Ten Second News Links and Open Thread for the week of 11/7/2022
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to Ten Second News.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these on the Sidebar every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
Out on my jog again yesterday and I jogged past that little house. It still had a for sale sign in front of it. Checked it on the zillow and it dropped another 10k.
Actually 10k+1. It went from being a house that ended in all zeroes to ending in 9,999.
In related news, Wells Fargo reported a 90% drop in mortgage originations.Report
Something something when your only tool is a hammer something somthing nails.Report
Proving once again that the GOP intend to serve none of its voters and has no plans to address their issues:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/07/politics/kevin-mccarthy-interview-border-security/index.htmlReport
Life under Democrats:
“It is unimaginable and unacceptable that years after we legalized cannabis, Californians are still waiting to get their records cleared,” the bill’s author, Assemblymember Mia Bonta (D-Alameda), said in a statement. “We have a moral obligation to get this right.”
The new law gives the courts a deadline of March 1 to update case records and transmit them to the state Department of Justice, which maintains California’s criminal history database and responds to background checks. The state DOJ must modify its records by July 1.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-22/california-to-clear-pot-convictions-faster-after-times-probeReport
Life under Republicans:
Black voters in Florida express fear, confusion as DeSantis election laws kick in
It is now illegal to turn in more than two ballots that don’t belong to a close relative. There are new restrictions for organizations that help register voters. And shortly after its inception, DeSantis’s Office of Election Crimes and Security announced deputies had made 20 arrests — 15 of them involving Black voters accused of voting illegally.
The arrested voters were charged with casting ballots even though they did not qualify to vote. A state constitutional amendment gives most people formerly convicted of a felony the right to vote. Several of those arrested say they thought they qualified. They applied to register, got voting cards and were never told they had acted improperly until officers showed up to question them on a summer afternoon.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/11/07/florida-elections-voting-desantis-laws/Report
The Post is funny.Report
So the Post is funny for accurately reporting the arrest of people trying to do the right thing, where the real culprit is the right hand of Florida government and the left hand of Florida government not knowing what they other is doing?
Fascinating.Report
The Post is funny for seeing everything in race, and assigning their fears to black people.Report
Assigning fears? The state of Florida is arresting black people for violating a law that other state agencies helped them violate. So yes, the black people in question are fearful. not sure what your point is however.Report
Because the system worked, the per was caught and charged, we need to temporarily disenfranchise active duty military voters?
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2022/11/07/lawsuit-asks-to-sequester-wisconsin-military-ballots-ahead-of-midterms/69624147007/Report
NYT has a visual showing what times polls close: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/08/us/politics/poll-closing-times.html
Are they write that polls in certain parts of Kentucky and Indiana close at 5PM local time?
It’s almost like leaders there don’t want people to vote. Can anyone offer a GOOD reason for closing polls that early?Report
If we’re going to talk bizarre and hilarious WaPo headlines I couldn’t help but laugh at this one that just came up:
Despite torrent of misinformation, voting unfolds relatively smoothlyReport
This will be overshadowed by everything else we are talking about today, but potentially significant news from Ukraine. Russia is withdrawing from the west bank of the Dnipro river, which will concede the only major city captured since February 24.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/09/europe/ukraine-russia-kherson-withdrawal-intl/index.htmlReport
Yeah Ukraine is definitely quietly improving daily. And all without additional ground truths from other Nato nations . . .Report
This day just keeps on giving.Report
Meta is laying off 11,000 people at the same time as Twitter layoffs at the same time as Lyft layoffs at the same time as Stripe layoffs at the same time as Opendoor layoffs at the same time as Chime layoffs seems to be an indicator that San Francisco real estate is going to become more affordable soon.Report
Sorry if I’ve commented about this before, but I’ve seen three recent ads (national ones for major brands) where the butt of the joke was a VR dude missing out on life. That seems significant to me. You don’t make ads mocking early adopters unless you’ve got a very staid product or you sense that something isn’t going to catch on at all.Report
The VR helmet, as far as I can tell, has no killer app.
It’s got some great novelty apps! You can play Resident Evil 4. Moss is a delight. Skyrim? Unbelievable! You won’t even want to play. You’ll just want to walk around. Fallout 4 is kind of okay, but the sniping sucks. There’s that other one too that will probably keep it on life support until a real killer app emerges.
But, currently, it’s a novelty. I don’t want to say that it isn’t going to catch on at all… but to catch on at all, it’s going to need a killer app.
And Meta ain’t one.Report
People now have this fear that the random avatar you run into in the metaverse could in the real world be Mark Zuckerberg.Report
SF for the last 20+ years has jumped all over augmented reality. VR is seriously limited by the fact that visual cues and inner-ear cues have to match, at least somewhat.Report
Augmented reality might be cool. I could see how Google Glass v. 2.0 could take off. Get a constant stock ticker, weather report, news headlines, and little updates over everything you happen to see? Oh, Carl’s Jr. goes back to 1956? I did not know that.
Well, maybe not for everybody, but I could see that there would be a base for that among the population.
VR motion sickness ain’t no joke. They still haven’t figured out how to make it work. Even teleport fails.Report
This just scrolled across my timeline…
$400.
Report
The VR helmet, as far as I can tell, has no killer app.
Porn?Report
I kind of alluded to that one with “There’s that other one too that will probably keep it on life support until a real killer app emerges.”
If that’s the only thing that acts as a killer app, it’ll eventually be known as merely “the porn helmet”.
In the short term, it needs an application that will sell it that will plausibly be a bigger draw to normies than, well, the ones in a plain brown wrapper.Report
Apparently Crypto blew up yesterday. Like, vaporized. I’ve seen several people declare 99.9%+ losses.Report
Over the last 18 months, the six companies that have reached a trillion dollar valuation at some point — Meta, Amazon, Tesla, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Apple — have collectively lost over four trillion dollars in valuation.Report
I don’t know how to read tea leaves for this. This seems different than 1929.
But it seems to be dancing in the smudgy area between “merely different” and “significantly different”.Report
Remind me when you learned what M3 was?
This is a free money crisis.Report
Seeing flight to the safety of BTC… now trading at $17k.
Sure, *that’s* down $30k or 63% YTD… but hey, Tom Brady would be able to retire if he’d stashed his hoard there instead.Report
I am so glad that I was not smart enough to get into crypto.Report
On the other hand, I’m still bitter I too smart to get in when I was looking at it around $100 — seemed stupidly over valued… but I could easily have thrown $1k at it.
{But, if I hadn’t lost evertyhing in the Mt.Gox hack, I doubt I would have held it much beyond the price going up to $1,000 – what kind of idiot pushes a 10 bagger?}Report
Yeah, exactly. I have been spending the last 10 years or so saying “I don’t wanna go in, it’s going to crash” and, well, 10 years later I was totally right.
Now to continue to avoid looking at my 401k…Report
As a general matter, we normal individual investors should realize that we aren’t smart enough to game out exotic stuff like crypto (it’s questionable whether anyone else is either, but that’s not our problem) and should stick to strategies suitable for dummies. They aren’t sexy, but in the long run they work. F**k FOMO.Report
Okay. This helped me understand it a little bit better.
Report
Apparently the guy at the center of the storm is the 2nd largest individual donor to the Democrats.
I only found this out about 2 minutes ago.Report
Does that make him even worse than George Soros? He’s the right religion for that.Report
If Soros is #1 and this guy is #2, does that make him worse than Soros or not?Report
He tries harder.Report
At least they waited until after the election.
Report
Are you suggesting that a Texas-based judge appointed by Trump who shot down Biden’s student loan plan chose to do so after the election to help Biden…?Report
Imagine the crapshow if he did it this time last week!Report
“Are you suggesting that a Texas-based judge appointed by Trump who shot down Biden’s student loan plan chose to do so after the election to help Biden…?”Report
I’m not sure that this is helping Biden at all.
But given that we’re about 20 minutes after an election, neither am I sure it’s hurting him.
I guess I’m just shrugging and saying “At least they waited until after the election.”Report
Who is “they”?Report
The illuminati.Report
More seriously, I didn’t know the gender of the judge who looked at this and said “this is an unconstitutional exercise of Congress’s legislative power and must therefore be vacated!” and went on to press the red “unconstitutional” button. So I went with a singular “they”.
As for my own personal inclinations, I agree with 2021 Pelosi.
Even though she is from one of the non-he/they genders.Report
“U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman, an appointee of former Republican President Donald Trump in Fort Worth, called the program an “unconstitutional exercise of Congress’s legislative power” as he ruled in favor of two borrowers backed by a conservative advocacy group.”
Paragraph two of your link.
Do you read the links you post? Or was it just too juicy a shot to take and you went for it without really knowing what you were talking about?Report
Well, perhaps my copy and paste of “unconstitutional exercise of Congress’s legislative power” was taken from tertiary sources.
But, like, what if I copied and pasted “unconstitutional exercise of Congress’s legislative power” from the original source?
WHAT THEN?!?
Like, I mean, we might have to argue about the roles of the legislative vs. the executive.
And I don’t know about you but it’s the first night of a three-day.Report
I have zero interest in debating the decision itself; I do not know nearly enough about the various matters involved to have an informed opinion. I offered that quote not because of what it said about the judge’s decision but because of what it said about the judge, including his name, his gender, and who appointed him.
You clearly seem to have an opinion on the timeline of it’s release, though that doesn’t seem particularly well-informed. You didn’t even read the first two paragraphs of an article you linked to which had pretty pertinent information as to the potential motivation behind the timing of the release. I’m trying to understand your opinion on the timing and what you were trying to imply with your initial comment.
If you have no interest in clarifying that (i.e., you don’t want to have an actual conversation), I’ll let you enjoy your long weekend.Report
I was just having a fun throwaway joke while pointing out that the thing that Biden did was found by a court to be unconstitutional.
Since I kinda thought it was unconstitutional at the time, I kinda agree with the decision.
And I admit to not really caring about the color, gender, or nominator of the person who looked at it and said “yeah, that’s unconstitutional”.
Though I’d be fascinated to hear why a Black woman might reach a different conclusion.Report
If the judgment had come down last week, Biden could have told young voters with student loan that their free ten to twenty grand might go away if there’s no blue wave. It’s not at all clear to me that that would have hurt Democrats.Report
Actually, never mind. The judge delaying the judgment until after the election to hurt Biden (assuming that it was intentional) is consistent with your skepticism that it was done to help Biden. I was thinking more generally in terms of whether the timing made strategic sense in terms of the judge’s presumable political preferences.Report
I think if you’re going to make accusations that a Judge decided to base the timing of their release of a judgement to in some way impact an election, you should probably:
1.) Read AN article discussing the judgement and its release
2.) Consider who the judge is
3.) Demonstrate some understanding of how court decision releases work
Of course, that is IF Jaybird is making the accusation. Despite asking twice, he won’t actually acknowledge what his motivation or thinking was behind his initial comment.
I have no reason to think this wasn’t just business as usual for the court unless/until there is evidence to that, perhaps something showing that the timing of the release is very atypical or the judge making comments elsewhere that indicates he had ulterior motives. I don’t think the judge did it to hurt or help Biden or anyone else; I think he just released his decision.
But I’m happy to be proven wrong.Report
you’re going to make accusations that a Judge decided to base the timing of their release of a judgement to in some way impact an election, you should…
Could we, instead, point out that it happened *AFTER* an election?Report
Kazzy, you’ve seen the Jaybird drive-by before. Surely you know better than to expect him to say plainly what he means or provide some coherent explanation.Report
It was a throwaway joke before a link to an article explaining that the case was found to be unconstitutional!
What’s the fundamental argument that we’re expecting me to make here?
How’s this?
I think that if this decision came out last week, it might have resulted in Biden saying “Vote for me, vote blue, and I’ll forgive your student loans!”
Which might have resulted in a handful of elections changing hands due to young people getting energized, other young people getting outraged, older people getting energized, and other older people getting outraged.
The main thing that I think would have happened is “churn” and it would have eaten a handful of news cycles.
As it is, the decision came out after the election meaning that it wouldn’t have an impact on the election.
I can imagine people who think “this would have resulted in more votes for my team” coming out and saying “therefore this was done in order to avoid getting more votes for my team AND SINCE THE MOTIVATIONS WERE THAT, THIS DECISION IS SOMEWHAT LESS LEGITIMATE!”
But it came out after the election.
So now we’re stuck noting that it happened after the election and whatever churn might have happened didn’t happen.
I mean, if we don’t want to talk about the merits.Report
When no one can tell the difference between what you, and apparently no one else, identify as a joke and Jaybird being Jaybird, you might want to brush up on your joke-telling technique.Report
For me, the important part was the article saying “yep, a judge found this unconstitutional”.
If we want to have the conversation about how my throwaway joke confesses that the judge waited until after the election because he knew that his judgment would result in young people voting for democrats, we can have that conversation too, I guess.
But I’m one of those people who thinks that the merits of the decision are important.
Hey! You’re a lawyer!
Do you have any thoughts on the merits of the decision?Report
“For me, the important part was the article saying “yep, a judge found this unconstitutional”.”
Maybe you should have said THAT instead of… not that.
Especially given we’ve had lots of talk during recent elections about the actions of various political agencies and how they did or did not impact elections.
But you do you. Keep saying… not what you think is important… and keep acting confused when people talk about… not what you think is important.
Enjoy your weekend.Report
Why is it that the same 4-5 people who can’t understand Jaybird also misremember or misunderstand my posts? It’s not like comments from the two of us are hard to come by, so you’d think they could catch on after a while. If only there were someone at the haidt of social psychology who could explain this.Report
And when Jaybird posts on like weekend plans or video games, his sense of humor becomes easy to understand again. It’s like the only thing people can’t comprehend is when someone disagrees with them ideologically. That’s such a depressing notion, because one of the virtues of this kind of format is exposure to different ideas. It seems so wasted.Report
I thought that the link to the story was the important part.
Especially given we’ve had lots of talk during recent elections about the actions of various political agencies and how they did or did not impact elections.
See? This is why I thought a throwaway joke like “at least they waited until after the election” was funny!Report
Further evidence that joke-making is not the sharpest tool in your toolbox.Report
“Why do you guys keep talking about what I said instead of what I didn’t say?”
I asked you to clarify your statement (twice)… either time you could have said it was a throwaway joke but both times you didn’t.
Almost like it wasn’t a throwaway joke.Report
Because it struck me as so obviously a throwaway joke that I found myself confounded that I be asked to dissect it.
Let me copy and paste this from above. Could you tell me if this strikes you as accurate at all?
Report
How often doesn’t something strike you as so obviously a joke but few others?
Again, you could have easily clarified in Comment #3 of this subthread and you opted not to.
Stop trying to dig up.Report
Oh, all the time.
Remember when you said “Especially given we’ve had lots of talk during recent elections about the actions of various political agencies and how they did or did not impact elections”?
Assume that I knew that we’ve had lots of talk during recent elections about the actions of various political agencies and how they did or did not impact elections when I made my comment.
Does it read differently?
Did what I said above strike you as accurate or not? I’m trying to figure out what the root issue is here.
If it’s not “Jaybird is trying to plausibly deny that this judge was interfering with the election by not doing this before the election”, I don’t know what it is.Report
“ Are you suggesting that a Texas-based judge appointed by Trump who shot down Biden’s student loan plan chose to do so after the election to help Biden…?”
Yes or no?Report
Here’s what I said up there:
So, to answer with one word, no. That’s not what I’m suggesting.Report
Well, you weren’t suggesting anything, I thought. You were merely making a throwaway joke… right?
Or you WERE suggesting something but since you couldn’t take 30 seconds to read a couple paragraphs of the link you shared you got caught with your pants down and pretended it was a joke?Report
Well, if you want to get into a deep dive.
I know that we’ve had lots of talk during recent elections about the actions of various political agencies and how they did or did not impact elections.
As such, I know that people were going to look at this decision and say “this was *OBVIOUSLY* a political decision to release the decision *NOW*”.
But it was released *AFTER* an election rather than before it. So it’s not like it’d be easy to argue that this was intended to interfere with the election or help one side or the other.
Heck, the fact that it was after means that it was deliberately *NOT* intended to interfere with the election.
So that means that the argument that the timing was suspect must hinge on “the judge knew that this would give Democrats votes if he released it prior to the election and he deliberately timed his decision to avoid giving Democrats votes!”
And so the argument is over whether this is somehow an election shenanigan because it was deliberately done in such a way to *NOT* impact the election when it’s something that *SHOULD* have impacted the election.
And I was obliquely noting that mindset and gently teasing it. In 8 words.Report
This whole subthread is giving me flashbacks to the early years of my marriage, where i would occasionally make some offhand semi-humorous comment and my wife would take it the worst possible way -“what exactly did you mean by that???!!!”
Then we’d spend the next half hour hashing it out, but she would never entirely believe my denials of any negative subtext.Report
Was she wrong?Report
Hey! You’re a lawyer!
Do you have any thoughts on the merits of the decision?
No, I don’t. And I have no incentive to spend the necessary time to develop some.Report
Fair enough.
I’ll let you get back to being the joke prosecutor.Report
And if you want to see where we discussed the original announcement of student loan forgiveness, you can do so here.Report
Let the record show that I got the joke.Report
Thanks, Brandon.Report
Trump is having a thing: https://twitter.com/FrankFigliuzzi1/status/1590869605513195520?ref_src=twsrc%5EtfwReport
Here’s an example of why most punditry is just barstool sports bloviating:
https://www.levernews.com/the-real-reason-for-dems-rust-belt-revival/
Her thesis is that Democrats won by offering real tangible economic advantage, things like the IRA and so forth.
And I really, really want to believe this! This essay is practically written as Chip-bait, designed to press all my Democrat loving priorities.
But I notice that it consists entirely of the author stretching the outcomes to fit her theories, without any sort of data or empirical facts. We are told that voters thought this or that and made this or that choice without any sort of evidence.
It’s the reverse of the pundits who “felt” a red wave, projecting their own desires onto the entire population.Report