Well, That Was a Thing

Just in case you are wondering, the fact that this went down at a meeting where Zelensky was supposed to acquiesce to Trump's demands to loot the Ukraine is a whole special kind of nuts.

I'm not sure if Trump ambushed Zelensky, or Zelensky ambushed trump, or Trump is just experiencing the neurological effects of tertiary syphilis, (if I had to choose, I would choose the latter) but this is unprecedented.

US military support for Ukraine hangs in the balance and talks over a minerals deal have collapsed following a disastrous White House summit in which Donald Trump warned Volodymyr Zelenskyy that he was “gambling with world war three” and told the Ukrainian president to come back “when he is ready for peace”.

Zelenskyy left the White House early, and a press conference to announce the minerals deal was cancelled, after Trump gave Zelenskyy a dressing-down that followed an ambush led by vice-president JD Vance to shatter the fragile relationship between the two leaders.

The US president received the Ukrainian president on Friday to discuss a controversial mineral resources deal that Trump has said is the first step towards a ceasefire agreement he is seeking to broker between Russia and Ukraine.

I should note here that this sort of exchange is not unprecedented in foreign relations, but it occuring during a f%$#ing photo op for the press is.

What's more, to quote (not) Talleyrand, "It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake."

Gee, You Mean That They Lied?

During the campaign, Trump promised to release the files related to the case of Trump buddy Jeffrey Epstein.

Today, US Attorney General Pam Bondi released the files of the jet setting pedophile to a carefully curated selection of conservative influences, and most interesting among the revelations are:

• You thought that they would reveal information about a notorious long time Trump associate?  Psyche.
• Nope, nothing here.
• Yeah, suck on this MAGAt losers. 

So, yes, this is not a release of anything:

For days, Attorney General Pam Bondi had talked about releasing the “Epstein files,” supposedly secret documents the federal government has on some of the powerful men who were in the orbit of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

But the roughly 200 pages of documents that Ms. Bondi released on Thursday contained little new information pointing to wrongdoing by anyone other than Mr. Epstein, a registered sex offender who died in jail. The document dump largely consisted of flight logs for Mr. Epstein’s planes — long ago made public — and contact information for hundreds of associates, along with brief descriptions of items found at his residences.

………

On Thursday afternoon, Ms. Bondi and Kash Patel, the director of the F.B.I., offered a sneak preview of the documents to several conservative influencers, some of whom emerged from the West Wing waving chunky white binders with the label “The Epstein Files: Phase I.” One of them later called it an “interesting souvenir.”

This is an amazing level from a conservative influences. 

But by midafternoon, the Justice Department had not posted the contents. And Ms. Bondi was drawing criticism on social media from those who had taken her at her word the night before. The conservative personality Glenn Beck posted on X: “The Epstein files are a total joke,” and asked, “Who is subverting POTUS?”

F%$# me.  I agree (in part) with Glenn f%$#ing Beck.

………

Still, some Republicans in Congress took to X to voice displeasure with the information released by Ms. Bondi.

“THIS IS NOT WHAT WE OR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ASKED FOR and a complete disappointment. GET US THE INFORMATION WE ASKED FOR!” wrote Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida.

F%$# me.  I agree (in part) with Representative Anna f%$#ing Paulina Luna of Florida

………

Mr. Epstein is believed to have sexually abused more than 200 teenage girls and young women over three decades. During that time, he amassed a fortune worth $600 million and befriended some of the most powerful and famous people in the world.

Included in the documents, which were finally posted on Thursday night, was an entirely redacted list of 254 people described as masseuses.

(emphasis mine)

Yeah, nothing corrupt here.

Bezos Wants the Worst Op/ED Page in the Nation

I've said on a number of occasions (here most recently for example) that the Washington Post Editorial page is the 2nd worst editorial page in the nation.

Jeff Bezos has now announced that he wants it to be worse than the WSJ OP/ED page.

It's a heavy lift, but I think that he can do this. 

Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, announced a major shift to the newspaper’s opinion section on Wednesday, saying it would now advocate “personal liberties and free markets” and not publish opposing viewpoints on those topics.

Mr. Bezos said the section’s editor, David Shipley, was leaving the paper in response to the change.

………

Mr. Bezos’ decision to curtail the scope of views on The Post’s opinion pages is a major departure from the newspaper’s decades-long approach to commentary and criticism. Under Mr. Shipley and his predecessor, Fred Hiatt, The Post has published a wide variety of views from the left and the right, including liberal stalwarts like David Ignatius and Ruth Marcus and conservative voices like George Will and Charles Krauthammer.

Umm....Ruth Marcus is a, "liberal stalwart?"  This is a spelling of, "Relentlessly establishmentarian," that I was previously unaware of.

As to David Ignatius being a, "Liberal stalwart," he's the go to stooge for anything that the CIA wants ink on.

More New York Times both-sidesing rat-f%$#ery here, I guess.

Bezos and the phone hacking criminal who is Post Publisher have made assurances that this will not effect news reporting, but I'm pretty sure that this is a lie.

Even if it is not a lie, getting a regular opinion gig is a plum assignment for a reporter which would necessarily influence the reporting of any ambitious reporter.

One of the Greats

Gene Hackman has died at age 95.

He could be and do almost anything as an actor.

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ or ╭∩╮（︶︿︶）╭∩╮ Who Knows?

It's just one week, but initial unemployment claims jumped 9%, by 220,000 to 242,000 which is clearly not good.

Continuing claims actually fell slightly, by  5,000 to 1.862 million, though it should be noted that continuing claims are delayed by a week.

It could be a blip, but I am inclined to believe that it is not because, consumer confidence took its biggest hit in 4 years falling by 7 points to hit 98.3.

That's the 3rd straight drop, and the biggest drop in consumer confidence in 3½ years.

That's why I'm betting on the downside, because consumer confidence is down, and we can expect to see something near to 1 million federal employees lose their jobs in the next few weeks as President Musk continues his rampage.

Not good.

We Need to Start a GoFundMe for a Soon to be Fired Apple Employee

Someone at Apple has been a very naughty boy, and needs to be rewarded for this. 

You see, it appears that someone did something that briefly replaced the term "Racist" with "Trump" in the iPhone speech to text program.

In all fairness, this could have been something that a group of users did, akin to the Google Bombing of days past, but if I had to bet on this, I would bet on it being an inside job, and not some form of AI data poisoning by users.

A former member of Apple's Siri Team agrees with my assessment, saying, "This smells like a serious prank. The only question is: Did someone slip this into the data or slip into the code?"

So, when this hero gets caught, and caught he will be, we need to get enough money together that he never has to work another day in his life. 

While using Apple’s automatic dictation feature to send messages on Tuesday, some iPhone users reported seeing a peculiar bug: the word “racist” temporarily appearing as “Trump,” before quickly correcting itself.

The message blip, which was replicated several times by The New York Times, provoked controversy after appearing in a viral TikTok post, raising questions about Apple’s artificial intelligence capabilities.

An Apple spokeswoman blamed the issue on phonetic overlap between the two words, and said the company was working on a fix.

"Phonetic overlap," my flabby hairy white ass.

The two words are not at all alike in their sounds, though they are nearly identical in their meaning.

Candyass Snowflakes

'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.

— Adrian Bott (@Cavalorn) October 16, 2015

No sympathy for them

It appears that House members representing the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party were shocked when constituents whose faces were eaten complained.

Of course, there isn't actually a party called, the, "Leopards Eating People's Faces Party," but the reality is that this is what the Republican Party is these days.

House leadership, showing the integrity and bravery that they have become notorious for, issued guidance to members of their caucus, they should stop holding public events.

When you make the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) appear to be be a model of courage and integrity, you have f%$#ed up big time: 

Republicans returned to their districts last week only to be met with legions of angry constituents demanding answers over their acquiescence to drastic cuts orchestrated by Elon Musk and the Trump administration. Instead of actually listening to the voters who put them in office, GOP leaders are reportedly advising lawmakers to simply stop meeting with them in person.

According to a Tuesday report from NBC News, House Republican leadership has advised members of the caucus to avoid in-person town halls for fear that voter backlash may become viral if circulated online.

“I don’t know that a specific edict is going to come down from on high that they need to stop or anything, but a message I believe has been clearly sent that this narrative should end very soon,” one Republican National Committee official told NBC News.

Here is a thought for all those supporters of the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party, Leopards are not racists.  They will eat the faces of white people too.

 

Maybe it Was Premature to Disparage AI

WOW! This actually just happened!

The Monitors were just hacked at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to display an AI video of Trump licking Elon Musk’s toes.

The caption over it read: “LONG LIVE THE REAL KING.” pic.twitter.com/11JWuH2XfZ

— Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) February 24, 2025

I think that a content warning here would be superfluous

After all, any tool that can be used to generate a video showing Donald Trump lavishing oral and digital affection on Elon Musk's toes, which some very good person then put up on the video screens all across the offices of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, seems to me to be a remarkable societal good.

Visitors to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development's headquarters in the capital got some unpleasant viewing on Monday morning after TV screens across the building began showing a deepfake video of President Trump kissing and sucking Elon Musk's toes.

The AI-generated footage had been circulating online over the weekend on social media, but the video was displayed on monitors at HUD on Monday morning, along with the message: "Long live the real king."

(For those who don't know, that's a reference to Republican President Trump yelling on state social media the other day "long live the king," referring to himself as a monarch. Elon, meanwhile, was recruited by Trump to, under the DOGE project, run through federal organizations to cut programs, contracts, and thousands of staff the Tesla tycoon doesn't approve of, and thus has been likened by some as the real president of the United States, especially given this earlier baffling press conference in the Oval Office.)

HUD staff reportedly resorted to unplugging the screens after failing to get the video removed from sight, and the agency is investigating.

 It's a pity that Oscar season is over.  This would be in the running for best selected short.

This is beautiful.

Interesting AI Development

Microsoft, which has gone all-in on Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence systems has been backing out of some the leases for AI related data centers that it had negotiated.

They haven't broken any leases.  Instead they have walked away at the point where they need to sign on the dotted line.

I'm beginning to think that the folks in Redmond are realizing that AI, or at least Sam Altman's version of AI, is oversold and under-performing.

Microsoft Corp. has canceled some leases for US data center capacity, according to TD Cowen, raising broader concerns over whether it’s securing more AI computing capacity than it needs in the long term.

OpenAI’s biggest backer has voided leases in the US totaling “a couple of hundred megawatts” of capacity — the equivalent of roughly two data centers — canceling agreements with at least a couple of private operators, the US brokerage wrote Friday, citing “channel checks” or inquiries with supply chain providers. TD Cowen said its checks also suggest Microsoft has pulled back on converting so-called statements of qualifications, agreements that usually lead to formal leases. 

………

A potential lease pullback by Microsoft raises broader questions about whether the company — one of the frontrunners among Big Tech in AI — is growing cautious about the outlook for overall demand. The company has said it expects to spend $80 billion this fiscal year on AI data centers, and on a late January earnings call, Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said Microsoft has to sustain spending to meet “exponentially more demand.” 

Gee, why would they be cautions?  Maybe because a 2nd tier Chinese player, using 3rd tier hardware, was able to match OpenAI's performance at 3% of the cost? 

Naah, it couldn't be that!

………

In Friday’s report, TD Cowen’s analysts wrote that their channel checks had unearthed a number of signs that Microsoft is gradually retreating. They learned that Microsoft had let more than a gigawatt of agreements on larger sites expire and walked away from “multiple” deals involving about 100 megawatts each. (Data center capacity is often stated in terms of the power they need to stay up and running.)

Well, mabe.

Lesson Learned

Good news everyone!

---

I invented a device that makes you read this in your head using my voice!

So, a Asian buffet opened up right next door to the gym that I go to.

I love me some Asian buffet.

I can have some pot stickers, and some sushi, and some spare ribs, and some shrimp and General Tso's chicken, and then I can go to the gym and use the stationary bicycle for a half hour, and work it all off.

That's great.

(Sh%$ for brains goes and does that at the Royal Buffet's grand opening)

Note to self:

Get the F%$#ing Order Right!!!

If you down a half dozen dumplings, some rolls of sushi, a bowl of clam chowder, fried shrimp, ribs, and some fried rice as your first meal of the day, at 3:00pm, and then go and ride a stationary bike, your exercise session will be EXTREMELY sub-optimal.

Exercise THEN eat, not the other way around.

Making Comcast Look Good

HP, the misbegotten child that was spawned when Carly Fiorina destroyed Hewlett Packard, instituted a new policy, if you call technical support, they will delay all calls by at least 15 minutes, because customers should go online and deal with their crappy website.

Rather unsurprisingly, when this started getting press coverage, they reversed this policy.

Just to remind you what HP has done:

• Sells its printers with almost empty ink cartridges, which are then further drained during "calibration".
• Prohibit their multi-function devices from scanning if the ink is out of date or empty.
• Roll out updates which sabotage the ability to use 3rd party ink cartridges.
• Put a delay in the sabotage in order to make sure as many people as possible update the printer before the trap is sprung.
• Set cartridges to empty when they have 20% ink remaining.
• Tricks customers into irrevocable ink subscription programs. 
• Abuse the DMCA in an attempt to make 3rd party ink cartridges a felony.
• Charges over $10,000.00 a gallon for said ink, "More than the semen of a Kentucky Derby winner.

Seriously, HP makes Comcast look like Bernie f%$#ing Sanders.

 

Meme of the Day

This is a Matthew Saroff original.

Feel free to share, please attribute.

Cue Billy Ray Valentine

I am once again referencing what has turned out to be the most important quote of the 1983 comedy film Trading Places. 

I direct your attention to an essay by Hamilton Nolan where he suggests that the best way to take Musk down is to go after the source of his wealth.

Specifically, he notes that the bulk of Musk's wealth is in Tesla stock, and that company is very vulnerable:

Elon Musk, an impossibly wealthy, drug-addled Nazi sympathizer, is making drastic, devastating, unaccountable cuts to our federal government. He is making decisions of great global consequence based on nothing but his own demonstrably ignorant ideas. He is materially harming millions of people around the world. He seems to be operating outside of the law. He appears to have nothing holding back his worst impulses. The Republican Party has opened the door for him, the Democratic Party believes itself to be unable to stand in his way, and there is no indication that the courts will be able to roll back the damage he has already done. It is up to us.

As a regular person, it can seem impossible to plan and execute actions that would have a serious impact on the richest guy in America. Protesting and waving signs and calling your representatives are all things that you should do, but I know that they can often leave people feeling like their effort has not produced any real effects. You marched against the war and the war still happened. You marched against DOGE and they still defunded a bunch of cancer trials. Is any of this actually getting through to the well-insulated oligarchs?

Today, I want to point out that: Yes. There are very straightforward ways that regular people can organize and exercise leverage on Elon Musk. I will discuss one way here that you, yourself, can get involved with. The wealthier that someone gets, the more points of vulnerability their fortunes have.

What is the source of Elon Musk’s power? His wealth. There are lots of smart tech guys and there are lots of company founders and CEOs and political donors and as a group they exercise a fair amount of political influence, but the reason why this man in particular is swanning around DC doing whatever the hell he wants is that he is worth more than anyone else, and he spent more than anyone else to help get Trump elected. The way to get Elon Musk to pay attention is to target his wealth. I don’t think that he will ever be “not rich,” at least not until the revolution comes, but it is completely possible to bring about enormous losses in his net worth.

Short version is that Tesla has a price/earnings ratio of 166, as compared to P/E ratio for the plodding old economy Apple Computer, which has a P/E ratio of 39, to say nothing of the ratios of car manufacturers Toyota and GM (7).

Would YOU buy this car if you get this? Tesla still does not build cars well, its fit and finish issues of the Swasticars are notorious, and its approach to self-driving is arguably the worst of all of the major players in the field.

When juxtaposed with the plethora of competitors entering the market and the expiration of EV subsidies, it is clear that the car company is seriously over-valued. 

The source of this valuation is the goodwill accumulated by the assiduous marketing of Elon Musk by ……… Elon Musk, who has convinced many people that he is a visionary genius, and its insane valuation is based on, "A magical belief that Musk will make it the biggest automaker in the world.."

It's clear now that the emperor has no clothes, and there is now a concerted effort to show people this:

………

There is already a nascent protest campaign against Tesla. Its hashtag is #TeslaTakedown. It has a website. There have already been protests at Tesla dealerships across the country, and many more are planned. You can join them. In order for Tesla to make money they must attract buyers. Potential buyers can easily be turned off by having to pass protesters calling them Nazis when they go to browse for a new car. There are plenty of other cars to buy that will not get them yelled at. These things are a genuine factor in the minds of consumers.

Furthermore, we have all seen the reports of Tesla cybertrucks being defaced with swastikas or other graffiti implying that such vehicles could only be owned by Nazis. Some cybertruck owners have told reporters that they no longer want to own cybertrucks after these incidents. I would never condone illegal vandalism as a protest tactic. But as a keen observer of social trends, I observe that these types of actions often spread and become more frequent when large numbers of people view them as effective ways to achieve a goal. If owners of cybertrucks—or other Tesla products—come to find that they are frequently being made the targets of graffiti implying that they are supporting Nazis, I predict that consumer enthusiasm for purchasing Tesla products will decline. Do you really want to worry about your car being vandalized every day due to the political actions of the person who started the company? Why not just buy a different car, and save yourself that worry?

I should note here that I do not approve the current spate of vandalism, though I am profoundly amused by the current spate of vandalism.

I would note that there is a historical precedent of vandalism working, specifically with fur coats, which are now only rarely seen in high profile public events as a result of protesters throwing paint on their wearers.

The MAGAts out there are unlikely to buy Musk's Swasticars, they hate EVs, and there are other cheaper and better ways to drive an electric automobile these days that don't involve getting flipped off on the highway or having one's car vandalized.

Elon Musk is not going to take over the automobile industry, and protests, whether legal ones such as protests in front of dealerships, or more extreme measures will make that clear. 

Leopards and Faces, the Video

This made me smile. I watched the whole 30+ minutes.

I think that this will make my reader(s) smile.

You're welcome.

Living the Meme

So, I was driving to the gym with Sharon,* and she discussed her appointment with her new rheumatologist today.

She is dealing with fibromyalgia.

She mentioned that the doctor did a Lupus test, which she has been tested for before, and as on previous occasions, she tested negative this time.

So, I said, "It's not Lupus, it's never Lupus."

She gave me a profoundly confused look, and replied that she had already said that. 

I asked if she understood the meme, and she shook her head, and I said, "House," and suddenly there was memetic recognition in her eyes.

It made my day.

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

Nice Metaphor

Aaron Ross Powell describes the current ideological insanity in Silly-Con Valley as being an example of model collapse.

"Model collapse," is when artificial intelligence starts to degrade because it is eating its own product cause it to fail.

Basically, it's coprophagy where the AI models are poisoning themselves by eating their own sh%$.

Mr. Powell is saying that the humans of Silly-Con Valley are poisoning themselves by eating their own sh%$.

Seems to be a pretty good description of most of the tech sphere:

The ideologues of Silicon Valley are in model collapse.

To train an AI model, you need to give it a ton of data, and the quality of output from the model depends upon whether that data is any good. A risk AI models face, especially as AI-generated output makes up a larger share of what’s published online, is “model collapse”: the rapid degradation that results from AI models being trained on the output of AI models. Essentially, the AI is primarily talking to, and learning from, itself, and this creates a self-reinforcing cascade of bad thinking.

We’ve been watching something similar happen, in real time, with the Elon Musks, Marc Andreessens, Peter Thiels, and other chronically online Silicon Valley representatives of far-right ideology. It’s not just that they have bad values that are leading to bad politics. They also seem to be talking themselves into believing nonsense at an increasing rate. The world they seem to believe exists, and which they’re reacting and warning against, bears less and less resemblance to the actual world, and instead represents an imagined lore they’ve gotten themselves lost in.

So, it appears that when we told the, "the Elon Musks, Marc Andreessens, Peter Thiels, and other chronically online Silicon Valley representatives of far-right ideology," to eat sh%$, they listened.

Hoocoodanode?

………

The problem with model collapse is, once it goes too far, it’s difficult to correct. The solution to model collapse is to train on better data. But accomplishing that, and undoing the rapidly radicalizing right-wing ideology of these titans of the Valley, means undoing the structural causes of that self-referential and self-reinforcing cascade. And that’s no easy task.

I disagree with conclusion.

In fact, much of this problem is a direct result of years of law-breaking by the Silly-Con Valley movers and shakers.

"Fake it until you make it," is fraud.

"Move fast and break things," is a criminal conspiracy.

If these guys had the law enforced against them in the same way that a cop enforces a law against an African American accused of shop-lifting, they would no longer have the sense of impunity, and hence the sense of superiority that makes them so toxic.

The solution is democracy and the impartial administration of justice.

In the meantime, however, why don't they all just eat sh%$.

I Think That the Judge Just Called Your Arguments Ethically Suspect

Federal District Judge Dale Ho, who is overseeing the corruption case against Eric Adams, has
delayed ruling on the dismissal proposed by Trump stooges and appointed a lawyer to deliver arguments against the deal.

It sounds me like the judge is not so subtly stating that there is something hinky going on:

A federal judge on Friday delayed a ruling on the Justice Department’s request to drop the corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York City, instead appointing an outside lawyer to present independent arguments on the motion, which was otherwise unopposed.

The lawyer, Paul D. Clement, is a political conservative who was the U.S. solicitor general during President George W. Bush’s administration.

The judge, Dale E. Ho of Federal District Court in Manhattan, also called for additional briefs from the parties and said he would hold an oral argument on March 14 if he felt it was necessary.

Judge Ho’s decision, explained in a five-page ruling, will prolong an episode that has led to political and legal upheaval, with federal prosecutors in New York and Washington resigning and several of Mr. Adams’s campaign opponents calling for him to step down.

………

Judge Ho noted in his order on Friday that, with a top Justice Department official and the mayor’s lawyers agreeing the case should end, he needed to hear other arguments.

“Normally, courts are aided in their decision-making through our system of adversarial testing,” Judge Ho wrote, “which can be particularly helpful in cases presenting unusual fact patterns or in case of great public importance.”

He said that because the Justice Department and Mr. Adams both wanted the charges dropped, “there has been no adversarial testing of the government’s position.”

………

Judge Ho wrote that the legal system “assumes adversarial testing will ultimately advance the public interest in truth and fairness.” He listed a half-dozen questions he wanted Mr. Clement and the parties to address, including whether, as the government wants, the charges should be dropped “without prejudice,” meaning they could be reinstated.

My guess would be, and I am not a lawyer, would be that the judge will not allow a dismissal without prejudice, because the only argument for this is to maintain a legal threat against Mayor Adams in order to secure his cooperation with the Trump administration.

Without the ability to refile charges, Trump's leverage over Adams is significantly reduced.

Splitting the Baby

Once again, New York Governor Kathy Hochul chooses a path that helps no one but herself.

She has announced that she will not remove corrupt New York City Mayor Eric Adams while taking more control of New York City for herself.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said Thursday she won't — for the time being — remove embattled New York City Mayor Eric Adams from office, but will instead impose limits on his power.

Hochul in recent weeks has been pressured to exercise her power to remove Adams from City Hall after his indictment last year on corruption allegations.

"After careful consideration, I have determined that I will not commence removal proceedings at this time," she told reporters at the governor's New York City office.

………

Calls to remove Adams have intensified after the Trump administration moved to drop all charges against the mayor and told him he needs to help federal authorities carry out immigration raids. That raised allegations from New York Democrats of a "quid pro quo" arrangement, making Adams allegedly beholden to Trump.

Allegations?

Acting U.S. deputy attorney general Emil Bove (Now there is a Bond Villain name) explicitly stated that he wanted the charges dropped because they wanted him to support Trump's mass deportations.

This is a fact.

………

The governor announced plans to limit mayoral authority:To install a "special inspector general" to oversee the mayor.

• Making arrangements for the city comptroller, the public advocate and the New York City Council speaker to have an independent authority to take possible legal action against the federal government.
• And she's expanding operations of the state comptroller "for city oversight" that would closely evaluate "decisions related to the federal government," Hochul said.

"This is an opportunity to install safeguards that we need to have in place to give people confidence that there’s only one factor in every decision that’s made, and that’s what’s best for the people of the city," Hochul said.

………

Adams has refused to back down and Hochul has kept largely mum about a previously, little-known element of the city charter that allows a New York governor to remove the mayor.

"The mayor may be removed from office by the governor upon charges and after service upon him of a copy of the charges and an opportunity to be heard in his defense," according to the charter.

This is a classic example of how not to address what is arguably the most corrupt action by the US Department of Justice in my lifetime, and I was alive when John F%$#ing Mitchell was Attorney General.

Thanks, Kathy.

And Find Out

The Dutch pension fund ABP has sold all of its Tesla, Alphabet, and Meta shares citing the companies' failure to meet the pension's governance standards.

Short version:  You are funding a madman who wants to invade Greenland, this does not reflect well on your claims that you are properly managed: 

ABP, the Netherlands' largest pension fund, has sold its shares in tech companies Meta and Alphabet, its CEO told Dutch newspaper FD in an interview published on Monday.
CEO Harmen van Wijnen said the companies no longer fit the fund's governance criteria. FD reported last month that ABP had sold its shares in Tesla for the same reason.

Van Wijnen said the shares in the three companies were sold in the third quarter of last year. He did not specify the exact timing or prices at which they were sold.

In second quarter of 2024 the pension fund held Alphabet shares worth about 3 billion euros ($3.15 billion) while its Meta holdings totalled 2 billion euros, FD said. Its Tesla holdings were valued at 597 million euros at the time.

Van Wijnen said the sales were not related to the election of Donald Trump as U.S. President and the support he received from the CEOs of those companies.

"We are agnostic when it comes to Trump," Van Wijnen told FD.

Yeah, right, it's just an amazing coincidence.

Things that I Never Thought that I Would Write

Apple Did the Right Thing.

Specifically, instead of adding a back door into their end to end encryption as demanded by UK authorities, they have pulled the service from the island nation.

Adding a back door for law enforcement adds a back door that could be accessed by any malefactor who wants you data:

Apple disabled its most secure data storage offering for new customers in Britain on Friday rather than comply with a secret government order that would have allowed police and intelligence agencies to access the encrypted content.

The order under the country’s Investigatory Powers Act, reported by The Washington Post two weeks ago, requires the California maker of iPhones and Mac computers to create a backdoor capability allowing authorities to snoop on iCloud storage anywhere in the world.

That would nullify the technology in Apple’s Advanced Data Protection service, which provides such strong encryption that the company itself is unable to retrieve users’ information. Apple rolled out that optional end-to-end encryption globally starting in late 2022.

Compromised security, even when complying with law enforcement, makes for less security. 

It is likely to actually result in more crime, because criminals know that they will have easier access.

This has to Accompany the Prior Post

The Shoe Event Horizon

If we look at the 10 largest market cap companies in the world listed on my previous post, most of them are prime targets for a sudden collapse as a result of their costumers/users finally deciding that the aggravation costs more than does switching.

Adam Fisher calls this, "The Trust Thermocline." (Non Pay-walled version here)

If you look at Apple, or Google, or Microsoft, or Amazon, or Facebook, (not so much Apple) what is keeping people as customers is not that they love these companies, in many cases, they HATE these companies, it's just that it's not worth it to leave:

I came across this tweet this morning and it perfectly explains a phenomenon that all customers and employees intuitively understand.

So: what's a thermocline?

Well large bodies of water are made of layers of differing temperatures. Like a layer cake. The top bit is where all the the waves happen and has a gradually decreasing temperature. Then SUDDENLY there's a point where it gets super-cold.

— John Bull (@garius) November 3, 2022

The Trust Thermocline in Products and Services

John Bull's explanation is straightforward: if you gradually provide less quality for more money, you are gradually eroding your customers' trust in you as a provider. At some point your customers will lose faith and bail, and it won't be because of one specific change. It will be due to a breach of faith so bad that leaving or switching to a new provider will be worth the cost.

If this sounds familiar to you, it might be that it sounds rather a lot like the, "Shoe Event Horizon," from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

The US economy, and hence the world economy, is headed for a, "Shoe Event Horizon," event.

 

Quote of the Day

Wowsers

America represents 70% of of all value globally so if you think about it would you rather own the world would you rather own America for $70 or if you could own everything but America for 30 which would you pick and what that says to me is that America is overvalued

—Obsidian Wings noting a comment in the Kara Swisher/Scott Galloway Podcast Pivot where Galloway noted that 70% of equity and debt value in the world is in the US stock and bond markets.

Galloway goes on further noting that there are, "10 stocks that represent 28 to 33% of the value," of US markets, which means that about ⅕ of all global wealth is in 10 companies.

The most obvious point here is that the 10 highest market cap companies, in order Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Meta (Facebook),Tesla, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, Broadcom, and Berkshire Hathaway.

So, you have a luxury goods company who gets most of their profit from monopoly rents (Apple), a software company whose success is due to inertia (Microsoft), a niche product riding the unsustainable AI bubble (Nvidia), a monopolist whose primary product they have been enshittifying for years (Alphabet/Google), a monopolist whose primary product they have been enshittifying for years (Amazon), a company whose route to profit since its founding has been harming its users (Meta/Facebook), a company whose profitability is entirely due to government subsidies (Tesla), a company who makes the best computer chips in the world (TSMC), another company riding the unsustainable AI bubble (Broadcom), and an investment firm that is unlikely to survive a decade past the expiration of its nonagenarian founder (Berkshire Hathaway).

That's a f%$# ton of "wealth" accounted by companies that don't do anything of real value.  (Except for TSMC, they produce a real product with real quality)

When the music stops, we are going to be in a world of hurt.

D'oh!

Forgot to do yesterday's unemployment report.

A bit worse than forecast, and the Federal Government rat-f%$#ery has not yet affected the unemployment numbers.

 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Of Course They Did

Trump, or more accurately his Transportation Secretary, former reality TV contestant Sean Duffy, has
revoked approval for New York City's congestion pricing program.

I can see why they did this:  This was a well tested (in Europe) and highly effective program which would benefit mass transit, and hence ordinary people .

Trump and his Evil Minions™ HATE that sort of thing.

In a bizarre but not totally unexpected twist, I think that Donald Trump declared himself king:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/nyregion/trump-congestion-pricing-nyc.html President Donald Trump’s administration revoked federal approval for congestion pricing on Wednesday, taking a first step toward fulfilling his campaign promise to kill the tolls that charge drivers a $9 daytime fee to enter Manhattan south of 60th Street.

“CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!" Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social, declaring victory even as the MTA vowed to keep the tolls on until a judge said otherwise.

(emphasis mine)

………

Less than an hour after Duffy issued his letter, MTA officials filed a defiant federal lawsuit against the federal Department of Transportation, arguing the Trump administration was unlawfully attempting to reverse approval of the program. 

………

Duffy wrote he can revoke approval for the tolls because congestion pricing “appears to be driven primarily by the need to raise revenue for the Metropolitan Transit (sic) Authority."

In case you are wondering, Secretary Reality TV did get the name of the authority wrong. It is the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.  

Heck of a job, Sean-Boy.

You cannot make this sh%$ up.

Well, THAT was Exciting

So, Sharon* and I were going to the gym after dropping NJ off at the theater for rehearsal, and suddenly I hear a sickening grinding sound.

I identify it as an auto accident, but I am not feeling any vibration. 

I start to look around, and in the passenger side mirror, I see an SUV (a Ford Escape) overturned.

I pull into a nearby gas station and check out how the passengers of the car are doing while Sharon* calls 911.

By the time I get there, there a crew from a nearby tow truck and a nurse at the scene (just in the right place at the right time), and they manage to get the door open and the nurse carries the 5ish year old back to her car while the surrounding people try to get the driver out of her car.

I was about as useful as tits on a bull, all I could do was open the car door for the nurse.

By that time, 3 police cars were there, and the fire/rescue truck was pulling up, and since I had nothing to contribute, we left.

It did not appear that anyone had life threatening injuries.

Still, yikes.

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

Well, Knock Me Over With a Panzerkampfwagen VIII

I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you! To find that gambling is going on this establishment

So Tata, and one would assume the rest of the South Asian body shops, have engaged in a years long program to use L1A visas to evade the already meager regulations that cover H1B visas.

Short version is that they engaged in systematic inflation of job titles and job holder qualifications to show that they were not just employing cheap code monkeys.  (Spoiler, thew were just employing cheap code monkeys) 

The first time Donald Trump took over the White House, Anil Kini alleges that executives at India’s biggest outsourcing firm ordered him to take part in what he describes as a coverup.

Kini, who was an IT manager working in Denver for Mumbai-based Tata Consultancy Services Ltd, or TCS, says his superiors ordered him to falsify internal organizational charts — to make them appear more top-heavy with managers than they really were.

………

Kini and two other former TCS employees who filed similar lawsuits say the company repeatedly made improper use of special manager-level visas to hire front-line workers who had no management responsibilities. All three cases, which were filed under the federal False Claims Act, were dismissed before the allegations of visa fraud were examined in court; Kini’s is on appeal. The manager visas, known as L-1As, are easier for employers to obtain and have fewer guardrails; for example, they lack even the minimal pay requirements that Congress has imposed for H-1B holders.

As I have noted a few times on this humble blog, one of the solutions to H1-B abuse is to require an open and transparent bidding process to make the application and to get the visa.  

At that point, firms with legitimate needs will bid more than those who are just looking for cheap labor.

Also, criminal and economic sanctions against the entities who conspire to break these laws, and it ain't just Tata or Infosys, it's IBM and Apple, and Google as well, would be a good thing.

Our Corrupt Markets

Terumo Cardiovascular, makes a perfusion system used in open heart surgery has changed its terms of service, so now hospitals will be forbidden from doing any maintenance on these machines.

So, they are going to f%$# hospitals just like John Deere f%$#s farmers.

The manufacturer of a machine that costs six figures used during heart surgery has told hospitals that it will no longer allow hospitals’ repair technicians to maintain or fix the devices and that all repairs must now be done by the manufacturer itself, according to a letter obtained by 404 Media. The change will require hospitals to enter into repair contracts with the manufacturer, which will ultimately drive up medical costs, a person familiar with the devices said.

The company, Terumo Cardiovascular, makes a device called the Advanced Perfusion System 1 Heart Lung Machine, which is used to reroute blood during open-heart surgeries and essentially keeps a patient alive during the surgery. Last month, the company sent hospitals a letter alerting them to the “discontinuation of certification classes,” meaning it “will no longer offer certification classes for the repair and/or preventative maintenance of the System 1 and its components.”

This means it will no longer teach hospital repair techs how to maintain and fix the devices, and will no longer certify in-house hospital repair technicians. Instead, the company “will continue to provide direct servicing for the System 1 and its components.”

………

Hospitals are increasingly being pushed into signing maintenance contracts directly with the manufacturers of medical equipment, which means that repair technicians employed by hospitals can no longer work on many devices and hospitals end up having to employ both their own repair techs and keep up maintenance contracts with device manufacturers. 

“One of my fears is that if a device goes down, we’re going to be subject to their field engineers’ availability,” a source who works in hospital medical device repair told 404 Media. 404 Media agreed to keep the source anonymous because they were not authorized by their hospital to speak to the media. “They may not be able to get here that same day or the next day, and if you’ve got people waiting to get an open-heart surgery, you have to tell them ‘Oh, the machine’s down, we’re going to have to postpone this.’ That’s detrimental to a patient who has a life-altering, very serious thing that they’re having to cancel and reschedule.” 

………

This specific ventilator repair crisis during COVID led experts at Harvard Medical School to write that “For years, manufacturers have curtailed the ability of hospitals to independently repair and maintain medical equipment by preventing access to the necessary knowledge, software, tools, and parts” in a piece calling for right-to-repair legislation. The FTC, meanwhile, suggested in a report that medical device manufacturers sometimes charge two-to-three times what an independent repair tech would charge for the same repair. 

………

Medical equipment manufacturers have strongly lobbied against right to repair legislation all over the country, and have been successful in getting medical devices exempted from right to repair legislation by claiming that the machines are too sensitive and complex to be repaired by anyone besides the manufacturer. The medical device giant AdvaMed, for example, says “the risk to patient safety is too high.”

What AdvaMed is really saying is that, "The risk to senior executive stock options are too high."

We no longer have a free market in America, we have lobbyist driven looting.

This ain't gonna end until we start arresting and imprisoning senior executives who do this.

Hurray!

The power was restored at about 1:20 this morning, about 22 hours ahead of forecast.

By that point, the temperature in the house was 49 degrees.

And there was much rejoicing.

Funny, Innit?

Following the end of World War II, doctor's in the then Soviet Union became overwhelmingly women.

This was rapidly followed by a loss of pay and socioeconomic status for doctors.

We are Now seeing the same thing with college now that women make up the bulk of college students in the United States.

In the 1950s, men outnumbered women 2:1 in college.

By the 1990s, the ratio was 1:1.

Today the ratio is 4:6 with fewer men than women attending college.

The question on everyone’s mind is why? Why aren’t men going to college anymore?

………

While many of these reasons address why college is less appealing to boys, almost none of them address what has actually CHANGED in recent decades to cause the drop.

Many people cite the lure of trade schools and blue collar jobs as more appealing to men, but when you consider that blue collar jobs have gone down from 31.2% of total employment in 1970 to 13.6% today- why would men suddenly be more attracted to blue collar work compared to an era when these jobs were more plentiful?

As I listened to the Freakanomics podcast, I was confused why they kept skirting around the thing that has actually changed—

As an aside here, listening to or reading Freakonomics is a recipe for being stupider. (Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.)

As I showed over 15 years ago, there's folks go out of their way to twist facts so as to come up with a counterintuitive result.

This is, as Mount Everest is, and Alma Cogan isn't.

What has changed is an increase in girls.

When you look at other areas where this exact same thing has happened, it is not such a head scratcher why fewer men are going to college.

We’re just not talking about it.

The example of veteranarians is then given where make attendence dropped from 89% to 22.4% between 1969 and 2009.

As we’ve seen with teachers, nurses and interior design, once an institution is majority female, the public perception of its value plummets.

Scanning through Reddit and Quora threads, many men seem to be in agreement- college is stupid and unnecessary. A waste of time and money. You’re much better off going into the trades, a tech boot camp or becoming an entrepreneur. No need for college.

Gee, imagine that.

Posted via Mobile.

fuck

Light posting for a while. 

BGE systems show you are still out of power. Your estimated time of restoration is 02/19/25 at 11:00 PM. Crews are working hard to assess and repair damage quickly and safely. We will send updates as they are available. Monitor progress at BGE.com/tracker. Text PAUSE for 72hr pause or STOP to stop all texts.p

No Posting Tonight

118,000 people without power in Baltimore County, and our outrage does not have a crew assigned.

Good Point

President Musk's current jihad against the federal civil service could have an unintended effect, crashing the already precarious Commercial Real Estate (CRE) markets.

As a result of the Covid pandemic, CRE is already in a very bad way, and the clearing out of  largely privately owned office buildings by government agencies will make the situation even worse.

It hasn’t gotten much attention, but one of Elon Musk’s major DOGE initiatives is a massive fire sale of federal office space. Despite forcing federal employees back to the office by abolishing telework programs, Musk and company want to unload a large number of unused properties and recoup that money for the budget, a process that could expand if worker purges continue.

That theoretical win-win, however, will soon come into contact with the realities of commercial real estate markets, which are particularly depressed when it comes to the very type of inventory the government wants to sell. Older office space is experiencing record vacancy levels, with owners struggling to refinance the buildings. Putting large amounts of it on the market could have dramatic consequences, including damaging the economy in cities like Washington, D.C. It could lead to widespread defaults in financial securities linked to commercial mortgages. And if unchecked, that could lead to broader pain.

“Every additional shock is painful,” said Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, a professor of real estate and finance at the Columbia Business School. “I’m not sure they’ve thought this fully through.”

I'm pretty sure that the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ never thinks ANYTHING fully through, and Trump's real estate experience is largely for entertainment venues, casinos and golf courses.

They brag about not thinking this fully through, so it is reasonable to assume that they have not done so. 

………

A potential crash in the office sector of commercial real estate (CRE) has been a looming hazard ever since the pandemic, as increased work-from-home has lessened the need for such properties. The time-honored tactic of extend and pretend, where some loans get rolled over and the market waits out the problems, has so far mitigated the damage. But the warning signs are there.

Over 20 percent of U.S. office space was vacant in 2024, according to financial analysts at Moody’s, and this year is expected to be rocky as well. A growing number of older buildings (known as Class B and C offices by the lingo of CRE) are simply being torn down; one industry veteran lists about 30 percent of the entire office portfolio as “basically worth nothing.”

Also note that loans for CRE do not allow one to just make the payments to get through a rough patch.

Typically, they are 5 year loans that must be refinanced at the end of the period, and if the property value has dropped, then the bank will not refinance on the property and it will foreclose. 

Enough of this happens, and it is "Game over, dude!" both for the banks and for developers.

………

Into this mess comes the General Services Administration (GSA), now staffed at the senior level mostly by Musk allies, ready to sell office space into a buyer’s market. There’s reportedly a list of more than 500 buildings on the way out, on the road to a proposed 50 percent reduction in overall space. “The intention of GSA and the whole federal government is to reduce the number of old buildings that are owned with high liabilities … in favor of newer leased buildings, which can be more flexible and are more modern, that have ways for teams to collaborate and have private spaces,” said Thomas Shedd, head of the Technology Transformation Services, a division of GSA, in a recording of a staff meeting on February 5.

This would be exactly the wrong strategy for the moment, as Van Nieuwerburgh explained. A reliable government tenant is the only thing making any building the government currently owns at all valuable. “If the government sells the building and also vacates it, that building will be close to worthless, especially in a market with a lot of vacancy,” Van Nieuwerburgh said. Maybe some buildings could be converted into apartments as a potential win-win, but those conversions are maddeningly complex and expensive, and would require selling at even bigger discounts to make the financing work.

Of course, given the history of both Trump and Musk (Mump? Trusk? whatever) we can also expect to see widespread abandonment of leased properties.

………

GSA, however is also very interested in shedding leases, too. DOGE has already announced the cancellations of 22 leases as of February 2, with a savings of $44.6 million. The plan is to cancel leases on as many as 7,500 buildings in all, according to the Associated Press. GSA has even worked on canceling leases on offices for federal public defenders, something it cannot do because public defenders are part of the judicial, not the executive, branch.

But for the most part, the government is locked into its leases. Real estate analyst Trepp estimates that GSA can terminate up to 53 million square feet of office space between now and 2028, about 35 percent of its total. But the agency is setting its aspirational goals much higher than that.

Trying to cancel leases not up for renewal would trigger hefty fines, saving no money whatsoever. But the Trump-Musk history of stiffing creditors, pulling out of leases, and skirting accountability could come into play here. “They may just say, ‘We’re out of here. Come after me,’” one former CRE lawyer told Virginia Business. That would be very destabilizing.

"Very destabilizing," huh?  "Apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"

To quote Andrei Bonovia, "You arrogant ass. You've killed US!"

Light Posting Tonight

At least I assume so.

There are high wind warnings and lots of power outages in the area, including at my house.

Get Over Yourself and Do Your F%$#ing Job

It appears that Congressional Democrats are having a sad because are having major butt hurt over the fact that constituents and activists want them to do more to obstruct Donald Trump's agenda.

We saw the steps taken by Republicans in 2009, when they were in a far weaker position than Democrats are now, to obstruct Obama's agenda.

Democrats want to sit back, and raise money from rich folks, and win when it all burns down, because work is hard, and it's not like they will be hurt when it all falls apart.

Seriously, if this all you want to do, get a job as a telephone sanitizers on planet Golgafrincham.

A closed-door meeting for House Democrats this week included a gripe-fest directed at liberal grassroots organizations, sources tell Axios.

………

Zoom in: "There were a lot of people who were like, 'We've got to stop the groups from doing this.' ... People are concerned that they're saying we're not doing enough, but we're not in the majority," said one member.

Yeah,, "We are busy fundraising for the next campaign, shut the F%$# up!" is a lovely political strategy.

People will vote something over nothing, every day, and the  Democratic Party establishment's (There is no Democratic Party establishment) path forward is to do, and be, nothing.

The Trump Trial of Danielle Sassoon - WSJ

I mentioned earlier that Trump appointees at the DoJ that corruption charges against Eric Adams be dropped for what are clearly political and corrupt reasons.

This was not a surprise.

Neither was it a surprise that numerous lawyers in the New York US Attorney's office resigned rather than do this. (Well maybe the interim US Attorney Danielle Sassoon, she clerked for Antonin Scalia was a bit of a surprise)

What is a surprise is a Wall Street Journal editorial lauding Ms. Sassoon and lambasting Trump and his Evil Minions™.

The worst and most dishonestly right wing OP/ED page in the nation is doing the right thing.

I did not see that coming:

The resignations of prosecutors at the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York this week are playing in the press as typical “resistance” to Donald Trump. They’re far from that, and the real story speaks well of the prosecutors but sends a rotten message to any lawyer who might want to join the Trump Administration.

The story begins with the memo this week by acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove instructing the Southern District to drop criminal charges without prejudice against New York Mayor Eric Adams. The memo cited two grounds for dismissal: The prosecution was an example of lawfare because Mr. Adams had criticized President Biden’s immigration policies, and Mr. Trump needs Mr. Adams to help on immigration enforcement.

………

Ms. Sassoon is a member of the Federalist Society and clerked for two conservative pillars of the judiciary, Justice Antonin Scalia and Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. She led the prosecution of crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried and is a rising star in conservative legal circles.

Her memo to Ms. Bondi explained in detail that the prosecution wasn’t a case of weaponized politics and why it is improper to dismiss a case based on a quid pro quo for policy cooperation by Mr. Adams. “Because the law does not support a dismissal, and because I am confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged,” Ms. Sassoon wrote, “I cannot agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations.”

If the meeting with the AG didn’t take place, Ms. Sassoon said she’d resign. This is how a public official is supposed to behave when disagreeing on policy or ethical principle. If you can’t in good conscience follow instructions, you should offer to resign so your bosses can do what they want.

………

The Trump Administration is acting on its belief in the unitary executive that enforces discipline across the executive branch, and we sympathize with that goal. But one argument against the unitary executive is that there is no check on corruption. The Adams case, with its tolerance of alleged corruption, isn’t a good look to persuade judges ruling on its executive actions.

This is a monumental statement against interest.

Gee, You Mean that You Would Freeze the Mortgage Markets?

Russell Vought, one of the chief architects of Project 2025 and OMB director, shut down the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (this has been stayed by a judge), sending everyone home and literally locking the doors on their offices.

In fact, he went so far as to set up a snitch line for people who were doing work.  (Some government efficiency, huh?) 

Well, now he has had to back track a bit, because otherwise, mortgage markets in the US would have completely frozen up:

There’s an old saying about the dog that caught the car: They don’t know what to do next. Let me tell you the case of the dog that caught the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Russ Vought is an own-the-libs kind of guy, an ideological warrior who delights in watching the world burn. Shutting down the CFPB is his idea of paradise; now the rugged capitalists can get back to work making America great again without interference from meddling bureaucrats determined to punish success.

Then he heard about the APOR tables.

APOR stands for the “average prime offer rate,” and it’s a little tool that keeps the mortgage market running. It involves public servants, every week, going in and calculating it. Those staffers work at the CFPB, and if they’re locked out, you have no APOR tables. And over time, if you have no APOR tables, you have no mortgage market, or at least an uncertain and economically damaging mess.

In the face of this, tough guy Vought blinked, and in so doing revealed why even the most John Galt-ian banker needs the government every now and again.

Following the 2008 mortgage meltdown, regulations were passed that required that lenders do due diligence to ensure that the loans that they made could be repaid.

While this would to be banking 101, don't lend to people who cannot pay you back, before and during the financial crisis lenders were making loans almost certain to go bad, and then reselling them to useful idiots investors, so a decision was made to require lenders to show that they had done their homework.

Well, they had to do their homework unless the loan was "Qualified", which in this case means not high interest.

The question, of course, is what is meant by, "High Interest?" In this case, it means not much above the APOR, and the APOR is calculated weekly by, you guessed it, the CFPB, which means that by shutting down the CFPB, mortgage lending will become far riskier and far more  complex for the lenders.  This would mean that we would see less of it, a LOT less of it. 

………

You know who makes sure that doesn’t happen? The CFPB.

The agency updates the APOR tables every week, using survey data for eight different mortgage products. The survey data comes primarily from Freddie Mac, one of those secondary-market giants. But it’s CFPB’s job to manually calculate and publish the APOR tables to keep the mortgage market humming. (Under Rohit Chopra, CFPB actually strengthened reporting of the APOR tables with a new methodology that was more redundant and less susceptible to the failure of outside providers to send the data.)

Yesterday, I started hearing from people worried that with the CFPB in shutdown mode, they wouldn’t publish the APOR tables. Per the statute, lenders could use the last published rate as a guideline in the short term, but if mortgage rates rose, those would quickly become obsolete. They could try to calculate APOR themselves, but that might not have any legal sanction.

Georgetown Law professor Adam Levitin explained the stakes in a post late Monday night. Lenders would either not make loans at risk of coming in above APOR, or would raise rates on loans below APOR to compensate, costing borrowers potentially tens of thousands of dollars in financing. Home values could get skewed, and credit access could be cut for many borrowers. “In other words, shutting down the CFPB does not reduce regulation. It actually increases it because it results in the [APOR tables] being miscalibrated,” Levitin wrote.

So I asked CFPB whether their stop-work order covered the APOR tables. Spokesperson Rachel Cauley got back to me: “Yesterday, CFPB Chief Legal Officer Mark Paoletta directed Jason Brown, the Assistant Director of Research at the CFPB to continue all necessary functions, including the publication of the APOR on a weekly basis indefinitely.”

The dirty secret of the free-market mousketeers is that markets they laud as the alternative to government cannot function without extensive government support, even in Russell Vought's fever dreams.

When You Treat Your Customers Like Criminals

Only criminals are your customers.

Case in point, Walgreens backtracking on its program of locking up everything on their shelves: 

In a challenging retail landscape, Walgreens Boots Alliance shared plans to revamp its strategy in a Q1 2025 earnings call. Despite reporting a 23% year-over-year decline in adjusted EPS to $0.51, the pharmacy giant outperformed expectations, buoyed by robust cost management and strength in U.S. pharmacy services. CEO Tim Wentworth emphasized the company’s commitment to a “retail pharmacy-led turnaround,” underpinned by strategic store closures, enhanced customer engagement, and a renewed focus on health and wellness offerings.

The company plans to close approximately 450 additional stores in 2025, noting that the stores that remain open outperform the ones designated for closure by approximately 250 basis points. Wentworth also acknowledged the ongoing struggle with shrink as a “hand-to-hand combat battle.” After reporting a 52% increase in shrink, or lost inventory, in 2020 and 2021, Walgreens invested in increased security that proved to be “largely ineffective.” And while many drug stores have taken to locking up commonly looted goods, Wentworth admitted, “When you lock things up…you don’t sell as many of them. We’ve kind of proven that pretty conclusively.”

Gee, ya think?

Oops!

It turns out that amid the mass firing by President Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™, they decided to layoff at least ⅙ of the staff at the National Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA).

These are the folks who are responsible for designing and maintaining America's nuclear arsenal.

They are trying to call them back now.

If I were one of those laid off employees, I'd start negotiating for one f%$# of a big re-signing bones:

The Energy Department is seeking to bring back nuclear energy specialists after abruptly telling hundreds of workers that their jobs were eliminated, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The employees, responsible for designing and maintaining the nation’s cache of nuclear weapons at the National Nuclear Safety Administration, were part of a larger wave of workers dismissed from the Energy Department, drawing alarm from national security experts. Between 300 and 400 NNSA workers were terminated, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The agency’s quick reversal was announced Friday in an all-staff meeting. The NNSA is seeking to recall the workers because they deal with sensitive national security secrets, according to the people, who weren’t authorized to talk about the matter, which is not public.

Those cuts are especially concerning because the positions typically require high-level security clearances and training that can take 18 months or longer, said Jill Hruby, who served as the NNSA administrator during the Biden administration.

"Gee, now you want me back?  I've started a consulting business, here is my rate card."

………

The NNSA is a semi-autonomous arm of the Energy Department responsible for producing and dismantling nuclear weapons, providing the Navy with nuclear reactors for submarines and responding to radiological emergencies, among other duties. 

So these are the guys who get called when the nuclear sh%$ hits the fan, and you just dumped them like they were radioactive.  (Yeah, I know, cheap joke.  I gotta be me.)

At the rate this is going, we're going to be envying 3rd world nations for the competence and honesty of their bureaucracies.

Today in Complete Hypocrisy

I do not know why the New York Times has been so relentlessly and ruthlessly anti-transgender over the past few years, 

Now, the the Times editorial board is pretending that this never happened, and decrying the anti-trans backlash that they nurtured:

Early Sunday, the New York Times published an editorial board piece that calls out the myriad anti-trans executive orders signed by President Donald Trump in his first few weeks in office.

Though most of the piece goes into detail in opposing the return of the Trump trans military ban, the editorial board names a host of other trans issues that Trump has used executive power to crack down on recently.

The editorial describes Trump actions as follows: "Within hours, this language began to be codified in a series of executive orders and actions attempting to exclude transgender people from nearly every aspect of American public life: denying them accurate identification documents such as passports, imposing a nationwide restriction on gender-affirming medical care for transgender youths, investigating schools with gender neutral bathrooms, criminalizing teacher support for transgender students and commanding the Federal Bureau of Prisons to force the estimated 1,500 transgender women in custody to be housed with men."

• There's just one problem. The Times itself, through both the news and opinion sections, have been advocating for these policies for years. The Times' negative coverage of gender-affirming care for trans youths has been well documented. NYT lead health reporter Azeen Ghorayshi was accused in 2023 of "betraying" parents of St. Louis area trans kids after she wrote a glowing profile of debunked "whistleblower"-turned anti-trans social media personality Jamie Reed

And then there is OP/ED columnist David French.

………

• In 2018, he wrote for the conservative outlet National Review that our society should work toward 'ending … transgenderism.'
• Just in case anyone thinks he may have reconsidered his views, just three months ago he said that he refuses to use trans people’s correct pronouns, writing, 'I don’t agree that trans men are ‘men’ or that trans women are ‘women,’ and while I strive to treat every person I encounter with dignity and respect, I don’t use preferred pronouns because their use is a form of assent to a system of belief to which I don’t subscribe.'"

………

On the news side, Times reporters have developed a reputation for not quoting a single trans person in stories about trans politics. I know there's an obsession with getting "both sides" amongst modern day media editors, but when it comes to trans issues at the Times, trans people might as well not exist. If there were passports for trans journalists, the Times would have a more restrictive policy against them than Trump does with actual US Passports.

A few years ago, a group of hundreds of Times contributors signed an open letter criticizing the Times for failing to adhere to consistent editorial standards in the paper's coverage of trans issues and in response, Times leadership accused the journalists of colluding with an activist group and defended what they called balanced coverage of trans issues.

There is a reason that Atrios refers to the Times as, "That f%$#ing paper."

They have been assiduously huffing their own farts for so long, witness their 4 Year Long butt-hurt over Biden not giving them a one on one interview, that they have lost any connection to reality.

They don't care, they don't have to, they are The f%$#ing New York f%$#ing Times.

Partying Like It's 2008

With home sales falling, would be home sellers are pulling their homes from the market.

The WSJ story talks about people giving up, at least for now, on selling their homes.

I think that it is something more significant.

After, if you need to move, you sell your house, unless, of course, the offer price is less than you owe to the bank.

You can always sell a house, it's the price that is the issue.

I think that a lot of these home buyers have realized that if they sell now, they will walk away with nothing:

Nearly 73,000 homes were pulled from sale after they failed to find a buyer in the final month of last year, data from real-estate analytics firm CoreLogic show. 

Delistings tend to spike in winter when fewer people are actively looking for a home. But the trend last December was unusually strong, representing almost one in 10 properties on the market, and a 64% increase from the same month of 2023. 

Most sellers are pulling their homes only temporarily and think they will have a stronger hand if they relist in spring. But the jump in delistings indicates that much of the extra inventory that hit the housing market throughout 2024 sat unsold, so had to be pulled in higher numbers come winter. It also suggests there is a bit more pent-up desire to sell than headline inventory figures would indicate.

………

But the lock-in effect is slowly fading as more people need to move for a job, to accommodate a growing family or some other life event that can’t be delayed indefinitely. In December, 1.15 million homes were for sale in the U.S., a 16% increase from the same month of 2023, data from the National Association of Realtors show.

………

Home values have held up despite this weak demand, at least so far. Homeowners don’t like to sell for less than their neighbors received and aren’t ready to adjust their expectations yet. Delistings are probably acting as a safety valve, allowing sellers to delay rather than accept a lower offer. 

But prices for new homes have slipped. This is partly because units are being built smaller to keep them as affordable as possible for first-time buyers. But builders are struggling to sell homes, even though they are offering to buy down mortgage rates. The number of completed and ready-to-occupy new homes rose 46% from a year earlier in December to 118,000, based on data from the National Association of Home Builders.

Also, I would note that, in the United States at least, the cost of a home is largely a cost of the land, particularly in large metropolitan areas.

Smaller homes do not save much, though smaller lots might.

People pulling their homes off the market during the winter is not uncommon.

The numbers spiking like this are out of the ordinary though.

We are already seeing problems with commercial real estate, where the market is largely in, "Extend and Pretend," mode.

We may be seeing this again in th housing market, just 16 years after the housing crash.