid which Ireland is required to recover.”

A lower court had in 2020 quashed the commission’s order and the ECJ’s decision to overturn that ruling was unexpectedly decisive.

………

The Irish finance ministry said it would consider the ruling but added: “The Irish position has always been that Ireland does not give preferential tax treatment to any companies or taxpayers.”

The technical term for the statement by the FM is a, "Lie."

The case has been watched carefully across the bloc as a watershed moment over Big Tech’s tax affairs in Europe, with the EU’s efforts to probe the arrangements between companies and member states having previously suffered setbacks.

………

However, the ECJ on Tuesday affirmed the commission’s original finding that Apple’s tax structure in Ireland—which excluded the profits generated from the intellectual property licenses held by its international and European arms—amounted to state aid.

………

However, Dan Neidle, founder of the Tax Policy Associates think-tank, said the ECJ’s Apple decision would still have “significant implications” that will force member states and multinational companies to reconsider how profits are allocated between countries.

Neidle said: “It’s a massive victory for the commission—their strategy of using competition law and state aid to override domestic tax rules has succeeded. I and most observers thought it wouldn’t—we were wrong.”

If the various free trade deals were actually about free trade, the orgy of subsidies that we see directed toward companies, Amazon's attempted rat-F%$#ing of New York for example, and almost any sports franchise out there, would be explicitly banned.

Those deals are not really about free trade though, they are about labor arbitrage and rent seeking.

 

Bin Laden Won

Once again, on the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, there can be no other conclusion.

Donald Trump was elected President in 2016, and he is the nominee of a major party for the 3rd time in a row.

The question, once again, is how with such limited resources he could have won.

He didn't.  He made us defeat ourselves.

Once again, I will the short novel by Eric Frank Russell, Wasp, in which a man is sent to be an agent provocateur on the planet of an empire at war with Earth, and his mission is not to collect intelligence or do damage, but rather to provoke an overreaction by the authorities:

"Phew!" Mowry raised his eyebrows.

"Finally, let's consider this auto smash. We know the cause; the survivor was able to tell us before he died. He said the driver lost control at high speed while swiping at a wasp which had flown in through a window and started buzzing around his face."

"It nearly happened to me once."

Ignoring that, Wolf went on, "The weight of a wasp is under half an ounce. Compared with a human being its size is minute, its strength negligible. Its sole armament is a tiny syringe holding a drop of irritant, formic acid, and in this case it didn't even use it. Nevertheless it killed four big men and converted a large, powerful car into a heap of scrap."

………

"However," Wolf went on, "the problem becomes less formidable than it looks if we bear in mind that one man can shake a government, two men temporarily can put down an army twenty-seven thousands strong, or one small wasp can slay four comparative giants and destroy their huge machine into the bargain." He paused, watching the other for effect, continued, "Which means that by scrawling suitable words upon a wall, the right man in the right place at the right time might immobilize an armoured division with the aid of nothing more than a piece of chalk."

Our car is headed toward a bridge abutment.

We Got the Inflation Numbers

Inflation is definitely low enough to justify some rate cuts from the Fed, but I'm still betting on the under for the next FOMC meeting:

Inflation eased in August to a new three-year low, teeing up the Federal Reserve to begin gradually reducing interest rates at a meeting next week.

The consumer-price index climbed 2.5% from a year earlier, according to the Labor Department, decreasing from 2.9% in July and extending its cooling streak to five months. Core inflation, a measure that excludes volatile food and energy costs, held roughly steady at 3.2%.

Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal had expected overall prices to have risen 2.6% from a year ago, as well as a 3.2% increase in core prices.

The report likely cemented a shift in focus by the Fed from inflation, which has receded from 40-year-highs, and toward a cooling labor market, where softer hiring has sparked concerns of broader deterioration in the economy.

………

Firmer shelter inflation that contributed to somewhat stronger-than-anticipated core price increases in August will likely make it harder for officials to push for a larger half-percentage-point rate cut at next week’s Fed meeting, Wall Street analysts said on Wednesday.

Many of the central bankers have signaled they are prepared to cut rates, and Wednesday’s consumer-price index reading won’t change that outcome. But some officials hadn’t entirely ruled out the prospect of a larger cut, as opposed to a more traditional reduction of a quarter percentage point, or 25 basis points.

………

Cost increases for food slowed in August, while used vehicles and energy were cheaper than a month earlier. An intensifying selloff in oil markets suggests prices at the pump will continue to decline in the coming weeks, a key reversal in pressures that have colored Americans’ views of the U.S. economy.

Still betting on a ¼% cut.

Neener Neener Reader(s)

I know what you are all wondering following my drunk blogging of the Presidential debate, how bad was my hangover.

I had no hangover at all.

I have in fact never to had a hangover, though I did wake up drunk once, which was a bit disconcerting to put it mildly.

Some peculiarity in my metabolism and/or neurology that means that in the few hundred times that I have been drunk over the past forty some odd years, I have never had a hangover.  (I figure 2-4 times a year, I do not drink that much)

Don't hate me because I'm hangover proof.

I put this down to genetics.

I know 4 people who don't get hangovers, and three of them are definitely of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, and I am not sure about the religious and ethnic heritage of the 4th individual. 

If you share this bit of biology, share it in the comments.

I will offer one warning to those so blessed, of the 4 people that I know, 2 are recovering alcoholics.

Without the prospect of a hangover, it appears that unrestrained behavior is more likely.

Shut It Down

Net-asset-value loans have always been central to private equity looting of the firms that they take over. 

It appears that the honeymoon is over:

UK regulators are scrutinizing how some of the world’s biggest banks help private equity firms layer on debt, prying into a controversial corner of the $8.2 trillion buyout industry.

The Prudential Regulation Authority has asked banks to provide more information about their offering of net-asset-value loans to buyout funds, according to people with knowledge of the matter. It’s asked some lenders how much capital they have dedicated to the effort and how much leverage they’ve offered to fund managers for these loans, the people said.

………

NAV loans are a type of debt that allows fund managers to borrow against a pool of companies they own, making them a controversial form of financing because they let private equity managers layer more leverage onto their funds. That’s because the borrowing comes on top of loans taken out by many managers when they first acquire a company.

NAV loans have existed for more than a decade but the recent slump in dealmaking has forced many fund managers to increasingly turn to these facilities as a way to offer liquidity to early investors, especially when the sluggish appetite for transactions takes company asset sales off the table. That’s caused the market for such loans to explode in recent years and it’s now sitting at about $100 billion globally.

NAV loans are predicated on the idea that PE firms are going to loot the assets of companies that they acquire. 

As such, they should be banned.

Live (Drunk) Blogging the Debate

My final, somewhat alcohol sodden analysis:

• The moderators were not great, but in comparison to the Bobsey twins, CNN correspondents Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, they f%$#ing sounded like f%$#ing Edward f%$#ing R. f%$#ing Murrow.
  
• I am profoundly drunk.
• I am stunned that I still have booze remaining.
• I am profoundly drunk.
  
• I am not listening to the post-debate analysis.  That is more annoying than Donald Trump.  Hell, it's more annoying than Donald Trump/JD Vance scat pr0n.
• I am profoundly drunk.
  
• I think that Harris won. I don't think that it was a big win, but it reinforces the whole "Weird," framing.
• I am profoundly drunk.
• Donald Trump is f%^$#ing deranged.
• I am profoundly drunk.
• Trump performed more sanely than I had anticipated. 
• I am profoundly drunk.
• I would have liked to see some more about anthropogenic climate change.
• I am profoundly drunk.
  

---

10:43 pm:
Trump is talking, and talking, and talking, and taking.  Brings up immigration again.
Take a shot.

10:41 pm:
Harris' closing statement.
Welcome to cliche theater. "Opportunity economy," etc.
Meh.

10:36 pm:
Another commercial break, then closing statements.
I still have some cordial left. I is surprised by this. I am very drunk though.

10:35 pm:
Trump brings up Hunter Biden.
Take a shot.

10:34 pm:
Trump's voice is like fingernails on a chalk board.  Harris' voice is better, but still not good.

10:33 pm:
Climate change comes up, FINALLY.
It's only the f%$#ing end of the f%$#ing world, so I understand why it was brought up so late.

10:30 pm:
Kamals brings up John McCain on defending Obamacare. F%$# that.
Take a shot.

10:29 pm:
"I have concepts of a plan," Trump on what to do about Obamacare.
Take a shot.

10:27 pm:
Trump claims that Kamala wants to take your guns out of nowhere,
Not surprising, but gun control should be a question that the mods asked/

10:25 pm:
If I were taking a shot every time that Trump that Trump calls himself the, "Greatist," I'd be dead now.
For context, I am pretty f%$#ing drunk right now.

10:23 pm:
Harris brings up his calls for the execution of the (innocent) Central Park 5, and birtherism vs Obama.
Not a major thing, but it reinforces the whole "Weird" meme.

10:20 pm:
Asking about Trump calling her not Black.

10:17 pm:
Afghanistan. Harris blames Trump

10:15 pm:
And Trump goes full, "Triumph the insult dog."
Take a shot.

10:14 pm:
Sh%$.  Kamala Harris goes full domino theory.
Take a shot.

10:08 pm:
The Ukraine is brought up.
I'll give Trump props on this, his call for an immediate peace is a right.
The US foreign policy Blob policies are risking WW III.
Kamala is willing to fight to the last Ukrainian.
Even a stopped clock is right once a day.

10:03 pm:
Commercial break.  Drinking water.

10:02 pm:
You can see trump stewing over being called weak, and goes back to immigration.

10:01 pm:
Harris calls Trump weak.  It's on.

9:57 pm:
Davis brings up the Gaza war.
Harris discusses vague goals, as opposed to any potential solutions.

9:55 pm:
Trump talks about how much Hungarian PM Victor Orban loves him?  Not a winning line.

9:53 pm:
David Muir and Linsey Davis are pretty good.
Muir asks about Trump's threats of legal prosecution against his political opponents.

9:52 pm:
Trump brings up immigration, and doubles down on the election theft statement.

9:51 pm:
Mods are definitely better than Tapper and Bash.
They ask about Trump's election lies.

9:49 pm:
Starting to feel the alcohol.
This is not shaping up to be a good drunk.

9:48 pm:
Harris bringing up Charlottesville and the antisemitic protesters that Trump called, "Very good people."

9:46 pm:
Mods press, ask if there is anything that he regretted on January 6.
Trump blames Nancy Pelosi.

9:45 pm:
Trump makes it about immigration.  I get it.  It's all that he has got.

9:44 pm:
Oh, they brought up the insurrections. The mods note his inaction as it was ongoing.

9:42 pm:
Trump says that Harris wants to perform transgender surgery on illegal immigrants.
What the f%$#?  Take a shot.

9:39 pm:
The moderators are actually pretty good.  I think that the heat that the hapless CNN mods took a lot of heat for being hopeless sad sacks, and this had an effect on the moderators.
Not liking the framing on their question about Harris flip-flopping on fracking, etc., but it is a legitimate question.

9:38 pm:
Last shot went down the wrong way.  Finished coughing.

9:37 pm:
Trump, who has promised weaponization of the justice department, claims that his felony conviction was weaponization of the justice department.

9:34 pm:
Trump is going all purity of the national blood, and claims that the FBI, etc. are lying about the crime rate.
Take a shot.

9:33 pm:
Now he is claiming that he got more votes than Biden.  You knew it was coming, but still.....
Take a shot.

9:30 pm:
Trump brings up allegations or immigrants eating people's pets?
2 shots.

9:28 pm:
Harris just mentioned how Trump is deranged on the campaign trail, and that his audience leaves early.
Oh, Snap! Take a shot.

9:27 pm:
Harris goes first, and she notes that Trump killed an immigration bill that had bipartisan support because he wanted to run on the issue.

9:25 pm:
Lordy, they are bringing up immigration.

9:24 pm:
Harris brings up how abortion bans also criminalize IVF.

9:21 pm:
Trump makes abortion about student loan forgiveness?  Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
Take a shot

9:18 pm:
The moderator calls Trump a liar and asks Harris about it.
Harris has clearly been working on this.
She promises to sign an abortion law when passed.

9:17 pm:
Abortion is brought.  That's the elephant in the room.
Trump lies about killing born children.  He lies about every legal scholar wanting it back in the states.
Take a shot.

9:15 pm:
Harris accuses him of selling chips to China, Trump accuses her of having no real policies at al.

9:13 pm:
Trump lies about what his tariff raised.
Not worth a shot.

9:10 pm:
Trump feels compelled to say that he went to Wharton, because a black woman is mean to him.

9:09 pm:
Oh, Harris touched a nerve with her Covid comments.  Trump is whining.
Take a shot.

9:08 pm:
Harris calls him a liar straight out of the box, makes a reference to the January 6 insurrection, mismanaging Covid, and mentions Project 2025.

9:07:
Trump talks about people from foreign insane asylums takeing Black and Hispanic jobs.
Take a shot, particularly when Trump talks about the "Best economy ever">

9:05 pm:
Harris goes first.  Talks about Trump's tax cuts for the rich.

9:03 pm:
First question from the ABC spokes-models "ZOMG Inflation!"

8:57 pm:
I have the cordial, a shot glass, and a bottle of ice water.
Let's do this.

8:55 pm:
The blog is now live.  I am absolutely not watching the pregame show.

---

I will be posting at the top, with each update having a time in H:HMM pm format. 

In a first, I will be getting plastered using a chocolate and pepper cordial based on a 400 year old chocolate recipe that I made myself.

My current plan is when ever something said is a clear lie or an extremely trite cliche or the moderators behave like potted plants, I will take a shot.

I will have a spotter to prevent death by alcohol poisoning.

What Happens When Your Employees Hate You

So, we had a tentative deal cut between Boeing and its Machinist Union, and it looked pretty good to me:

Boeing and the Machinists union leadership reached a last-minute deal Sunday that would avert a strike and give the aircraft manufacturer space to reset as it struggles to recover from multiple setbacks.

But many workers said the deal falls short of their demands, leaving the possibility of a work stoppage on the table.

The 11th-hour agreement — reached at about 2:30 a.m. Sunday, with the news publicly released a couple of hours later — will avoid a strike if a majority of the union’s members ratify the deal, as recommended by International Association of Machinists District 751 President Jon Holden, who led the negotiations.

The contract offers workers a 25% general wage increase, enhanced retirement benefits, fewer hours of mandatory overtime work and increased parental leave.

And, in what could prove a historic element of the contract for this region, Boeing offered a first-of-its-kind commitment that if it launches an all-new plane in the next four years, that jet will be built in the Puget Sound area by the local workforce.

It appears, however, that my initial impression was wrong, because Jon Holden,  the local president says that he expects members to reject the deal.

Seeing as how he was the one wot negotiated this, I'm inclined to believe his prediction: 

After an overwhelmingly negative reaction to a deal struck by Boeing and Machinists union leaders, union leader Jon Holden said Monday he expects rank-and-file members will reject the contract and strike late this week.

“The response from people is it’s not good enough,” Machinist union district 751 president Holden said in an exclusive interview with The Seattle Times at the union’s South Park headquarters. “Right now, I think it will be voted down, and our members will vote to strike.”

Boeing and union leaders announced the tentative agreement, which Holden has endorsed, early Sunday morning. Machinists union members will vote Thursday on both the proposal and whether to strike.

On Monday, hundreds of Machinists marched in protest through the Everett widebody jet plant during the lunch break, then gathered outside facing the factory’s giant doors, shaking their fists in the air and chanting “Strike! Strike! Strike!”

Boeing's credit rating is one step above junk, and they have been f%$#ing with their workers for decades.

The Machinists know that Boeing is in a cash crunch, and they do not trust Boeing not to f%$# them when the company recovers, so they are disinclined to to cut Boeing slack when they are up against the wall as a result:

………

With Boeing’s credit rating now just one rung above junk bond status, a lengthy strike that hits cash flow and increases debt could have a dramatic effect on its financial standing.

Holden said the union will try to convey to its members the benefits of the offer, and why he’s recommending it be accepted. However, he doesn’t think that will turn sentiment around and get to a “yes” vote.

“I don’t believe that’s going to happen,” Holden said.

………

Union members had hoped for a 40% pay hike and were disappointed by the contract’s 25% increase. But Holden said that’s the largest general wage increase for all members “in our history.”

………

Some Machinists were set on getting back their traditional pension, given up in 2013. Holden said no company has ever restored such a pension after taking it away, and Boeing wouldn’t budge on that.

No one has ever done this before?  Well, be the first. 

Boeing labor relations have always been contentious, but it was always in the context of the employees believing int he company.

They no longer believe in the company, and so have adopted the mindset of senior management, they want their money now, the company be damned.

This is what happens when MBA types run a company.

Of Course She Did

Ginny Thomas, Clarence Thomas' wife, was caught thanking a right wing advocacy group for fighting against ethics reform for the federal courts. What's more, the group has a taped group phone call where they say as much.

Both of these two have stated repeatedly that they never discuss court business among themselves.

I dunno.  Maybe expensive vacations, overpriced property sales, deals on motor coaches, and other sundry gifts have a way of talking all by themselves:

Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, privately heaped praise on a major religious-rights group for fighting efforts to reform the nation’s highest court — efforts sparked, in large part, by her husband’s ethical lapses.

Thomas expressed her appreciation in an email sent to Kelly Shackelford, an influential litigator whose clients have won cases at the Supreme Court. Shackelford runs the First Liberty Institute, a $25 million-a-year organization that describes itself as “the largest legal organization in the nation dedicated exclusively to defending religious liberty for all Americans.”

Shackelford read Thomas’ email aloud on a July 31 private call with his group’s top donors.

Thomas wrote that First Liberty’s opposition to court-reform proposals gave a boost to certain judges. According to Shackelford, Thomas wrote in all caps: “YOU GUYS HAVE FILLED THE SAILS OF MANY JUDGES. CAN I JUST TELL YOU, THANK YOU SO, SO, SO MUCH.”

Shackelford said he saw Thomas’ support as evidence that judges, who “can’t go out into the political sphere and fight,” were thankful for First Liberty’s work to block Supreme Court reform. “It’s neat that, you know, those of you on the call are a part of protecting the future of our court, and they really appreciate it,” he said.

………

The push to change how the court functions grew after a series of ProPublica stories showed that wealthy Republican donors have showered Thomas and Alito with free gifts and travel that they failed to disclose. Following ProPublica’s reporting, Thomas amended past disclosure reports, and the Supreme Court adopted the ethics code, its first ever. 

Both of the Thomases need to be frog-marched out of their respective offices in handcuffs.