By Lambert Strether of Corrente
Bird Song of the Day
Satin Flycatcher, Devonport, Tasmania, Australia. I like the recordings that are environmental portraits of the bird’s surroundings, besides the bird’s song.
Politics
“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” –James Madison, Federalist 51
“Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels” –Herman Melville, Moby Dick
“You can’t really dust for vomit.” Nigel Tufnel, This is Spinal Tap
Abortion
“Judge blocks part of Idaho’s new abortion law in first post-Roe lawsuit by the Biden administration” [NBC]. “A federal judge on Wednesday temporarily blocked part of Idaho’s strict abortion law that’s scheduled to take effect Thursday, handing the Biden administration a narrow courtroom win in its first lawsuit to protect reproductive rights since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade…. ‘It is impossible to comply with both statutes,’ Winmill wrote. ‘[W]here federal law requires the provision of care and state law criminalizes that very care, it is impossible to comply with both laws. Full stop.'”
Biden Administration
“Biden’s yet to fill the job that may soon matter more than any other” [Politico]. “The fate of President Joe Biden’s agenda could soon rest with the administrator of a tiny office deep within the White House. But first, Biden needs to decide who that administrator will be. After leaving the office without a permanent leader for the first 18 months of Biden’s presidency, the White House is closer to picking someone to run its Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The obscure unit is nonetheless poised to wield outsized influence over the administration’s policy ambitions, especially if Democrats lose control of either congressional chamber this fall. The office serves as a gatekeeper for rulemaking government-wide, coordinating, vetting and approving hundreds of federal regulations each year. It has final say over which agency priorities get fast-tracked and which get put on ice, and it will play a direct role in implementing major elements of Democrats’ just-passed climate, health and tax law. ‘The future of the Biden agenda rests on how efficiently large groups of people can edit Word documents,’ said one administration official. ‘When everyone’s aligned, they can move fast. But sometimes, it’s death by a thousand cuts.'”
2022
* * * “Biden to hold first political rally in run-up to November elections” [Reuters]. “President Joe Biden on Thursday will stage his first political rally in the final stretch to the November midterm congressional elections, looking to give Democrats a boost and prevent Republicans from taking control of Congress. The Democratic National Committee event at Richard Montgomery High School, located in a Maryland suburb of Washington and featuring a host of Maryland political leaders, will begin for Biden what the White House has billed as a coast-to-coast tour to help Democratic candidates…. President Joe Biden on Thursday will stage his first political rally in the final stretch to the November midterm congressional elections, looking to give Democrats a boost and prevent Republicans from taking control of Congress. The Democratic National Committee event at Richard Montgomery High School, located in a Maryland suburb of Washington and featuring a host of Maryland political leaders, will begin for Biden what the White House has billed as a coast-to-coast tour to help Democratic candidates.” •
“Women are registering to vote in Pa. in numbers far exceeding men since the Supreme Court abortion decision” [Philadelphia Inquirer]. “Thousands of women across Pennsylvania and the country have registered to vote since the June 24 Dobbs v. Jackson decision that overturned the federal right to an abortion in the United States. Pennsylvania has had one of the nation’s biggest gender gaps in new registrations, according to Democratic voter data firm Target Smart, which said women have outpaced men by about 12 percentage points in new registrations since June 24. That gap is three times larger than their estimate of a 4-point difference in total registrations. (Gender is an optional field when registering to vote in Pennsylvania, so the state’s voter rolls don’t provide a complete picture of the gender split in registrations.)” • I’m reminded of Tyrion’s speech at the gate of King’s Landing: “Don’t fight for your king [Biden] and don’t fight for his kingdoms [Democrat electeds]! Don’t fight for honour [Biden 2024], don’t fight for glory [“Vote Blue No Matter Who”], don’t fight for riches, because you won’t get any! This is your city Stannis [Trump] means to sack, that’s your gate [uterus] he’s ramming! If he gets in, it’ll be your houses [uterus] he burns, your gold [uterus] he steals, your women he’ll rape [uterus]. Those are brave men [indeed] knocking at our door [uterus]. Let’s go kill them [Republicans]!” • If the Republicans managed to ignite single-issue, culture war voting that works against them, that would be deeply ironic. NOTE I mean no aspersion or irony by the continued use of the word “uterus.” I mean to restructure Tyrion’s argument, which I think is perfectly rational. Kudos to the Supreme Court for clarifying the stakes, and may they suffer greatly for it.
“Swing-State Democrats Not Sold On Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness” [HuffPo]. The headline is a bit deceptive; the reactions are all over the map. This caught my eye: “‘As someone who’s paying off my own family’s student loans, I know the costs of higher education are too high,’ Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) said in a statement Wednesday. ‘And while there’s no doubt that a college education should be about opening opportunities, waiving debt for those already on a trajectory to financial security sends the wrong message.’ Ohio isn’t really a swing state anymore, but major spending by Republicans to boost Ryan’s opponent, J.D. Vance, in November’s U.S. Senate race shows it’s still in play. Ryan has been courting middle-of-the-road voters by running ads on Fox News and, in some instances, distancing himself from Biden.” • A degree is “on a trajectory to financial security”? What’s Ryan smoking? (Meanwhile, illustrating my point that Ryan will be the new Manchin, and heaven knows the old one is about used up.)
OH: “We reject the free speech-trampling rules set by J.D. Vance and Ron DeSantis for covering their rally: Letter from the Editor” [Cleveland Plain-Dealer]. “Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a likely presidential candidate in 2024, scheduled a trip to Ohio Friday to stump for Senate candidate J.D. Vance, and our reporters were not there because of ridiculous restrictions that DeSantis and Vance placed on anyone covering the event. The worst of the rules was one prohibiting reporters from interviewing attendees not first approved by the organizers of the event for DeSantis and Vance. When we cover events, we talk to anyone we wish. It’s America, after all, the land of free speech. At least that’s America as it exists today. Maybe not the America that would exist under DeSantis and Vance. Think about what they were doing here. They were staging an event to rally people to vote for Vance while instituting the kinds of policies you’d see in a fascist regime. A wannabe U.S. Senator, and maybe a wannabe president. Another over-the-top rule was one reserving the right to receive copies of any video shot of the event for promotional use. That’s never okay. News agencies are independent of the political process. We do not provide our work product to anyone for promotional use. To do so would put us in league with people we cover, destroying our credibility.” • And:
2024
“Washington’s Mar-a-Lago Prosecution by Leaks” [The Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal]. “It sure looks like someone is prosecuting the case through the media. The latest example arrived Monday in a dispatch in the New York Times that Justice has recovered “more than 300 documents with classified markings” from Mr. Trump since he left office. Which documents? The report doesn’t say. But, rest assured, they ‘included documents from the C.I.A., the National Security Agency and the F.B.I. spanning a variety of topics of national security interest, a person briefed on the matter said.’ Ah, there’s our old friend, a person briefed on the matter. Nice to hear from you again, whoever you are…. Meanwhile, Mr. Garland’s lawyers are telling federal Judge Bruce Reinhart that the legal affidavit with more details about the search shouldn’t be released to the public. Or that, if the judge releases it, the affidavit should be so heavily redacted as to tell the public and Mr. Trump’s lawyers very little. In other words, ‘a person briefed on the matter’ can leak details about the investigation to the press that the public is supposed to credit as true. But the actual ‘court filings and its work,’ in Mr. Garland’s phrase, must remain secret. And these people wonder why tens of millions of Americans don’t trust the Justice Department and FBI?” • The Democrats have actually managed to make the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page look sane and balanced. Quite an achievement!
“Biden says he had ‘zero’ advance notice of FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate” [USA Today]. • Right [nods vigorously]. The only way this could possibly be true is if Biden told Garland “don’t tell me anything.”
Democrats en Déshabillé
I have moved my standing remarks on the Democrat Party (“the Democrat Party is a rotting corpse that can’t bury itself”) to a separate, back-dated post, to which I will periodically add material, summarizing the addition here in a “live” Water Cooler. (Hopefully, some Bourdieu.) It turns out that defining the Democrat Party is, in fact, a hard problem. I do think the paragraph that follows is on point all the way back to 2016, if not before:
The Democrat Party is the political expression of the class power of PMC, their base (lucidly explained by Thomas Frank in Listen, Liberal!). It follows that the Democrat Party is as “unreformable” as the PMC is unreformable; if the Democrat Party did not exist, the PMC would have to invent it. If the Democrat Party fails to govern, that’s because the PMC lacks the capability to govern. (“PMC” modulo “class expatriates,” of course.) Second, all the working parts of the Party reinforce each other. Leave aside characterizing the relationships between elements of the Party (ka-ching, but not entirely) those elements comprise a network — a Flex Net? An iron octagon? — of funders, vendors, apparatchiks, electeds, NGOs, and miscellaneous mercenaries, with assets in the press and the intelligence community.
Note, of course, that the class power of the PMC both expresses and is limited by other classes; oligarchs and American gentry (see ‘industrial model’ of Ferguson, Jorgensen, and Jie) and the working class spring to mind. Suck up, kick down.
“Post-Roe political regrets sink in” [Politico]. “Even Democrats who were initially skeptical about the political effect of Roe v. Wade’s overturning have by now come around to the idea that it’s significantly altering the midterm election landscape….. A year ago, “when we knew this eventually was going to happen,” grumbled one Democratic strategist who advises major donors, why weren’t Democrats preparing to put abortion-related initiatives on ballots across the country to juice turnout? That’s what Republicans did in 2004, when the cultural flashpoints of the day appeared to favor the GOP more than Democrats. That year, conservatives orchestrated the placement of anti-gay marriage measures on ballots in 11 states to lift turnout. Karl Rove knew what he was doing. The Democrats?”
“Progressives hail Biden for action on student loans” [The Hill]. “‘Today is a day of joy and relief,’ Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted after the announcement.” • Hard to disagree:
This is textbook deradicalization. Organizers demanded to abolish student loan debt and make college education available to everyone. Biden offers you something measly that doesn’t meet the actual demand and black folks jump in to sell you a “victory” and “progress”. https://t.co/GMIzykM3cV
— Breya Johnson (@TheBlackLayers) August 24, 2022
Which doesn’t prevent the pearl-clutching about Biden’s meagre “breathing space” from being even more absurd:
From the archives | But if President Lincoln were to free the slaves—a preposterous idea—how would that be fair to slaves who risked life and limb to escape or who actually bought their emancipation the old-fashioned way: through hard work?
The Editorial Board, 1863
— New York Times Pitchbot (@DougJBalloon) August 24, 2022
And since PitchBot is on fire:
The Ethicist | I overheard our nanny celebrating getting 10K of her student loans forgiven. Is it ok to reduce her salary by 10K?
— New York Times Pitchbot (@DougJBalloon) August 25, 2022
“Joe Biden Outlines New Steps to Ease Economic Burden on Working People” [Joe Biden, Medium]. April 9, 2020: “The concept I’m announcing today will align my student debt relief proposal with my forward-looking college tuition proposal. Under this plan, I propose to forgive all undergraduate tuition-related federal student debt from two- and four-year public colleges and universities for debt-holders earning up to $125,000, with appropriate phase-outs to avoid a cliff. The federal government would pay the monthly payment in lieu of the borrower until the forgivable portion of the loan was paid off.” • Plus, Joe Biden owes me six hundred bucks.
Meanwhile, the Republicans are asking for my vote again:
President Biden’s student loan bailout ignores the true culprit: bloated, self-serving colleges.
I’ll be introducing a bill to hold these colleges accountable for debt, lower tuition, support non-college career paths, and save the taxpayers billions.https://t.co/DEUyhwXmt4
— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) August 24, 2022
Of course, Cotton’s idea of “bloat” might not be mine; he might want to fire professors, not administrators. Nevertheless, at least he’s trying to think about systems, even if his ideas are bad.
Realignment and Legitimacy
“Inside The Right’s Historic Billion-Dollar Dark Money Transfer” [Lever News]. “An elderly, ultra-secretive Chicago businessman has given the largest known donation to a political advocacy group in U.S. history — worth $1.6 billion — and the recipient is one of the prime architects of conservatives’ efforts to reshape the American judicial system, including the Supreme Court. Through a series of opaque transactions over the past two years, Barre Seid, a 90-year-old manufacturing magnate, gave the massive sum to a nonprofit run by Leonard Leo, who co-chairs the conservative legal group the Federalist Society. The donation was first reported by The New York Times on Monday. The Lever and ProPublica confirmed the information from documents received independently by the news organizations. Our reporting sheds additional light on how the two men, one a judicial kingmaker and the other a mysterious but prolific donor to conservative causes, came together to create a political war chest that will likely supercharge efforts to further shift American politics to the right.” And: ‘In practical terms, there are few limitations on how Leo’s new group, the Marble Freedom Trust, can spend the enormous donation. The structure of the donation allowed Seid to avoid as much as $400 million in taxes. Thus, he maximized the amount of money at Leo’s disposal. Now, Leo, 56, is positioned to finance his already sprawling network with one of the largest pools of political capital in American history. Seid has left his legacy to Leo. ‘To my knowledge, it is entirely without precedent for a political operative to be given control of such an astonishing amount of money,’ said Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance lawyer at the nonpartisan watchdog group Documented. ‘Leonard Leo is already incredibly powerful, and now he is going to have over a billion dollars at his disposal to continue upending our country’s institutions.'” • The analogy is not Soros, but Soros giving — well, it’s hard to find an example of a Democrat operative as effective as Leo — say David Axelrod a billion dollars. Of course, Trump proved that money isn’t everything. But. Here is a long thread on the article:
Let me tell you a story about an ultrasecretive donor, a key architect of the Supreme Court's rightward lurch, and a whole lot of money.
$1.6 billion. With a B.
We @propublica & @levernews went deep on it.
Let's talk about how massive this dark-money deal is.
It's 🧵time pic.twitter.com/G7Ix0Ik3jJ
— Andy Kroll (@AndyKroll) August 23, 2022
#COVID19
• This extraordinarily long Twitter thread — we used to have technology for this sort of material, called a “blog” — is well worth a read. #90:
90/ Here is when we think that the ERROR of "5 micron particles fall to the ground in 1-2 m" originated:
Only TB and bioweapons were important, someone at @CDCgov confused the size that goes to alveoli with size that falls to ground
Repeated till 2020https://t.co/hg6q74HEex
— Prof. Jose-Luis Jimenez (@jljcolorado) August 23, 2022
Following the science at the Centers for Disease!
• Jerome Adams asks a good question politely:
I’m not commenting on the personal opinions or experiences of anyone mentioned below- as we all are entitled to them. But to amplify an incredibly important question that Brian brings up- when did it become settled population level science that masking delays speech? https://t.co/NZuZRJYpmL
— Jerome Adams (@JeromeAdamsMD) August 24, 2022
Ghandi and Wen, together at last: It’s like a tag team for sociopaths (although only Wen actually holds the coveted “Sociopath of the Day” title; I will have to turn my attention to Ghandi, who is richly deserving).
• Maskstravaganza:
Why on earth do they keep doing this? I (almost) get their choice not to mask appropriately themselves, but why are inadequate masks being forced on us patients? It feels like being trapped inside a fictitious dystopian narrative, only for real.
— Ailurophile (@bk_ailuros) August 23, 2022
• Mastravaganza:
Med appointment. Asked to remove elastomeric mask. I asked if it was strictly necessary, otherwise no. Was then asked if I had any health condition that made me concerned about COVID: "No, but you asking this question means the risk of me getting infected by you just increased."
— Diego Bassani, PhD (@DGBassani) August 24, 2022
If you missed it, here’s a post on my queasiness with CDC numbers, especially case count, which I (still) consider most important, despite what Walensky’s psychos at CDC who invented “community levels” think. But these are the numbers we have.
Case Count
Case count for the United States:
Inching upward….
Query: Do any readers know of a map that shows when public schools re-open for the Fall 2022 semester in the United States? I can’t find anything current. Thank you!
Cases are undercounted, one source saying by a factor of six, Gottlieb thinking we only pick up one in seven or eight.) Hence, I take the nominal case count and multiply it by six to approximate the real level of cases, and draw the DNC-blue “Biden Line” at that point. The previous count was ~87,700. Today, it’s ~88,400 and 88,400 * 6 = a Biden line at 530,400 per day. (Remember these data points are weekly averages, so daily fluctuations are smoothed out.) The black “Fauci Line” is a counter to triumphalism, since it compares current levels to past crises. If you look at the Fauci line, you will see that despite the bleating and yammering about Covid being “over,” we have only just recently reached the (nominal) case level of November 1, 2021, and we are very far from that of July 1, 2021. And the real level is much worse.
Regional case count for four weeks:
Florida Man still grabbing cases out of the drawer.
The South (minus Texas and Florida):
Tennessee still bouncing around.
Up again…
Wastewater
NOT UPDATED Wastewater data (CDC), August 20:
Not happy with the grey dots in California, or virtually no dots in Texas and Florida. We have no check on case numbers in critical states.
For grins, August 19:
What I’m really worried about is an increase in grey dots (“no recent data”). because that would mean the effort is being shut down or defunded.
Positivity
From the Walgreen’s test positivity tracker, August 25:
-1.2%. (Date is at bottom left, not in header.)
Transmission
NOTE: I shall most certainly not be using the CDC’s new “Community Level” metric. Because CDC has combined a leading indicator (cases) with a lagging one (hospitalization) their new metric is a poor warning sign of a surge, and a poor way to assess personal risk. In addition, Covid is a disease you don’t want to get. Even if you are not hospitalized, you can suffer from Long Covid, vascular issues, and neurological issues. For these reasons, case counts — known to be underestimated, due to home test kits — deserve to stand alone as a number to be tracked, no matter how much the political operatives in CDC leadership would like to obfuscate it. That the “green map” (which Topol calls a “capitulation” and a “deception”) is still up and being taken seriously verges on the criminal. Use the community transmission immediately below.
Here is CDC’s interactive map by county set to community transmission. (This is the map CDC wants only hospitals to look at, not you.)
NOT UPDATED Rapid Riser data, by county (CDC), August 24:
I suppose that if case counts are indeed level, it’s likely there would be few rapid risers.
Previous Rapid Riser data:
NOT UPDATED Hospitalization data, by state (CDC), August 24:
Lots of green, which should make the hospital-centric goons at the Centers for Disease happy.
NOTE: Rapid Riser and Hospitalization data are updated Wednesdays and Fridays.
Variants
Lambert here: It’s beyond frustrating how slow the variant data is. I looked for more charts: California doesn’t to a BA.4/BA.5 breakdown. New York does but it, too, is on a molasses-like two-week cycle. Does nobody in the public health establishment get a promotion for tracking variants? Are there no grants? Is there a single lab that does this work, and everybody gets the results from them? Additional sources from readers welcome [grinds teeth, bangs head on desk].
NOT UPDATED Variant data, national (Walgreens), August 13:
No sign of BA2.75 at Walgreens, despite its success in India and presence in Bay Area wastewater.
NOT UPDATED Variant data, national (CDC), July 30 (Nowcast off):
BA.5/BA.4 moving along nicely.
Deaths
Death rate (Our World in Data):
Total: 1,067,549 – 1,066,416 = 1,133 (1,133 * 365 = 413,545; today’s LivingWith™* number (quite a bit higher than the minimizers would like, thought they can talk themselves into anything. Fluctuates quite a bit, but even the low numbers are bad). I have added an anti-triumphalist black Fauci Line. It’s nice that for deaths I have a simple, daily chart that just keeps chugging along, unlike everything else CDC and the White House are screwing up or letting go dark, good job.
• “How to Compare COVID Deaths for Vaccinated and Unvaccinated People” [Scientific American]. “Taken at face value, these numbers may appear to indicate that vaccination does not make that much of a difference. But this perception is an example of a phenomenon known as the base rate fallacy. One also has to consider the denominator of the fraction—that is, the sizes of the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. With shots widely available to almost all age groups, the majority of the U.S. population has been vaccinated. So even if only a small fraction of vaccinated people who get COVID die from it, the more people who are vaccinated, the more likely they are to make up a portion of the dead.”
Stats Watch
Employment Situation: “United States Initial Jobless Claims” [Trading Economics]. “The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits went down by 2 thousand to 243 thousand in the week ended August 20th from a downwardly revised 245 thousand in the previous period and well below the market estimate of 253 thousand. It was the lowest level for initial claims since the week ended July 23rd.”
Manufacturing: “United States Kansas Fed Manufacturing Index” [Trading Economics]. “The Kansas City Fed’s Manufacturing Production Index fell to -9 in August of 2022 from 7 in the prior month, reaching the lowest level since May of 2022. The slower pace of factory growth was contributed to less activity in wood products, machinery, and computer equipment. Meanwhile, gauges measuring employment, supplier delivery time, raw materials inventories, volume of shipments and volume of new orders backlog of orders also deteriorated. On a positive note, monthly price indexes fell to their lowest in over a year.”
Real Estate: “America’s Office Glut Started Decades Before Pandemic” [Wall Street Journal]. “America’s office glut has been decades in the making, real-estate investors, brokers and analysts say. U.S. developers built too many office towers, lured by federal tax breaks, low interest rates and inflated demand from unprofitable startups. At the same time, landlords largely failed to tear down or convert old, mostly vacant buildings to other uses. As a result, the country has too many offices and too few companies willing to pay for space in them. The rise of remote work during the pandemic aggravated a problem that was already emerging, analysts say. The office surplus is primarily an American issue. About 19% of U.S. office space was vacant in the second quarter, compared with 14% in the Asia-Pacific region and 7% in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, according to brokerage JLL. Analysts expect that share to grow as more leases expire and more companies cut down on their real estate.”
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 48 Neutral (previous close: 46 Neutral) [CNN]. One week ago: 54 (Neutral). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Aug 25 at 1:59 PM EDT.
Zeitgeist Watch
“Silicon Valley should spare us the guff about doing good” [Financial Times]. “If you believe the spin, the reason that Andreessen Horowitz — or a16z — is betting billions of dollars on the chimerical, crypto-powered idea of ‘Web3’ is because the current version of the internet, ‘Web2’, gives too much money and power to Big Tech, and not enough to users. You might wonder whether one of Silicon Valley’s biggest venture capital funds might themselves be trying to grab as much money and power as they can but no, really, it’s you they care about. ‘My hope is through Web3, we can return to . . . a much more decentralised distribution of power and control,’ Chris Dixon, head of the firm’s $7.6bn crypto fund, told the FT’s Tech Tonic podcast. ‘Facebook, Instagram . . . They figured out a way to have other people create their content and take basically all of the money,’ he said. This is bemusing. Isn’t a16z at the very heart of Big Tech, having massively profited from Web2? Is co-founder Marc Andreessen not still on the board of Meta — the company that owns both Facebook and Instagram — and doesn’t he still own millions of dollars’ worth of shares in it? And anyway, isn’t the whole point of venture capital to generate returns? Why does this company — and the tech sector more broadly — feel the need to insist that their raison d’être is saving the world, when in reality they are simply out to make as much money as they can? Shouldn’t it be OK to say that? Dixon in fact went still further. Web3, he said, wouldn’t just follow the old Google mantra of ‘Don’t be evil’ — which was quietly abandoned a few years ago — because this relies on fallible human beings sticking to it. Making the internet run on blockchains instead, and introducing new financial incentives in the form of crypto tokens, would actually somehow mean this idea was built into the system: ‘That’s a very, very important concept in Web3: ‘can’t be evil’ instead of ‘don’t be evil’.’ Now this, of course, is a farcical idea, as a quick glance at some of the projects that a16z’s crypto fund has invested in can demonstrate.” • Ouch. Why not roll everything back to Web1?
Class Warfare
This is very pure (and I mean that in a good way):
My coworkers and I spent months forming a union. Ownership closed without ever even finding out what we wanted.
I want my job back. I want to keep making pizza. I miss my work friends. I miss my regulars. I hate this.https://t.co/8sRYJQmykn
— rejected cornflake (@jmaypierce) August 24, 2022
News of the Wired
“Developers help older Macs do something Apple won’t allow” [Digital Trends]. “They said your Mac was too old for the latest and greatest Mac OS upgrade. They told you to buy a new Mac instead. Apple can be a harsh companion. But I’m here to tell you there is another way, the way of MacOS Ventura on older Macs…. Apple said macOS Ventura will not run on iMacs from before 2017, MacBooks from before 2018, and Mac Minis made before 2018. But the OCLP developers said “Hogwash! We shall bring Stage Manager to the masses who insist on still using ancient computers!” And this they have done. You can download OpenCore Legacy Patcher from GitHub here.”
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81 comments
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US and Chinese construction industries, same shit different wrapping?
Slight advantage to US, maybe, kinda but…wait, US infrastructure..like the SF Bay Bridge used Chinese steel…that failed stress tests…so…
Yeah, different color, same flavor.
But I’m sure there are still craftsmen in both countries who hate what the industries have become.
I’ve always wondered who the Monopoly guy with the top hat and monocle was!
Barre Seid.
#TYVM
> Was then asked if I had any health condition that made me concerned about COVID:
I wonder whether “being alive” or “not yet being debilitated by Long COVID” would quality as “health condition”s.
Every hospital visit to cardiologist/dermatologist I’m asked after the symptom question “have you taken a COVID-19 test in last 14 days”. A sane person would assume the correct answer is “yes”. We do not live in sane times here in UK NHS. If you’ve tested you must be suspect so the correct answer is “no”.
You kinda understand their logic when you’ve worked in the hospital….. And *allegedly* a senior clinician returned to work whilst still positive and caused the most recent massive omicron outbreak (IN ONCOLOGY where there are no immunocompromised patients of course) – that got me. Then they fired me when I got positive result. Oh our glorious NHS. BTW – they promptly replaced me with son of my boss. Easily verified.
Public knowledge – CEO pushed out when she got long COVID given her statements. The hospital Trust is officially (using government criteria) failing. NUH. Not an innuendo or insider knowledge. There in cold hard statistics.
I hope you’re okay on both COVID and income accounts! What a horrible story,
Thanks. Health definitely not good….. Thankfully I have family etc to fall back on re income.
What makes me angry is that I’m one of the NC commentariat who knew the health risks from day 1 and was so careful….. Yet fate wasn’t kind.
Ohhh, fuckkkk that.
I’d be tempted to go full Hulk on that…SMASH.
Get well and then get revenge.
The only way to answer that question is to say, “I test myself every week. Don’t you? You’re in the health business.”
Terry of 2015 would do exactly that. Terry of today is worn down unfortunately – I have a certain “stock” of bolshiness left that I’ve used judiciously (like the private sector 2nd opinion) but no more. Thanks anyway.
I hate to break it to you, but women are more pro-life than men:
https://www.vox.com/2019/5/20/18629644/abortion-gender-gap-public-opinion
https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/395816-dem-pollster-women-are-less-likely-to-be-pro-choice/
https://www.christianheadlines.com/contributors/michael-foust/despite-popular-belief-women-are-more-pro-life-than-men-gallup-poll-says.html
Maybe women are registering in PA, and maybe they are fuming over Dobbs, or maybe the Amish are plotting a take-over of state government in light of the recent Supreme Court decisions. Just because you have more women than men registering, it doesn’t necessarily mean much with respect to support for abortion. [My limited understanding is that the single issue abortion females are clustered in blue enclaves in blue cities and not likely to tip elections whereas your prolifers are more rural so if anything, Dobbs will turn out more Yawl-Qaeda types itching for theocracy in rural swing districts.]
Whichever party these nouvelles join, no doubt they both agree Fetterman needs to lose.
Vox link: 2019 post cites a 2015 poll.
Hill: 2018 post says:
.
It cites a 2018 Gallup poll that asks if abortion should be completely illegal vs completely illegal.
It also cites a 2016 poll of of people who “described themselves as practicing a religion…The poll also found that 30 percent of religiously observant respondents who called themselves “pro-choice” said they would sometimes think of themselves as “pro-life.”
Here’s a link to Gallup polling trend lines. In the trend line (1975-2022) that polls legal, legal under certain circumstance, illegal the 2022 numbers for legal + legal under certain circumstances are women 86% men 83%. In the trend line (1995-2022) that polls pro-choice/pro-life the 2022 numbers are Women 61-33 Men 48-47.
(emphasis added above)
To a survey designer none of this is surprising. You can’t just bandy about those terms and qualifications. My (lapsed) RC mother hates David Steele (former MP who singlehandedly caused Labour in 1979 to lose the confidence vote and brought us Thatcher – Spitting Image NEVER forgave him) but because he “allowed abortions to be performed too late”.
If you’re gonna discuss abortion then these nuances MATTER. I’m not saying this as some guy who wants to restrict it – the opposite! But I recognise that many women have nuanced views when we get to the “point of viability” which had been pushed earlier due to science. Listen to them and I’ll bet you get a vaguely sensible law.
No surprise, brainwashing works!! It’d be easy to use high culture philosophical terms like Nietzsche’s “slave morality” to discuss the majority of ‘Muricans, but overall it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. I’d bet to most Americans the question is “How can we shore up the Master’s jails with the master’s tools, so we’re safer as inmates?” Look at how totally unchallenged the billion$ our Ruling Class is sending to fight to the last Ukranian while Americans lose housing, health care, infrastructure & education, etc. Until Bush 2 both parties openly pandered exclusively to suburban whites, like “soccer moms”– & there’s a reason for that. Now the Trumpist party worries less about suburbs and more about the “working class” (less educated), but wolves have pretty good instincts as to how to treat sheep, whichever side of the power Duopoly they label themselves as.
Re Cleveland Plain Dealer–one can agree that “news” organizations should be allowed to do their job while at the same time believing that accusations of fascism do not exactly signal that ” News agencies are independent of the political process.” In 2022 does anybody other than the newspapers themselves really believe that? The truth is that news organizations have been shaping our elections for decades and one can scoff at Trump’s claims of 2020 fraud while still suggesting that the blackout on Hunter and his connections to “the Big Guy” might very well have tipped the election for Biden.
All campaigns try to shape their own coverage and the Plain Dealer doth protest too much with its reckless “fascism” blast and boast of an objectivity halo.
Living in the city where the sad, little Plain Dealer still does business, I know its limited value these days. But Desantis is merely perpetuating Reagan’s Propertarian assertion that whoever pays for the mike sets the rules. These Randians deny any sort of public space where the Bill of Rights holds sway. Everything is a mall where the mall cop can taze you if you try to conduct a protest.
Both sides go to great lengths to prevent not just the press but any citizen from speaking out at a political rally or even asking uncomfortable but valid questions. The Dems will claim you’re engaging in disinformation and are a borderline terrorist. The Reps will treat you like you’ve crashed a party at the plantation. Different rationales. Different attitudes. Same goal.
THIS.
Thanks, HMP.
Seconded.
Heartedly.
Summed it right up. They don’t want to hear about it, but someday they will be forced to, and it won’t be pretty for any of us.
Precisely. Well put. Relatedly, I think it was Matt Taibbi who observed that the proliferation of news sources and opinion online revealed what mainstream media always were (but not so obviously), mouthpieces for the Democratic Party. I agree, in the main.
Well those Sunday “news” programs for home-bound seniors in the 90s & thru Bush 2 used to skew 3 or 4 guest R’s to every crazy “liberal” milquetoast Dem . . . I will agree that since the advent of the vulgar Orange Man they switched parties to the “good cop”, but both parties’ Representatives have the same funders and owners, so not that it makes much difference anyhow.
The MSM were mouthpieces for the Clintonites and the DLC/Hamilton Project type Democrats. I remember before Clinton got elected, and got NAFTA/WTO/MFN for China signed; that the MSM were all mocking Perot and “old fashioned New Deal Loser-type” legacy Democrats and opponents of Free Trade Agreements, said agreements which the MSM all supported.
It was only after the DemParty became New Democrats ( DLC-Clintonite-Hamilton Project) that the MSM became the Democrats’s moutpieces.
I’ll observe that the paper is complaining about the candidates determining the propaganda content rather than the paper’s “significant others” making that decision. Of more interest to the paper is the candidate’s claim to own all content generated by the campaign. In this instance, the control of money and power are in play.
This is a significant event in that it is a skirmish in the ongoing three way war between capital, labour, and management. (I split up capital and management because this event is an acknowledgment of the fact that while capital has the ultimate control over resources, management, in effect the PMC as separate from Capital with a capital “C,” claims the right to direct the utilization of said resources.)
Poor PMCs, they don’t realize that, to Capital, they are but a slightly more sophisticated form of labour.
Just ask the two thousand middle managers just laid off by Ford Motors.
Damn, I understand more about the actual use of Capitalism/Marxism theories of control of the economy from comments here than I’ve ever learned anywhere else.
Well played, ambrit. And thanks.
Thanks and do note the other, much better read commenters here who actually deal with the phenomena of Capital and Labour. The older I get, the more I understand how much I do not understand. I need to learn a lot myself. Indeed, I view the Commenteriat here as a ‘Brains Trust’ for the disaffected.
Stay safe!
This could be pretty big:
…The Wall Street Journal reported [Thursday] that security regulators in Beijing are nearing a deal to provide access to financial audit records for U.S.-listed Chinese companies.
The report, citing sources it didn’t identify, said that arrangements are being made for accounting firms and the companies to transfer audit working papers and other data from mainland China to Hong Kong. Regulators from the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board would then travel to the city to inspect the records.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/china-stocks-delisting-audit-pcaob-51661445550
Maybe we should send the Pelosi’s more often? Paul’s gonna need more walking $, because next time’s gonna be tougher to get out of (and Nancy’ll need her ice cream, just to cope).
“Biden says he had ‘zero’ advance notice of FBI search”
Alzheimer’s confers some legal advantage here. Cabal doesn’t recall either but has understood this since Ronnie and the Contras.
It’s possible Biden himself has some level of plausible deniability, but according to this, the White House staff was definitely involved – https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/all-things-trump/biden-white-house-facilitated-dojs-criminal-probe-against-trump
Hard to believe CoronaJoe didn’t have at least an inkling.
Quote below from your link. So Joe had to know, since he would have had to waive Trumps waiver? Which seems a very odd thing to do or even be able to do. Also isn’t this (if true) making something retroactively illegal?
It does indeed smack of an “ex post facto” prosecution.
This precedent, if it is one, opens the floodgates to endless waves of ‘weaponized’ Presidential Decrees. It’s almost like a Bill of Attainder.
I was going to comment about the above that “that way madness lies.” Then I realized that we are now surrounded by madness.
As Lambert is known to say; “The stupidity, it burns.” Alas, I smell much smoke and just a whiff of roasting “long pig.” Wait? Are those my feet on fire? Who made these decisions anyway?
When I was in MA instead of voting for Pressley I wrote in Bernie Sanders, as she ran unopposed I believe. I won’t be around to vote against Warren, sadly.
When I was in MA, I found it impossible to find my polling place and figured they did that on purpose to keep people like me from voting.
“The only way this could possibly be true is if Biden told Garland “don’t tell me anything.””
Isn’t this the way he handled Hunter’s affairs and business dealings? I thought there were other examples as well.
This seems like marketing to those sorts of people attracted to “exclusive” resorts.
One minor stick in my craw: Using “wild type” as a breezy, sciencey sounding shorthand or has someone identified the non-laboratory source of covid furin1 clade whilst I was busy surfing and/or gardening?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/25/sports/tennis/novak-djokovic-us-open-coronavirus.html
Now how stupid is that? Apparently the virus only spreads from unvaccinated foreigners. We ought to quarantine everyone!
Dumb policy. The US is not a functional state.
Nope, we’re not.
He should just fly to Laredo and stroll across the border.
Seems to be working for others.
Lambert threw this down in Links today:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-32412-y
imo, it is worth the effort
Thanks for fixing the COVID images, Lambert!
When I made a first pass, they were teeny tiny!
:)
#DevelopersHelpOlderMacs
And wow! Thanks so much for this. I have an older iMac which has had a GPU replacement but is all good otherwise. I will definitely go through the docs and see if I can get it up to snuff!
Meanwhile … at the #WhiteHouseTwitterAccount …
Thread going off on GOP pols who got PPP loans forgiven … (via #Twitter)
Well, well … someone picked the Dems cajones up off the floor, eh?
I know … buried elsewhere under the edifice, one wonders about Dems who benefitted from same. Nevertheless, good to see #TeamBlue going a little feral.
#Observation
Comments low today … ???
Did you all run off to Cuba for the nasal vaccine without me??!!!
😂
The White House embrace of the “Dark Brandon” marketing scheme is pathetic and childish.
I don’t want a meme for my President, I want someone who makes American lives (ALL of them) better.
The PPP loans were intended, and only forgiven, if they were used to save jobs/ pay for employee wages/salaries (meaning 75%-80% of total loans had to go to employee pay).
PPP was a give away to businesses to cover EMPLOYEE costs. Employees benefitted from not being laid off, business benefitted from the government paying their labor costs.
Student loan forgiveness was a direct giveaway to people who had already agreed to re-pay their loans.
Apples to Oranges as per usual in politicial messaging.
And I benefitted from neither.
Nor did most Americans.
Why can’t we compare fruit?
> Student loan forgiveness was a direct giveaway to people who had already agreed to re-pay their loans.
Tertiary education should be free – just as primary and secondary are (in many other countries of the so called developed and developing world). Choosing to insult people under the yolk of student debt for getting a measley freakin’ $10K forgiven because “they agreed to pay” (euphemism IMO for “others agreed to pay and dutifully did so before”) – is as ridiculous as suggesting that we shouldn’t cure a disease in the present, in deference to those who couldn’t benefit from a cure in the past. Did you not get or agree-with the anger and sarcasm of the Johnson & PitchBot tweets?! Greed is the disease, and debt is a festering sore symptom everywhere rabid capitalists have usurped the public good in pursuit of profit. Education is a public good.
> The PPP loans were intended, and only forgiven, if they were used to save jobs/ pay for employee wages/salaries (meaning 75%-80% of total loans had to go to employee pay).
A wonderful thought, of course … but far from the murky reality of our kleptocrat duopoly.
There have been several articles posted here and elsewhere that show just how much politicians’ businesses benefitted from PPP. Perhaps you think that public servants should be able to earn a six figure salary from the government, while being fully vested in their lucrative side hustles. To use a quote from this article (via fortune.com):
When you pair the assessment above with the fact that like everything else that benefits the public, PPP was vastly underfunded – see Congress and Corporations Join Forces To Crush American Small Business (via NC) – you get the following (excerpt):
In other words, politicians who are wealthy getting in line ahead of small business owners who are not …
I’m no fan of the White House, or the Dark Brandon crap … I’m trying to point out a shift in behavior from the same team that embraced the vapid “when they go low …” trope.
Here in Oz the benefactors of PPP type funds were the big mover and shakers in the economy to prop up their share price and not suffer any indignities of loss. In many cases it was never used to retain or support employees.
On the other hand heaps of middling and small business hired of heaps of young/old apprentices which is a another government subsidized program offsetting employment number wang and then still engage in blatant wage/benefit theft.
Why is it so hard to make this ***Market Thingy*** work as proselytized like forever and at such a high pitch …
Missing the plantidote!
Pizza is an honourary plant.
When you think about all of the ingredients that go into a pizza, it really should be an honourary garden!
Sadly most people don’t know what pizza really is after Domino’s and its ilk … all wrong thingy …
The flour, its starter, its need to rest over night, the slow reduced sauce, what and how much stuff to put on it and where so it all blends, and most of all how its cooked.
On the Domino’s thingy its funny that a past GF in L.A. Brentwood family had friends over one night and the buzz was this one guy got a huge promotion because he was the guy that [like Musk] drove the project [others did the work] that cut coroners on the pizza box so it would not shift around and muck up the pizza during delivery. A boon to humanity I say and hay here is the keys to the executive level apartments and lounge – !!!!!! – mistress not included.
Too true. At one point, when we had to raise some ‘extra’ money to pay off the medicos for the birth of our last child, I took a second job working in a Mom and Pop pizza joint. They were old school. Everything made daily at the place. No trucked in cardboard roundels.
I learned a lot there. One thing being, to avoid the electronic poker machines. I saw so much money lost in those machines, it was almost satanic in it’s effects. Indeed, one of our ‘regular’ poker machine players turned out to have been embezzling money from the concern he was a middle manager at to fuel his ‘habit.’
This place had one of those conveyor belt styled gas ovens to cook the items. You had different places along the length of the machine to place various sized pizzas on the conveyor. And the ingredients! One Friday night bunch of regulars would bring their own mushrooms. Hilarity resulted quite often on Friday night.
After the older kids learned what “real” pizzas tasted like, (we’d get to bake one each at the end of shift to take home,) there was no more mass produced pizza seen in our house. Later, the middle girl started making her own pizzas from scratch. Early influences make a difference in the development of skills.
Stay safe!
Same here as my first job was working for a pizza place run by a old school Italian family, watching his wife make hand made ravioli from scratch, moved on by my Italian GF in Redondo Bch, and those epic family feasts, 3 days to make a proper pizza and all the rest.
Don’t know what to say about all the gold adorned on the baby’s thingy … widow black or other fun facts.
You know the old saying about medicos. The more medicos you have on a case, the lower the chances of a successful outcome.
This being Italian culture day, it would be more of a Tarantella. “When in danger, or in doubt. Run in circles, scream and shout.”
Where did our youth go?
“This being Italian culture day, it would be more of a Tarantella. “When in danger, or in doubt. Run in circles, scream and shout.””
Yeah but in the mists their is a comic that lays it all to waste, same with it the other mob noted above, don’t know why irony is lost on empires favorite. Even the OZ Jewry cackle at my L.A. Yiddish expletives.
New Order – World (The Price of Love) (Official Music Video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXzs47qy2Pk&list=RDGMEMQ1dJ7wXfLlqCjwV0xfSNbA&index=22
I had to leave work early and go stare at a shrub,
I’m recovering now!
Pollinator census? If so, how did yours go?
We’ve got 5 different kinds of bees here that we see regularly along with dragon flies, a verity of moths and butterflies and hummingbirds, no hummingbirds today.
Tom Cotton “trying to think about systems”– what a great laugh that phrase gave me!! I flashed back to his opinion piece in the Old Gray Lady calling on law enforcement to just mow down Black Lives Matters “rioters” with protective fire . . . his last name certainly raises questions, I would bet his family made quite a good little fortune in the commodity and owning “workers” in the past.
Allow me to note, tongue-in-cheek, that one can be a “Farmer Cotton” without being a cotton farmer.
It is IMO a shame, though, that his surname isn’t that other farmer’s name from The Fellowship of the Ring, Maggot. That would make for some theater.
An old English family name, related to “cottage”. Nothing to do with the plant apparently:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_(surname)
How about just don’t do it. Instead compare all cause mortality* for the two groups which can tell us if the “cost” of getting vaccinated outweighs the “benefit”
*Ideally adjusted by age/demographic factors if possible
Yes, that is what I would like to see. It is funny that we are not being shown that figure. It seems that it would be easy to come up with.
I was sad that no-one commented on the Nature article on micro clots that was put in the regular links today, since I would have liked to to have heard the opinion of someone more knowledgeable than me. The authors of the article actually “go there” – they consider that it is possible that the vaccines are also causing such microclots. Of course they can’t tell yet. The micro clots sound very, very nasty.
“Med appointment. Asked to remove elastomeric mask. I asked if it was strictly necessary, otherwise no. Was then asked if I had any health condition that made me concerned about COVID: “No, but you asking this question means the risk of me getting infected by you just increased.”
The “educated” class. All of this talk about going to college and not a damn thing worth knowing is being taught.
Overpriced non-sense. They can’t even teach bother to learn basic health precautions. Some of these idiots probably think it’s debatable whether or not they should wash their hands often.
What kind of bird is doing the singing in today’s birdsong sample?
( Never mind, I see it now. Normally the name occurs just under the click-to-play bar. This time the name appeared below the “Sponsored Content —Make Volatility Work For Your Advantage” ad)
More evidence that Paxlovid sucks:
Study finds Pfizer’s antiviral has little or even zero benefit for younger adults
Data from the 109,000-patient study may renew questions about the U.S. government’s use of Paxlovid, which has become the go-to treatment for COVID-19 due to its at-home convenience, as the Associated Press reported.
but
The study has limitations due to its design, which compiled data from a large Israeli health system rather than enrolling patients in a randomized study with a control group — the gold standard for medical research.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/study-finds-pfizers-antiviral-has-little-or-zero-benefit-for-younger-adults-and-who-says-ba-5-omicron-subvariant-accounted-for-74-of-cases-in-latest-week-11661438030
Here’s the study:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2204919?query=featured_home
Meanwhile, nitric oxide nasal spray seems to be an effective anti-viral:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lansea/article/PIIS2772-3682(22)00046-4/fulltext
I always lack the experience to evaluate studies. It’s kind of a shame in America you really need to be able to; I thought that’s why we had experts or whatever.
And an expensive one! I see it for 85$/25ml on Ebay. I’ll have to stick with my home brew of saline solution/povidone 20/1 nose spray and the Scope Crest mouthwash with cetylpirinidium for 30 seconds. Thank the info though.
From the Tweet:
I can’t swallow large pills (or BS from liberal Democrats), so it seems like if I need this stuff I’m screwed anyway. Or maybe if that day comes, I’ll find a way to make it work. Mostly I just hope as I get older I don’t have un-swallowable drugs I need to live.
Teamsters @Teamsters
HISTORIC WIN!
🧵1/5: Unified workers at a Chipotle Mexican Grill in Michigan voted overwhelmingly today to form a union with the International Brotherhood of #Teamsters, making it the 1st of the restaurant chain’s 3,000 locations to organize
https://twitter.com/Teamsters/status/1562942312346697728
https://teamster.org/2022/08/chipotle-workers-in-michigan-vote-to-join-teamsters/
“…You might wonder whether one of Silicon Valley’s biggest venture capital funds might themselves be trying to grab as much money and power as they can but no, really, it’s you they care about. ‘My hope is through Web3, we can return to . . . a much more decentralised distribution of power and control,’ Chris Dixon, head of the firm’s $7.6bn crypto fund, told the FT’s Tech Tonic podcast>>”
No, I don’t wonder. It’s more scam from scammers.
Still luring suckers using the words “decentralized” and “crypto” in the same breath.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02286-7
Imagine if we did these kind of population level screens to assess the health of the population, at least with regards to COVID. (Not that the US is a serious country, even with the ‘adults’ in charge again.)
We also know that someone infected with COVID might have barely detectible lung issues as well.
This should all happen as a matter of course, random population sampling. But we can’t even get current virus RNA sequencing or waste water data… and for the latter you literally just need sensors!
“From the archives | But if President Lincoln were to free the slaves—a preposterous idea—how would that be fair to slaves who risked life and limb to escape or who actually bought their emancipation the old-fashioned way: through hard work?”
Perfect analogy now that student loans are nevermore post-emancipation proclamation.
That’s part of the deal, right?
“Inside The Right’s Historic Billion-Dollar Dark Money Transfer”
“…Through a series of opaque transactions over the past two years, Barre Seid, a 90-year-old manufacturing magnate, gave the massive sum to a nonprofit run by Leonard Leo, who co-chairs the conservative legal group the Federalist Society….”
I hope some scammers just run off with his money. It would be the most fitting end for him. Karma.
Probably not the first instance, not likely the last in line for either the left or the right or whatever else might come forth in future politics. Just for starters, Peter Thiel (of Paypal fame, Palantir) has much more than $1.5 or 2 billions to burn and he is already making fairly quiet moves in national politics. The gift of Citizens United continues to be an unsurprising net boon, just not for many of the proles necessarily.
The lawyer above, Mr. Leo, well the guy is a piece of work even by DC standards. A creature made to flourish in this environment, his background reads like a silent horse whisperer.
“How to Compare COVID Deaths for Vaccinated and Unvaccinated People”
The linked article in Scientific American has it’s arithmetic wrong !
It states that
from 38 Mio unvaccinated people 383 died per week
from 67.5 Mio vacced people 143 died
from 59.5 Mio boostered peope 118 died.
And they say that means a death rate per 100 thousand of
1.71 unvacced
0.21 vacced
0.10 boostered
which is wrong !
The correct numbers (simple division of the raw numbers above suffices) are
1.01 unvacced
0.20 vacced (at least that one is right)
0.19 boostered
Scientific American takes the numbers from a CDC report without any comment about its wrongness. If one cannot rely on the very reputable Scientific American, all hope is lost, at least in my opinion.
PS: a ratio of 5:1 for deaths would in my book be a good reason to vaccinate, so why the CDC grossly inflates and distorts the numbers is beyond me. And why Scientific American is silent to this ….
Here is a little item from the coolguides subreddit called ” How To Enhance Your Google Searches”. It offers 8 particular things to type and/or ways to type them which are supposed to make searching go better.
Maybe people who are experienced at search engine searching can look at them and see if they have any use or value.
https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/wxoq10/how_to_enhance_your_google_searches/
Here is an interesting multi-screen instagram simple-explainer explaining why the Amazon plan to buy Roomba ( the robot vacuum cleaner company) is so dangerous to us all. The explainer explains why. In briefest, aside from the further monopoly power Amazon buys itself, it also buys a new in-home surveillance tool. It turns out those Roomba machines make simple maps of the inside of the houses they live in so that they “know” where to “go” and vacuum. Amazon wants to add all that Roomba mapping information to all the other spydata it already gathers from all its other spytools inside peoples’ houses.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/wxjzyr/found_this_on_instagram_thought_you_would_like_to/
Think Zillow would pay for those lay outs?