Nonetheless, the Beatings Will Continue

Inflation continues to moderate, with a month over month rate of 0.2% for the second month in a row, very close to the Federal Reserve's goal.

I expect them to continue to raise rates though because there is no upside for the institution to back off at the right time.  As I have noted before, creating a recession and mass unemployment, even when it is not necessary, serves the interest of the institution.

It serves to reinforce their perceived credibility and status.

Price pressures continued cooling last month, fresh inflation figures showed, likely deterring the Federal Reserve from raising interest rates at its September meeting.

The consumer-price index, a measure of goods and services prices across the economy, rose a mild 0.2% in July, the same as in June, the Labor Department said Thursday. Core prices, which exclude volatile food and energy categories, also increased just 0.2% in both months, extending a broader slowdown in price pressures.

The figures led to 3.2% annual inflation in July, up from 3% in June. Annual core inflation ticked down to 4.7% in July from June’s 4.8%.

The pickup in annual inflation was influenced by what happened in July of 2022, which serves as the basis for comparison. Economists don’t expect the annual rate of inflation to slow much more this year in part because of so-called base effects. 

By base effects, they mean that the old number are still pushing up the current numbers.

Also, it's jobless Thursday, and initial unemployment claims rose by 21,000 to 248,000, a 5 week high, and the the 4-week moving average rose as well, though continuing claims fell slightly.

The unemployment numbers are likely to get worse if I am right about the Fed.

This is Not Good

Ecuadorian Presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was just assassinated in Qito.

He was in the middle of the pack, but it is still a shocking development, and a part of the political turmoil in the country recently, but this is exponentially worse:

Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio has been shot dead as he left a campaign event in Quito, just days before an election where the central issue is the country’s slide into violence and crime.

Videos on social media show Villavicencio, a former journalist who has worked for the Guardian and was outspoken about alleged links between organised crime and politics, surrounded by supporters and being escorted by security guards to a waiting vehicle when gunshots ring out as people start to scream and take cover.

The country’s president, Guillermo Lasso, said he was “outraged and shocked by the assassination” and would convene a meeting of his security cabinet. “For his memory and his fight, I assure you that this crime will not remain unpunished,” he said.

It should be noted that Guillermo Lasso is responsible for much of the recent political instability, having dissolved the national assembly and subsequently ruling by decree in response to an upcoming impeachment vote for corruption.

………

The assassination comes amid a shocking surge in violent crime in the small South American country, as rival drug trafficking gangs perpetrate prison massacres and murder rates have more than doubled between 2020 and 2022. Lasso said in the wake of Wednesday’s killing: “Organized crime has gone too far, but they will feel the full weight of the law.”

Color me dubious of their being an organized conspiracy to kill Villavicencio.  It's much easier just to cultivate some unstable people, and one of them does the job on his own.  (Stochastic Terrorism)

Also, color me dubious Lasso's ability or inclination to pursue any conspiracy if one does exist.  He has proven ineffective in office and, according to US Representative Raul Grijalva, he is profoundly corrupt.

Given ongoing US efforts to destabilize governments in the region, Venezuela, Peru and Columbia have been seen support for destabilizing governments that Washington found insufficiently deferential, that region is a powder keg.

F$#@ With the Bull

In a blatant attempt at legal harassment, right-wing terrorist Andy Ngo sued some Portland activists who had nothing to do with his getting beaten up.

The jury rejected his argument, "Yadda, yadda, yadda, Antifa."

Good for them:

Jurors rejected right-wing writer Andy Ngo’s attempt to hold two left-wing activists accountable for the beating he received after going undercover at a Portland protest in 2021.

After a yearslong legal battle, the Multnomah County jury of six men and six women deliberated for about five hours before delivering a verdict Tuesday clearing activists John Hacker and Elizabeth Richter of all civil liability.

………

In a phone interview, Hacker said he wasn’t surprised with the result.

“The legal system — they’re not his Twitter followers,” Hacker said. “They’re not going to fall for his lies.”

………

Ngo had sought a combined $300,000 from Hacker and Richter, including more than $115,000 for his relocation to London, arguing that their actions had made it impossible for him to continue his on-the-ground reporting about the city’s social strife. 

This is like Idi Amin suing the Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere for interfering with the drafting of his cook book.

Today in Completely Not Shocking News

It turns out that businesses that insist on a return to office are finding recruiting quite difficult.

Hoocoodanode?

Two years into the return-to-office battle, and it’s becoming apparent that its staunchest supporters are facing headwinds.

Employers following in the footsteps of Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan by mandating a full-time office return may be inadvertently making themselves unattractive to job seekers, new research shows.

According to an analysis of more than 4,500 companies by Scoop, a software firm that tracks workplace policies, and People Data Labs, a data technology company, companies with remote or hybrid policies appear to be hiring people at about twice the rate of those requiring full-time attendance.

The research, or The Flex Index July 2023 Job Growth Report, maintains that some form of flexible work is the only way forward for workplaces that want to keep a competitive edge in the current tight labor market.

………

Over the past three months, Scoop Technologies’ analysis found that “fully flexible” companies—ones where all employees work remotely or have complete autonomy over whether they go into the office—grew headcount by 1.9% on average. Meanwhile, those with “structured hybrid” work policies grew by 1.5%. In comparison, employers that were fully in-office grew their headcount by just 0.8%.

………

Over the past 12 months, fully flexible companies grew headcount by 5.6%, which dropped slightly to 4.1% for hybrid companies. Meanwhile, full-time in-office companies grew by 2.6%—less than half the rate of flexible firms.

Workers are voting with their feet. 

It does not matter to a lot of managers, because workers in the office validate their professional existence.

There are a lot of Bill Lumberghs out there.

Pass the Popcorn

Jack Smith got a search warrant to search Trump's twitter account.  

Not a surprise.  I am sure that the direct messages are fascinating.

What is also interesting is that Ecch, formerly known as Twitter, was held in contempt of court and fined 350 Grand for dragging their feet on turning over the data.

Any bets on whether Elon told people to slow walk the request?

Any bets on whether Elon still has not paid the fine?

The US special counsel who is investigating Donald Trump obtained a search warrant for the former president’s Twitter account, and the social media platform delayed complying, a court filing on Wednesday showed.

The delay in compliance prompted a federal judge to hold Twitter in contempt and fine it $350,000, the filing showed.

The filing says the team of US special counsel Jack Smith obtained a search warrant in January directing Twitter, which recently rebranded to X, [Ecch] to produce “data and records” related to Trump’s Twitter account as well as a non-disclosure agreement prohibiting Twitter from disclosing the search warrant.

………

Twitter objected to the non-disclosure agreement, saying four days after the compliance deadline that it would not produce any of the account information, according to the ruling. The judges wrote that Twitter “did not question the validity of the search warrant” but argued that the non-disclosure agreement was a violation of the first amendment and wanted the court to assess the legality of the agreement before it handed any information over.

Definitely coming directly from Elon.  Non-disclosure warrants from law enforcement are routine at social media sites.

The warrant ordered Twitter to provide the records by 27 January. A judge found Twitter to be in contempt after a court hearing on 7 February, but gave the company an opportunity to hand over the documents by 5pm that evening. Twitter, however, only turned over some records that day. It didn’t fully comply with the order until 9 February, the ruling says. The delay in compliance prompted the court to Twitter in contempt, and on Wednesday, the federal court in Washington upheld that decision.

………

Trump had been a prolific user of Twitter, both before and during his presidency. Amassing more than 88 million followers, he used the platform to attack opponents, promote racist ideology, encourage violence against journalists, and even threaten nuclear war.

Trump was banned from the platform following the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the Capitol for inciting violence.

………

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Elon's companies never reply to press inquiries, unless you count the 💩.

He is so very clever, isn't he?

I’ve Been Saying This for How Long?

Someone just did a study on the best available data, and discovered that private equity and hedge funds under-perform the market by 1.2% annually.

This may not sound like much, but remember compound interest, 11.4% in 10 years, 21.5% in 20 years, and 30.4% in 30 years.

The best guess, because hedge funds deals with pension funds are notoriously opaque, is that they are getting gigged on the funds like a  disemboweled tuna:

Private equity, hedge funds, and real estate have failed public pensions for more than a decade.

A study that will be published in The Journal of Investing shows that not only did alternatives not deliver better returns, but adding them to portfolios actually destroyed alpha, the portion of return seemingly not explained by risk. Most people in finance define it more loosely: as the return on an active investment above what an index fund would provide.

“Alpha appears to respond to the presence of alts as if the latter were kryptonite — the greater the exposure, the harsher the effect on alpha,” wrote Richard Ennis, author of the study, a former editor of the Financial Analysts Journal, and co-founder of EnnisKnupp, one of the first investment consultants.

According to the study, public pension funds in the U.S. have generated negative alpha of approximately 1.2 percent annually since the global financial crisis in 2008. Ennis found that private equity didn’t help — or hurt — excess returns. But both real estate and hedge fund exposures detracted significantly from performance.

Endowments, public and corporate pensions, and other U.S. institutions have put about $2 trillion into alternative investments. Institutions have made a dramatic shift since about 2000 from holding mostly public stocks and bonds to adding extensive investments in private markets, because they’ve been convinced that many of these strategies will outperform public markets and add diversity and lower the volatility of their portfolios. 

………

Ennis collected data on the most transparent institution, U.S. public-sector pension funds, for the 13 fiscal years ending June 30, 2021. His collection methodology demonstrates how hard it is to get comprehensive information on alternatives. Ennis was limited by a number of funds that had different fiscal year-ends, making comparisons difficult, and pensions that didn’t explicitly say that their reported rates of return were net of fees.

So it could actually be worse, because hedge fund fees are typically 2% of the investment PLUS 20% of any profits.

………

Despite the shift in the composition of institutional portfolios, Ennis undertook the study because little research on the behavior of alternatives and whether they improve portfolios has been conducted. That’s because the investments are private — by definition, unlisted companies don’t trade on an exchange where prices are broadcast in real time — and only public pension funds and some large endowments disclose detailed and timely performance data.

Ennis collected data on the most transparent institution, U.S. public-sector pension funds, for the 13 fiscal years ending June 30, 2021. His collection methodology demonstrates how hard it is to get comprehensive information on alternatives. Ennis was limited by a number of funds that had different fiscal year-ends, making comparisons difficult, and pensions that didn’t explicitly say that their reported rates of return were net of fees.

He then used returns-based analysis to explain the returns of a 59 public pension fund-composite and 59 individual funds. From there, he calculated the returns that have been generated above a passive investment — in other words, alpha. Returns-based analysis is a widely accepted method based on the work of Bill Sharpe that identifies underlying market exposures from a series of returns.

Ennis found that in addition to the destruction of alpha, alternatives don’t offer the diversification benefits that institutions expect. “Stock and bond indexes alone capture the return-variability characteristics of alternative investments in the public fund composite for all intents and purposes in the post-GFC era,” said Ennis.

This is why private equity and hedge funds contribute so generously to campaigns.

The politicians get the donations, they lean on the pension funds, which generates the funds for political donations.

It's a self-licking ice cream cone.

More Good News

In Oregon, the Republican state senators who were removed from the body for non-attendance have been told that they cannot stand for reelection. (It was explicitly stated in Oregon Measure 113, from Article IV, section 15 of the state constitution, " Failure to attend, without permission or excuse, ten or more legislative floor sessions called to transact business during a regular or special legislative session shall be deemed disorderly behavior and shall disqualify the member from holding office as a Senator or Representative for the term following the election after the member's current term is completed.")

Boo f%$#ing hoo:

Ten Republican and Independent senators who participated in a six-week walkout this spring won’t be allowed to run for reelection, Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade announced Tuesday.

Griffin-Valade wrote that she views voter-approved Measure 113 as disqualifying Oregon lawmakers who received 10 or more unexcused absences during the 2023 legislative session from running for reelection in 2024.

That was clearly what voters intended, even though wording of the full text of the measure said absentee lawmakers couldn’t run in the election “after” their term, whereas lawmakers run for reelection about two months before their terms end. Ballot language and media coverage all communicated to voters that the punishment for absences would impact lawmakers in their next term, not a later one.

“It is clear voters intended Measure 113 to disqualify legislators from running for reelection” to a term immediately following the one in which they have 10 or more unexcused absences, Griffin-Valade said in a statement. “My decision honors the voters’ intent by enforcing the measure the way it was commonly understood when Oregonians added it to our state constitution.”

As the saying goes, you f%$# with the bull, you get the horns.

As an FYI, the ostensible reason for the walkout was that the Republicans felt that the bill summaries for bills creating a right to abortion and enacting some common sense gun regulations were that the summaries for this legislation used too many big words, and they feared that their constituents were too stupid to understand the laws. (As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know.")

In reality, it was an attempt to make sure that women carry their rapists' babies to term and that children would continue to be gunned down in their classroom, because these are core Republican values,

Definitely a Good News Night

Bummer of a birthmark, Ohio Republicans

The Republicans in the Ohio legislature decided to try to short circuit the upcoming referendum to repeal their ban on abortion with State Issue 1, which would require a super-majority for citizen initiatives.

It lost by 14 points.

The voters just told them to go Cheney themselves:

Ohio’s State Issue 1 has failed as voters rejected Republican lawmakers’ attempt to make it harder for the public to propose and approve changes to the state constitution.

With 2.7 million votes counted and 87% of precincts reporting, Issue 1 trailed 57% to 43%, a margin sufficient for the Associated Press the call the race even as more votes have yet to be tabulated.

………

Issue 1 would have required 60% of voters to approve the abortion-rights issue or any other future proposed constitutional amendments, up from the longstanding 50% plus one-vote requirement. It also would have made it much harder for citizen groups to get amendment proposals on the ballot by requiring them to gather signatures from all 88 Ohio counties, instead of half, and eliminating a 10-day “cure” period for campaigns to gather more signatures if they initially fall short.

………

But the pro-Issue 1 campaign generally sidestepped the issue, focusing their appeals to voters on arguing a 60% bar would prevent deep-pocketed groups from writing their interests into the state constitution, or reframing the issue as a protection against liberal groups that want to promote progressive views on gender in classrooms.

Both approaches are a tacit acknowledgment that abortion rights are politically popular, and that the abortion-rights amendment is likely to clear 50% in November.

The “no” campaign meanwhile framed Issue 1 as an attempt by politicians to take electoral power away from the public. Some ads mentioned abortion by accusing Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose and others of trying to game the rules to block a vote on a policy a majority of Ohioans support. The campaign benefitted from some Republican support, including from former Attorney General Betty Montgomery and ex-Gov. Bob Taft, 2000s-era Republicans who opposed Issue 1.

This does not bode well for the Republicans in November.

Now, in addition to Congressional elections, voters are going to be voting on legal marijuana and abortion rights, and they know that those votes will matter.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Anti-Abortion Activist Facing Trial Won't Be Allowed to Show the 5 Fetuses She Stole

—Anti-Abortion Activist Facing Trial Won't Be Allowed to Show the 5 Fetuses She Stole

This the lamest claim I've heard out of courtroom since ……… Yesterday.

Yes, it's Tuesday, but on Monday, the Trump lawyers were arguing against Jack Smith's request for a protective order against Donald Trump.

So yes, the lamest thing in ONE day.

I hate our version of the multiverse.

The Kid Is a Rapist, but Not Trans

Remember the Republican talking point about the trans kid in Louden County, Virginia using his status to get access to girls' bathrooms where he raped 2 girls?

It turns out that the kid was not trans, he was just a theater geek with colored hair who went into girls bathrooms to assault them.

In other words, this was a CIS kid raping girls and the school failing those girls.

And the initial response of the school authorities to the initial assault was to transfer him to a new school, because the school administrators are evil and incompetent cowards:

For months a sort of aerosolized fury had hung over the Loudoun County school district. There were fights over Covid closures and mask mandates, over racial-equity programs, over library books. Now, in the weeks before the school board’s meeting on June 22, 2021, attention had shifted to a new proposal: Policy 8040, which would let transgender students choose pronouns, play sports and use bathrooms in accordance with their declared gender identity. In May, an elementary-school gym teacher announced that as a “servant of God,” he felt he could not follow the policy. The district swiftly suspended him — and just as swiftly, the antennae of conservative media outlets and politicians swiveled toward Loudoun County.

The entire Republican ticket for that fall’s statewide elections made a pilgrimage to Loudoun, a swath of Washington exurbs in Northern Virginia that is the highest-median-income county in America and the fourth-most-populous in the state. “Fox & Friends” broadcast live from a local diner. “This won’t stop in #LoudounCounty,” the Family Foundation of Virginia, a conservative religious organization in Richmond, tweeted. “It’s coming to your schools and children too.” County Democrats urged supporters of the proposed policy to make their own voices heard at the upcoming meeting, and everyone descended upon the school administration building in the town of Ashburn.

………

The bathroom incident at Stone Bridge High School happened at the precise moment that Policy 8040 became a statewide political story. Ziegler told me that when the administrators assembled for their virtual meeting on the afternoon of the assault, or in another conversation that day, he asked Tim Flynn, the Stone Bridge principal, whether the assailant was transgender.

“Look, the kid is not transgender,” Ziegler recalled Flynn saying. “He runs with the drama crowd, and you know how the drama crowd can be. They’re attention-seeking. And he’s been experimenting with different looks.” He wore skirts on occasion, “but he has never come out to the school as either nonbinary or transgender.” (Flynn did not respond to requests for comment.)

The boy’s mother described her son similarly. “He had presented to me this desire to explore a different lifestyle,” she said, which involved sometimes wearing women’s clothes. But he was “absolutely not” transgender, she said, and “he did not identify as fluid or anything like that.” If the boy had never to anyone’s knowledge identified as anything other than a boy, Ziegler reasoned, then he would not have been allowed in the girls’ bathroom under Policy 8040 any more than he would have been under the existing rules.

(emphasis mine)

Republicans don't care about your kids, they just want someone to hate, because without someone to hate, they would have nothing. 

Pathetic.

Heavy Thunderstorms in My Area

So the power is out for an as yet undetermined amount of time.

Have a video extolling the the amazingness of cats.

Posted via mobile.

Linkage

• Bizarre True Story: Physicists Once Put a Ferret in a Particle Accelerator (ScienceAlert) An innovative application of the old tradition of hunting with ferrets.
  
• There's no such thing as a new nuclear golden age–just old industry hands trying to make a buck (Fortune) I've worked in nuclear, and this is truer than taxes, and nothing is truer than them.
• J&J effort to resolve talc lawsuits in bankruptcy fails a second time (Reuters) Once is stupid.  Twice is criminal fraud.  Frog march the executives out their offices in handcuffs.
• Elon Musk Is Just Donald Trump Without The Decomposing Corn Husk Wig. (Alien Sideboob) Somebody had to say it.
• 14 Warning Signs That You Are Living in a Society Without a Counterculture (Honest Broker) We got them all.
• My Life in Corporate Medicine (The American Prospect) A good essay on the soul (and morals) crushing juxtaposition of medicine and capitalism.
• The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries (Karawynn Long) The OverDrive platform has a monopoly on e-book distribution among US libraries.
• The First Big Antitrust Trial of the Century Is About to Start (Matt Stoller) Google, and I hope the states and the feds win.  
• With No Date Set, Musk and Zuckerberg Trade Barbs on ‘Cage Match’ (New York Times) Money quote, "It’s becoming clearer what the holdup may be: Mr. Musk."
  

Why we should not be grateful for our billionaire overlords' largess:

This Business Will Get out of Control. It Will Get out of Control and We'll Be Lucky to Live through It

Niger has closed its airspace in preparation for a threatened military intervention from ECOWAS nations to reverse a coup.

On the other side, Mali and Burkina Faso have offered to help Niger defend themselves from any potential military actions.

It appears that the coup is popular in Niger, at least in the capital of Niamey, where there have been large scale demonstrations in support of the coup, or least against the French presence in the country. 

This has the potential to get very ugly very quickly:

Niger closed its airspace on Sunday until further notice, citing the threat of military intervention from a regional bloc after coup leaders rejected a deadline to reinstate the country’s ousted president.

“In the face of the threat of intervention that is becoming more apparent … Nigerien airspace is closed effective from today,” a junta representative said in a statement on national television on Sunday evening.

He said there had been a pre-deployment of forces in two central African countries in preparation for an intervention, but did not give details.

“Niger’s armed forces and all our defence and security forces, backed by the unfailing support of our people, are ready to defend the integrity of our territory,” the representative said.

Defence chiefs of the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) have agreed a possible military action plan, including when and where to strike, if Bazoum was not released and reinstated by the Sunday deadline.

………

Earlier, thousands of junta supporters flocked to a stadium in Niamey, the capital, cheering the decision not to stand down by Sunday following the power grab on 26 July that toppled democratically elected president Mohamed Bazoum.

The coup, the seventh in west and central Africa in three years, has rocked the Sahel region, one of the poorest in the world. Given its uranium and oil riches and its pivotal role in a war with Islamist militants, Niger holds great importance for the US, Europe, China and Russia.

Niger last week revoked military cooperation agreements with France, which has between 1,000 and 1,500 troops in the country.

………

Any military intervention could be complicated by a promise from juntas in neighbouring Mali and Burkina Faso to come to Niger’s defence if needed, saying any military intervention against the new military rulers in Niger would be regarded as a “declaration of war”. France announced on Sunday that it was suspending development aid and budgetary assistance to Burkina Faso.

I'm not sure how much of this is the result of the various insurgencies in the region, how much is the result of military dissatisfaction with the deposed President, and how much is the result of France's continued semi-colonial involvement in many nations in Africa.

What I am sure of is that if there is a military intervention, and it isn't a cakewalk, the endgame will be chaotic and dangerous.

Yeah, This is a Big Deal

The Federal 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, arguably the most Neanderthal and Right Wing circuit in the nation, has ruled that Mississippi's felon disenfranchisement law is unconstitutional.

I am stunned and pleased:

Mississippi’s lifetime ban on certain felons voting constitutes cruel and unusual punishment and violates the Eighth Amendment, a federal appeals court ruled Friday, potentially paving the way for tens of thousands to regain their voting rights.

A panel of 5th Circuit judges ruled 2-1 in favor of the plaintiffs, writing that the section at issue in Mississippi’s state constitution “ensures that they will never be fully rehabilitated, continues to punish them beyond the term their culpability requires, and serves no protective function to society.”

………

If it holds, the decision would affect about 30,000 Mississippians who have served sentences for felonies covered by the disenfranchisement clause, the plaintiffs estimate.

The clause dates back to Mississippi’s 1890 constitution, which the state “adopted in reaction to the expansion of Black suffrage and other political rights during Reconstruction,” the ruling notes. The provision applied to felons convicted of crimes that included murder, bribery, theft and perjury, among other crimes.

The plaintiffs succeeded using an uncommon legal strategy for voting rights cases, focusing on the Eighth Amendment and its prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

The primary purpose of felon disenfranchisement is primarily, if not entirely, to keep black people from voting. 

It is well past time for the practice to be ended.

Tweet of the Day

How it started. How it’s going. pic.twitter.com/IdGPtfRlAh

— New York Times Pitchbot (@DougJBalloon) August 5, 2023

When parody accounts turn out to be prophetic, we are completely f%$#ed.

I call this phenenomon, "The prophecies of Nostra-Dumbass."

78 Years Ago Today

The first use of nuclear weapons in war, on August 6, 1945.

The Enola Gay dropped the Little Boy bomb  on Hiroshima, killing approximately 70,000 people immediately, and perhaps twice that in the subsequent years.

The anniversary should not pass unnoted.

Short Version, They Are Nucking Futs

It is increasingly obvious that the hyper rich have some serious screws loose.  (We are talking Bond villain sh%$)

They start off with a screw loose, anything beyond the first $100 million or so is just hoarding, and then they surround themselves with yes men and sycophants, which, after a few years, completely disassociates them from reality.

These people are not geniuses, they are not threats, they are a clear and present danger to the rest of society:

Today, in the New York Times, Paul Krugman shares a key insight that his headline editor summarizes as The Rich Are Crazier Than You and Me. While this is true, what's even more key to me is why the most prominent tech tycoons (who are one of the most powerful cohorts of the rich) have gotten so radicalized.

………

But I've spent decades in this industry, often knowing the executives and investors long before they came to wield so much power, and... they're just a bunch of dudes. They're just as prone to becoming swept up in stupid conspiracized thinking as, well, everyone else in their demographic seems to have been. And it's important to remember, nobody becomes a billionaire by accident. You have to have wanted that level of power, control and wealth more than you wanted anything else in your life. They all sacrifice family, relationships, stability, community, connection, and belonging in service of keeping score on a scale that actually yields no additional real-world benefits on the path from that first $100 million to the tens of billions.

So you have a cohort that is, counterintutively, very easily manipulated. If you have access to a billionaire (and billionaires all have access to each other, because it suits their ego to think of each other as peers), most are very easy to program by simply playing to their insecurity and desire for acknowledgement of exceptionalism, and so they push each other further and further into extreme ideas because their entire careers have been predicated on the idea that they're genius outliers who can see things others can't, and that their wealth is a reward for that imagined merit. "I must be smart, look how rich I am." The rising power of movements meant to counter their influence has catalyzed a vicious, and frankly very weird, backlash where they want to put everyone else in their place. And, due to the insularity of their lifestyles, they very seldom have any corrective voices pointing out when they've clearly lost the plot. If it weren't for the deep harm they were doing to so many with these radical ideas, I'd have a lot of pity and empathy for the fact that they're clearly acting out due to social isolation and the existential emptiness that must come from pursuing wealth and power to such an extreme degree that there's no room left in life for someone to call them on their bullsh%$.

 (%$# mine)

This explains Elon Musk, and Steve Jobs, and Larry Page, and Sergei Brin, and (literal vampire) Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg, and all the rest of them.

When Anil Dash, the author of this article, refers to these folks as, "VC Qanon," he nails it.

I am not concerned about how these folks are created, I am concerned how to stop them.

Man of the People?

I get it that someone can go and take an RV across the country in an attempt to see the, "Real America."

That being said, if you are Justice Clarence Thomas, and one of your patrons was the one who financed the $267,230.00 purchase price, perhaps you are constitutionally unable to see the real America.

The real America is not people whoring themselves to billionaires:

Justice Clarence Thomas met the recreational vehicle of his dreams in Phoenix, on a November Friday in 1999.

With some time to kill before an event that night, he headed to a dealership just west of the airport. There sat a used Prevost Le Mirage XL Marathon, eight years old and 40 feet long, with orange flames licking down the sides. In the words of one of his biographers, “he kicked the tires and climbed aboard,” then quickly negotiated a handshake deal. A few weeks later, Justice Thomas drove his new motor coach off the lot and into his everyman, up-by-the-bootstraps self-mythology.

………

But there is an untold, and far more complex, back story to Justice Thomas’s R.V. — one that not only undercuts the mythology but also leaves unanswered a host of questions about whether the justice received, and failed to disclose, a lavish gift from a wealthy friend.

His Prevost Marathon cost $267,230, according to title history records obtained by The New York Times. And Justice Thomas, who in the ensuing years would tell friends how he had scrimped and saved to afford the motor coach, did not buy it on his own. In fact, the purchase was underwritten, at least in part, by Anthony Welters, a close friend who made his fortune in the health care industry.

There is a crass metaphor to be made here, but at the moment, it does not spring readily to mind.

He provided Justice Thomas with financing that experts said a bank would have been unlikely to extend — not only because Justice Thomas was already carrying a lot of debt, but because the Marathon brand’s high level of customization makes its used motor coaches difficult to value.

In an email to The Times, Mr. Welters wrote: “Here is what I can share. Twenty-five years ago, I loaned a friend money, as I have other friends and family. We’ve all been on one side or the other of that equation. He used it to buy a recreational vehicle, which is a passion of his.” Roughly nine years later, “the loan was satisfied,” Mr. Welters added. He subsequently sent The Times a photograph of the original title bearing his signature and a handwritten “lien release” date of Nov. 22, 2008.

But despite repeated requests over nearly two weeks, Mr. Welters did not answer further questions essential to understanding his arrangement with Justice Thomas.

He would not say how much he had lent Justice Thomas, how much the justice had repaid and whether any of the debt had been forgiven or otherwise discharged. He declined to provide The Times with a copy of a loan agreement — or even say if one existed. Nor would he share the basic terms of the loan, such as what, if any, interest rate had been charged or whether Justice Thomas had adhered to an agreed-upon repayment schedule. And when asked to elaborate on what he had meant when he said the loan had been “satisfied,” he did not respond.

………

The two men’s silence serves to obscure whether Justice Thomas had an obligation to report the arrangement under a federal ethics law that requires justices to disclose certain gifts, liabilities and other financial dealings that could pose conflicts of interest.

Vehicle loans are generally exempt from those reporting requirements, as long as they are secured by the vehicle and the loan amount doesn’t exceed its purchase price. But private loans like the one between Mr. Welters and Justice Thomas can be deemed gifts or income to the borrower under the federal tax code if they don’t hew to certain criteria: Essentially, experts said, the loan must have well-documented, commercially reasonable terms along the lines of what a bank would offer, and the borrower must adhere to those terms and pay back the principal and interest in full.

This is ineluctably corrupt.

Even if these transactions did not result in specific votes on specific matters, and the evidence is clear that these transactions DID result in exceptional access to make their case for the donors, accepting these sorts of gifts is clearly a violation of the most basic professional ethics.

Clarence Thomas is a relentlessly corrupt son of a bitch, and he needs to be investigated, both by the Congress and by the Department of Justice.

Can We Give Them Back to Mexico?

It's Texas again, where their free-market Mousketeers have created a Petri dish for price gouging in electricity.

As a result of the anthropogenic climate change which the powers-that-be in Texas have denied, we are seeing an 800% surge in power prices:

Texas power prices for Sunday surged more than 800% as searing heat pushes demand toward record levels and strains supplies on the state grid.

Electricity prices for the grid rose to more than $2,500 a megawatt-hour for Sunday evening, up from Saturday’s high of about $275, according to data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the grid operator. The surplus of available power capacity on the grid versus power consumption will narrow to 1.6 gigawatts in the hour ending at 6 p.m. Sunday, a level that can trigger emergency responses, though Ercot has additional reserves it can tap to meet demand.

This is at least the 3rd time in recent memory that Texas' criminogenic approach to its power grid has resulted in this situation.

It is clear that the people of Texas need a more functional and less corrupt government, and returning the Lone Star State to Mexico would do this.

How Lovely

Cory Doctorow has a deep dive on the for-profit hospital chain HCA, and shows how it is sending not-dying patients to hospice care to maximize profits.

They provide little or no care at the hospices, because hospices by design provide only palliative care, and once they hit the $32,000.00 Medicare limit, they are kicked loose.

They then have to put their lives back together, including restarting Medicare coverage, because they were removed because they were declared to be dying by HCA:

It's not that conservatives aren't sometimes right – it's that even when they're right, they're highly selective about it. Take the hoary chestnut that "incentives matter," trotted out to deny humane benefits to poor people on the grounds that "free money" makes people "workshy."

There's a whole body of conservative economic orthodoxy, Public Choice Theory, that concerns itself with the motives of callow, easily corrupted regulators, legislators and civil servants, and how they might be tempted to distort markets.

But the same people who obsess over our fallible public institutions are convinced that private institutions will never yield to temptation, because the fear of competition keeps temptation at bay. It's this belief that leads the right to embrace monopolies as "efficient": "A company's dominance is evidence of its quality. Customers flock to it, and competitors fail to lure them away, therefore monopolies are the public's best friend."

………

Wealth-based health-care rationing is bad enough, but when it's combined with the public purse, a bad system becomes a nightmare. Take #HospiceCare: private equity funds have rolled up huge numbers of hospices across the USA and turned them into rigged – and lethal – games:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

Medicare will pay a hospice $203-$1,462 to care for a dying person, amounting to $22.4b/year in public funds transfered to the private sector. Incentives matter: the less a hospice does for their patients, the more profits they reap. And the private hospice system is administered with the lightest of touches: at the $203/day level, a private hospice has no mandatory duties to their patients.

You can set up a California hospice for the price of a $3,000 filing fee (which is mostly optional, since it's never checked). You will have a facility inspection, but don't worry, there's no followup to make sure you remediate any failing elements. And no one at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services tracks complaints.

So PE-owned hospices pressure largely healthy people to go into "hospice care" – from home. Then they do nothing for them, including continuing whatever medical care they were depending on. After the patient generates $32,000 in billings for the PE company, they hit the cap and are "live discharged" and must go through a bureaucratic nightmare to re-establish their Medicare eligibility, because once you go into hospice, Medicare assumes you are dying and halts your care.

PE-owned hospices bribe doctors to refer patients to them. Sometimes, these sham hospices deliberately induce overdoses in their patients in a bid to make it look like they're actually in the business of caring for the dying. Incentives matter:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/12/05/how-hospice-became-a-for-profit-hustle

 ………

The paperclip-maximizing, grandparent-devouring transhuman colony organism that calls itself a Private Equity fund is endlessly inventive in finding ways to increase its profits by harming the rest of us. It's not just hospices – it's also palliative care.

Writing for NBC News, Gretchen Morgenson describes how HCA Healthcare – the nation's largest hospital chain – outsourced its death panels to IBM Watson, whose algorithmic determinations override MDs' judgment to send patients to palliative care, withdrawing their care and leaving them to die:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/doctors-say-hca-hospitals-push-patients-hospice-care-rcna81599

Incentives matter. When HCA hospitals send patients to die somewhere else to die, it jukes their stats, reducing the average length of stay for patients, a key metric used by HCA that has the twin benefits of making the hospital seem like a place where people get well quickly, while freeing up beds for more profitable patients.

………

Only one of HCA's doctors was willing to go on record about its death panels: Ghasan Tabel of Riverside Community Hospital (motto: "Above all else, we are committed to the care and improvement of human life"). Tabel sued Riverside after the hospital retaliated against him when he refused to follow the algorithm's orders to send his patients for palliative care.

Tabel is the only doc on record willing to discuss this, but 26 other doctors talked to Morgenson on background about the practice, asking for anonymity out of fear of retaliation from the nation's largest hospital chain, a "Wall Street darling" with $5.6b in earnings in 2022.

………

But while cutting staff and leaving hospitals to crumble are inarguable malpractice, the palliative care scam is harder to pin down. By using "AI" to decide when patients are beyond help, HCA can employ empiricism-washing, declaring the matter to be the factual – and unquestionable – conclusion of a mathematical process, not mere profit-seeking:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/26/dictators-dilemma/ggarbage-in-garbage-out-garbage-back-in

But this empirical facewash evaporates when confronted with whistleblower accounts of hospital administrators who have no medical credentials berating doctors for a "missed hospice opportunity" when a physician opts to keep a patient under their care despite the algorithm's determination.

This is the true "AI Safety" risk. It's not that a chatbot will become sentient and take over the world – it's that the original artificial lifeform, the limited liability company, will use "AI" to accelerate its murderous shell-game until we can't spot the trick:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/10/in-the-dumps-2/

The risk is real. A 2020 study in the Journal of Healthcare Management concluded that the cash incentives for shipping patients to palliatve care "may induce deceiving changes in mortality reporting in several high-volume hospital diagnoses":

https://journals.lww.com/jhmonline/Fulltext/2020/04000/The_Association_of_Increasing_Hospice_Use_With.7.aspx

Incentives matter. In a private market, it's always more profitable to deny care than to provide it, and any metric we bolt onto that system to prevent cheating will immediately become a target. For-profit healthcare is an oxymoron, a prelude to death panels that will kill you for a nickel.

This is why I think that here should be aggressive criminal prosecutions against business executives.

A sanction to a company is just a cost of doing business.  We need to frog-march these executives out of their offices in handcuffs.

Hey, You Kids, Get Off of My Lawn!

Seriously this influencer/Twitch streamer sh%$ is getting out of hand. 

Case in point, the event hosted by Twitch celebs  Kai Cenat and Fanum, who latest stunt, a public appearance where they promised lots of goodies, including Play Station 5s, led to a riot.

All of this for some crappy video footage:

Twitch streamers Kai Cenat and Fanum invited fans to Union Square on Friday for a real-life stream and giveaway. They promised to hand out gift cards, gaming PC equipment and PlayStation 5s.

But the IRL stream descended into chaos as frenzied fans crowded over the giveaway, shutting down lower Manhattan in the aftermath.

………

But by 1:10 pm, police responded to a “large gathering” in the park, a New York Police Department spokesperson told TechCrunch. The spokesperson said that “a couple thousand individuals” crowded into the location. By 3:30, videos of the riot began flooding social media. Fights broke out as people in the crowd climbed vehicles and threw traffic cones.

………

The NYPD spokesperson said about 1,000 police officers were deployed to the location, and at the time of reporting, there were no injuries. Cenat was pulled from the crowd and taken into police custody, NBC New York reports, but the NYPD spokesperson could not confirm additional arrests to TechCrunch.

I do not get this sh%$ at all.

Meh.

NFP Growth


And beating inflation

We have the jobs report for July, and the US added 187,000 to the non-farm payroll last month.

That's pretty close to the number needed to account to natural growth in the workforce. 

On the bright side, wages beat inflation by a bit, growing by 4.4%.

The U.S. economy continued to generate sturdy employment growth in July, but it showed definite signs of cooling alongside the Federal Reserve’s battle to suppress inflation.

American employers added 187,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department reported on Friday, experiencing 31 straight months of growth. The unemployment rate sank back to 3.5 percent, near a record low.

Revised figures for the prior two months modulated the economic picture slightly from an almost imperceptible slowdown to a clear deceleration after gains exceeding 200,000 had become the norm. Still, the report shows that most people who want to work can find jobs, keeping upward pressure on wages.

Average hourly earnings rose 4.4 percent from a year earlier, slightly more than expected, and enough to give workers more spending power even as prices keep going up.

Telling is where the growth was.  Hospitality grew slowly, manufacturing and transportation were flat,  but healthcare was very strong.

I dunno, maybe they are hiring because there's another Covid surge?  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Gee, You Think?

It seems that the investment strategy which drives most of the tech industry may be little more than stock fraud with a high tech gloss.

So says Adam Rogers at Business Insider.

Where have I heard that before?  Oh ……… Right it was me, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Welcome to the club:

In 2016, Matt Wansley was trying to get work as a lawyer for a tech company — specifically, working on self-driving cars. He was making the rounds, interviewing at all the companies whose names you know, and eventually found himself talking to an executive at Lyft. So Wansley asked her, straight-out: How committed was Lyft, really, to autonomous driving?

"Of course we're committed to automated driving," the exec told him. "The numbers don't pencil out any other way."

Wait a minute, Wansley thought. Unless someone invents a robot that can drive as well as humans, one of America's biggest ride-hailing companies doesn't expect to turn a profit? Like, ever? Something was clearly very, very screwy about the business model of Big Tech.

"So what was the investment thesis behind Uber and Lyft?" says Wansley, now a professor at the Cardozo School of Law. "Putting billions of dollars of capital into a money-losing business where the path to profitability wasn't clear?"

Wansley and a Cardozo colleague, Sam Weinstein, set out to understand the money behind the madness. Progressive economists had long understood that tech companies, backed by gobs of venture capital, were effectively subsidizing the price of their products until users couldn't live without them. Think Amazon: Offer stuff cheaper than anyone else, even though you lose money for years, until you scale to unimaginable proportions. Then, once you've crushed the competition and become the only game in town, you can raise prices and make your money back. It's called predatory pricing, and it's supposed to be illegal. It's one of the arguments that progressives in the Justice Department used to bust up monopolies like Standard Oil in the early 20th century. Under the rules of capitalism, you aren't allowed to use your size to bully competitors out of the market.

The problem is, conservative economists at the University of Chicago have spent the past 50 years insisting that under capitalism, predatory pricing is not a thing. Their head-spinning argument goes like this: Predators have a larger market share to begin with, so if they cut prices, they stand to lose much more money than their competitors. Meanwhile their prey can simply flee the market and return later, like protomammals sneaking back to the jungle after the velociraptors leave. Predatory companies could never recoup their losses, which meant predatory behaviors are irrational. And since Chicago School economists are the kind of economists who believe that markets are always rational, that means predatory pricing cannot, by definition, exist.

………

"We think real world examples are not hard to find — if you look in the right place," Wansley and Weinstein write. "A new breed of predator is emerging in Silicon Valley." And the mechanism those predators are using to illegally dominate the market is venture capital itself.

………

On its face, it also seems to prove the point of the Chicago School: that companies can never recoup the losses they incur through predatory pricing. Matsushita and Brooke Group require that prosecutors show harm. But if the only outcome of the scaling strategy used by Uber and other VC startups is to create an endless "millennial lifestyle subsidy," that just means wealth is being transferred from investors to consumers. The only victims of predatory pricing are the predators themselves.

Where Wansley and Weinstein break important new ground is on the other legal standard set by the Supreme Court: recoupment of losses. If Uber and WeWork and the rest of the unicorns are perpetual money losers, it sounds like the standard isn't met. But Wansley and Weinstein point out that it can be — even if the companies never earn a dime and even if everyone who invests in the companies, post-IPO, loses their bets. That's because the venture capitalists who seeded the company do profit from the predatory pricing. They get in, get a hefty return on their investment, and get out before the whole scheme collapses.

"Will Uber ever recoup the losses from its sustained predation?" Wansley and Weinstein write. "We do not know. Our point is that, from the perspective of the VCs who funded the predation, it does not matter. All that matters is that investors were willing to buy the VCs' shares at a high price."

Let's be clear here: This isn't the traditional capitalist story of "you win some, you lose some." The point isn't that venture capitalists sometimes invest in companies that don't make their money back. The point is that the entire model deployed by VCs is to profit by disrupting the marketplace with predatory pricing, and leave the losses to the suckers who buy into the IPO. A company that engages in predatory pricing and its late-stage investors might not recoup, but the venture investors do.

"The single most important fact in this paper is that Benchmark put $12 million into Uber and got $5.8 billion back," Wansley says. "That's one of the best investments in history, and it was a predatory pricing."\

The issue is not monopolistic or predatory behavior.  This is flat-out boiler room type fraud. 

You do not need to change the minds of judges about Robert Bork's poisonous and corrupt theories on antitrust.  It/'s just stock fraud.

This Is Not the Mark of a Sustainable Business Model

It appears that Amazon employees are shaking down vendors to allow them to navigate the online retailer's opaque vendor suspension protocol.

You get suspended, and you cannot talk to a human being, or even know if a human being has reviewed the decision, so now Amazon employees are selling access to ……… Well, to themselves:

For the millions of sellers who make up the booming Amazon marketplace, few things are as perpetually concerning as the threat of getting suspended for alleged wrongdoing and watching business evaporate overnight.

Helping third-party sellers recover their accounts has turned into a large and lucrative enterprise, because the only way the merchants can get back up and running is to admit guilt and correct the issue or show sufficient evidence that they did nothing wrong. The process is often costly, lengthy and fraught with challenges.

Enter the illicit broker.

For a fee of $200 to $400, sellers can pay for services such as "Amazon Magic," as one broker on encrypted messaging service Telegram calls it. The offerings also include access to company insiders who can remove negative reviews on a product and provide information on competitors. Users are told to send a private message to learn the price of certain services.

………

The groups are part of a robust market of so-called black hat service providers that have cropped up alongside the rise of third-party marketplaces on Amazon, Etsy and Walmart. Amazon's marketplace now accounts for over 60% of goods sold on the platform, and includes numerous businesses that generate millions of dollars in annual revenue on the site.

………

A public Facebook page identified by CNBC offers an internal screenshot service with "valuable insight into your seller account, allowing you to see how Amazon employees view your account and its performance."

………

Brokers, who act as middlemen between sellers and employees, often reach out to insiders on LinkedIn, said a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality. Amazon has an internal group tasked with threat analysis and response, including a team dedicated to investigating employees suspected of leaking data, the source said. The threat analysis unit monitors social media platforms for abusive groups where bad actors may congregate before engaging in illicit activity on Amazon's marketplace.

………

In 2018, Amazon investigated claims that employees, primarily based in China, received payments of $80 to more than $2,000 to share confidential sales information or delete bad reviews, The Wall Street Journal reported. More recently, the Department of Justice charged six individuals in 2020 with participating in a scheme to bribe employees and contractors for internal data.

In July, the fifth defendant in the case, who is a well-known seller consultant, was sentenced to probation and house arrest after pleading guilty in March. Account annotations, internal notes from an Amazon staffer on a seller's account, were among the confidential data being exchanged between the defendants and employees. 

………

Amazon sellers have for years complained of being unfairly kicked off the site without explanation. The process of getting their account back can take months, costing critical sales in the meantime. The issue was a key focus of a 16-month investigation by the House Antitrust Subcommittee into competitive practices at Amazon and other Big Tech companies.

"When Amazon turns off the faucet, everything goes to hell," said Cynthia Stine, president of eGrowth Partners, a consultancy that helps merchants get reinstated. "I've had CEOs of large companies cry on the phone with me, and they've had to lay off their people. They've declared bankruptcy."

The abusive nature of Amazon's business model does not seem sustainable to me.

In fact, as shown above, their model seems positively criminogenic. 

At some point, the dysfunctional nature of Amazon's relationships with its users and its vendors will reach a point where people will go MySpace on their ass.

Thursday Jobs Report.

We have the weekly unemployment report, with initial unemployment claims rising by 6000 to 227,000 continuing claims rising by 10,000 to 1.7 million, and the 4-week moving average fell by 5,500 to 228,250.

I expect that the Fed will use this as a justification to further raise rates. 

One thing that I know for sure, my predictions on this electronic medium are not worth the paper that they are printed on.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

God Does Not Like Florida Right Now

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a travel warning to Florida because of an increase in Leprosy cases there.

God is literally getting biblical on Florida.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning that cases of leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease, are surging in Florida and should be considered when making travel plans.

The infectious [One of the least infectious diseases out there, actually] disease primarily affects the skin and nervous system and can be easy to treat if caught early.

Leprosy has been historically uncommon in the United States, but has more than doubled in the South over the last 10 years. In a case report issued Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that Central Florida has accounted for 81% of reported cases in the state and almost one-fifth of reported cases nationwide.

Of the 159 new leprosy cases reported in the United States in 2020, Florida was among the top reporting states with nearly 30 cases. The Florida Department of Health reported 19 cases from July 2022 to July 2023, with one South Florida case in Palm Beach County.

Between hurricanes, Leprosy, wildfires, mass shootings, Disney World, and Ron Desantis, it's abundantly clear that God is punishing them.

My guess is an improperly conducted census, (hover the mouse over to get the reference) though that is seriously old school.

Maybe be Florida is being punished for Ron Desantis?  At least how I am going to troll his Talibaptist supporters.

For the record, I do not think that God is smiting Florida because of Ron Desantis, but I do think that the Florida Governor's policy choices have made things worse in that state

Leprosy is just one consequence of putting incompetent zealots in charge of basic government functions.

I Oppose the Death Penalty

Even for the Tree of Life Synagogue terrorist Robert Bowers, who was just sentenced to death.

I will not mourn his death, but I have seen the conduct of prosecutors in Texas, where capital charges are one part leverage to get plea deals, and one part aspirations of higher political office by the district attorney or their prosecutors.

The death penalty is abusive, arbitrary, and not a deterrent to crime.

The only case that I am aware of where the death penalty actually effected the conduct of a crime was the Onion Field Murder, where a cop was shot to death because the perps (incorrectly) believed that they were facing the death penalty for kidnapping under the Little Lindbergh Law.

JOLTS Report Out

Rather unsurprisingly, given the Federal Reserve's ongoing attempts to foment a recession, employee turnover fell in June.

This is an indicator of a weakening of the job market, or maybe employers are being better to their employees ……… Yeah, right, employers becoming humane is a fairy tale ……… It's a weakening job market.

There were 9.6 million job openings in June, roughly the same as a month earlier, according to the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS).

Employers have tightened the screws on hiring in recent months, with job openings falling to their lowest level since April 2021 as the economy responds to tightening monetary policy.

The most notable changes in June were not in job openings but in hiring and quitting. There were 5.9 million hires in June, down from 6.2 million in May. And the quits rate, a measure of workers’ confidence in the job market and bargaining power, decreased to 2.4 percent, from 2.6 percent in May and down from a record of 3 percent in April 2022.

………

“We’re still in an economy where the labor market is unbalanced,” said Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, “with the demand for workers substantially outpacing the supply of workers.” There are roughly 1.6 job openings for each unemployed worker.

 Gee, something around 1½ million dead, and at least 16 million currently with long Covid, that's not an "Unbalanced" job market that's a catastrophe that scum like Michael Strain cannot see as anything beyond an inconvenience for his rich patrons. (The article only mentions the pandemic as being something that happened before employers found it hard to hire people)

There is a "Worker Shortage" because the workers are gone, some of them forever, and some of them for a long time, but they are gone.

"The generator's gone."

"Any way we can fix it?"

"It's GONE, MacReady."

This is Called a Death Rattle

Billions over budget, and over a decade late, the first nuclear power plant built in the US since the last century has come on line.

The customers of Georgia Power are going to be paying through the nose for this for years.

I worked briefly in nuclear power, on the back end of the fuel cycle, and it will never be viable for commercial use.

Even if everything is done right, and frequently it is not done right, it is ridiculously expensive even with the heavy subsidies:

It's more than half a decade late coming online and has cost billions more than estimated, but Georgia Power's Vogtle Unit 3, the first US nuclear reactor built from scratch this century, has finally come online.

Located near Waynesboro, Georgia, the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant's third reactor will supply an estimated 500,000 homes and businesses in the region with power. Utility companies in Georgia, Florida and Alabama all receive electricity generated by Vogtle's existing reactors, the first two of which came online in the late 1980s, and a fourth power facility is due to come online within the next year.

"Today's achievement … marks the first day of the next 60 to 80 years that Vogtle Unit 3 will serve our customers with clean, reliable energy." said Georgia Power CEO, chairman and president Kim Greene. Georgia Power said its overall energy mixture is now approximately 25 percent nuclear.

Construction on Vogtle 3, and its sister reactor Vogtle 4, began in 2009, making it the first nuclear reactor built from the ground up this century, but not the first new reactor in the last 23 years.

That honor belongs to Tennessee-based Watts Bar Nuclear Plant, which brought its second reactor online in 2016. Watts Bar Unit 2 began construction in 1972, but was paused in 1985. Construction wasn't resumed until 2007, and took another nine years to finish.

With Vogtle 3 online, Georgia Power is now turning to the completion of Vogtle 4, which it believes will be ready late in the fourth quarter of 2023 or early 2024. Once Unit 4 is online, Vogtle's total output will make it the "largest generator of clean energy" in the US, Georgia Power said.

"Largest generator," of nuclear power in the US?  Here's an investment tip:  If you can bet on their bankruptcy, it's a pretty good bet.

After all, one of the causes for the delay was the bankruptcy of the plant manufacturer, Westinghouse.

No Champagne until He’s in an Orange Jumpsuit

We have another set of Donald Trump indictments, these for a conspiracy to defraud the US, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, a conspiracy to deprive voters of their right to have their lawfully cast votes counted, and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding.

Excuse me, I need to tear up my bingo card, no Seditious Conspiracy:

A grand jury indicted former president Donald Trump on Tuesday for a raft of alleged crimes in his brazen efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory — the latest legal and political aftershock stemming from the riot at the U.S. Capitol two and a half years ago.

The four-count, 45-page indictment accuses Trump, who is again running for president, of conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding, attempting to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiring against people’s civil right to have their vote counted. The maximum potential sentence on the most serious charge is 20 years in prison.

“The attack on our nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy,” special counsel Jack Smith told reporters after the indictment was filed. “It was fueled by lies, lies by the defendant.”

………

The charges represent the third indictment of the former president filed since March — setting the stage for one of the stranger presidential contests in history, in which a major-party front-runner may have to alternate between campaign stops and courtroom hearings over the next year and a half.

A federal grand jury in Miami indicted Trump last month on charges of mishandling classified documents after leaving the White House and obstructing government efforts to get them back. A state grand jury in New York has charged him with falsifying business records in connection with hush money payments during the 2016 campaign. And a state grand jury in Georgia is weighing whether to charge Trump for his efforts to undo the 2020 election results there.

I still think that Trump will never see the inside of a jail cell.

His Uncle Died Fighting Nazis

The uncle in question is Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Jr.  And he died when the aircraft that he was flying as part of Operation Aphrodite blew up as the fuses for the explosives it was carrying were being armed.

The Nephew, of is Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jr., who is, as Mike the Mad Biologist observes, who now plays at Nazi peekaboo:

I’m stealing Amanda Marcotte’s phrase ‘Nazi Peekaboo‘ because it describes what Democratic primary candidate and anti-vaccinationist crank RFK Jr. did last Friday. His account tweeted a complaint about not receiving Secret Service protection, and phrased it like so (boldface mine):

Typical turnaround time for pro forma protection requests from presidential candidates is 14-days. After 88-days of no response and after several follow-ups by our campaign, the Biden Administration just denied our request. Secretary Mayorkas: “I have determined that Secret Service protection for Robert F Kennedy Jr is not warranted at this time.”

Our campaign’s request included a 67-page report from the world’s leading protection firm, detailing unique and well established security and safety risks aside from commonplace death threats.

(emphasis the aforementioned angry biologist)

14/88 has its own Wiki page.

14 refers the following phrase, "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children," and 88 stands for the 8th letter of the alphabet repeated twice, HH, which stands Heil Hitler.

"Nazi Peekaboo," is one way to refer to this, but the more general term is, "Dog Whistling." 

When George W. Bush referred to compassionate conservatism, he was dog whistling to the religious right, saying that he wanted to everyone out of the social safety net, and when he listed Dredd Scott as the worst Supreme Court decision he was actually talking about how he wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade.

When Ronald Reagan started his 1980 Presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where civil rights activists were murdered by the Klan and the police, and called for greater states rights, he was endorsing segregation.

To some degree this occurs in most politics, but the use of these code words is particularly prevalent among the right wing, racist Talibaptists, and opportunist hypocrite fellow travelers.

Quote of the Day

Actually, no, I couldn’t even come up with a halfhearted contrarian take. It’s trash.

—Darrell Etherington on TechCrunch, discussing Elon Musk's rebranding of Twitter to Ecch.

How the hell does someone so profoundly, and deeply, stupid end up the richest man in the world?

Irene WD Hecht, October 17, 1932 — July 31, 2023

My step mother since 1980.

Historian, Dean, College President, Mom.

She will be missed.

Linkage

• The CBGB Theory: Weirdos Not Bros Will Revive Downtown (PubliCola) What, dull stockbrokers don't make cities exciting?
• It Turns Out An Ancient Creature Actually Preyed Upon Dinosaurs (Science Alert) They found a fossile of a predatory mammal attacking a much larger dinosaur.
• People are getting fed up with all the useless tech in their cars (The Verge) The car companies want to record and monetize the habits of their users (don't call them owners), and the tech is a cover for installing spyware on cars.
• Long COVID Is Disabling Kids. Why We Ignore It (The Tyee) Some of the consequences are life long.  Herd immunity, my ass.Jeopardy! champs Cris Pannullo, Hannah Wilson, won't cross WGA writers strike (Philadelphia Inquirer) The technical term for this is, "Mensch."
• The Beltway’s Favorite Bogus Budget Model (The American Prospect) Money quote, "The important thing to understand about the Penn Wharton model is that it’s not really supposed to be a model of the macroeconomy. It’s supposed to be a tool by which you could kill progressive policymaking."
• Some long-covid patients may have cognitive issues for at least two years (Washington Post) These appear to be permanent disabilities.

They lied to you about the existence of barter economies.

Yeah, Pretty Much

Attached is a very good summary of the federal report on the extensive, and arguably habitual civil rights violations of the Minneapolis Police Department

It seems to me that this shows the Minneapolis is little more than a criminal gang that operates under the explicit protection of the law.

I'd be shocked, but literally EVERY deep dive on EVERY police department reveals the same, whether it's New York, Chicago, Portland, or Minneapolis.

An Overdue Library Book Is Returned to a Library 119 Years Later

You know, this sort of thing leads to irate librarians:

Have you ever returned a library book late? Perhaps by a day or two or maybe even a week? How about 119 years? …No? Well, a particular volume from the New Bedford Free Public Library in Massachusetts actually took that long to make its way back to the library’s shelves. A copy of An Elementary Treatise on Electricity by British scientist James Clerk Maxwell that was checked out in 1904 was finally returned in 2023.

The book was first spotted by Stewart Plein, curator of rare books at West Virginia University Libraries. The librarian was sorting through a recent donation of books when she spotted the copy of Maxwell's treatise. It was in great condition for a book that old, but there was one problem: it appeared to have once been part of a library collection and it didn’t have any sort of stamp indicating it was officially withdrawn. So, it appeared to be a lost and very long overdue book.

Plein got in touch with Jodi Goodman, the special collections librarian in New Bedford. While the library staff had seen overdue books returned 10 or 15 years later, this was something new. “This came back in extremely good condition,” New Bedford Public Library Director Olivia Melo says. “Someone obviously kept this on a nice bookshelf because it was in such good shape and probably got passed down in the family.”

………

Since the New Bedford library has a 5¢-per-day late fee, a book overdue by 119 years would mean a late fee of $2,100; however, the library’s late fee limit maxes out at $2. If anything, its true value lies in the history it has witnessed since being borrowed.

Daym!  After 119 years, they were remarkably gracious.

So, About Spain

So, a week ago, the Francoist PP party massively under performed expectations, and the right wing fascist VOX party lost seats in Spain's parliamentary elections.

Considering the history of Spain, going back at least to when the Kings of Castille.

The People's Party was hoping for an outright majority, and massive losses from the Socialist Party (PSOE), and it got neither, though it did pick up a rather impressive 47 seats.

What is particularly notable is that Vox went from 52 seats to 33 seats.

Considering the political winds in Europe right now, I am surprised that they under performed, particularly in Spain, which had the longest ruling fascist regime:

Just a week ago, Spain’s Popular Party (PP) dreamed of 168 seats and a landslide victory that would allow it to govern the country alone, without the need for the far-right Vox. But a much greater resistance from the left than expected, with a Socialist Party (PSOE) that against all odds has amply surpassed its 2019 results, has left PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo with such a narrow victory that not only will he not be able to govern alone — he will not even be able to achieve a sufficient majority with Vox.

The result in terms of votes is even more surprising than the one reflected in the seats: the PP wins the election by less than 300,000 votes. It is a victory, but a small one, very similar to that of José María Aznar in 1996, which leaves a very bad taste in the mouth of the PP leadership, which at no time doubted that they would obtain an absolute majority with Vox.

………

“The involutionist [I believe that a better translation would be, "Reactionary."] bloc has failed. There are more Spaniards who want Spain to move forward and it will continue to be so,” shouted a euphoric Sánchez as the PSOE’s grassroots followers shouted “No pasarán” (They shall not pass, a cry used by Republicans during the Spanish Civil War) at the door of its headquarters. “They have made the sum of the right fail,” admitted Santiago Abascal, leader of Vox.

 The formation of a government will be complex.