Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Fuck if i know. i just get yelled at when i try it.

Historically it is a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

We survived Breitbartpocalypse!

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Women: they get shit done

Peak wingnut was a lie.

How has Obama failed you today?

Reality always wins in the end.

No one could have predicted…

I personally stopped the public option…

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot.

Where tasty lettuce and good mustard aren’t elitist.

We can agree to disagree, but i’m right.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

‘Forty-two’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

Wetsuit optional.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

The house always wins.

The willow is too close to the house.

The revolution will be supervised.

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Free Markets Solve Everything

I Only Play for Money, Honey

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Hey, if you’re a Republican PAC and you sent money to one of the traitors who voted not to certify the election, the list of companies that won’t give you a fucking dime is getting longer every minute.  Different companies are taking different approaches — some are just suspending all donations for a while, while others are targeting PACs that gave to traitors.  MasterCard, which isn’t on the list in the piece linked here, won’t be giving any money to those PACs either (Jud Leglum has an internal memo to that effect.)

To be clear, both American Express and MasterCard have stopped giving money, but they’re still processing payments.  It would be very damn interesting if they stopped processing transactions for WinRed, the Republican equivalent of ActBlue, until WinRed said they wouldn’t support these traitors.  I’m gonna guess that’s not coming, but who knows?

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Short (Ha!) Parler Explainer

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Last night Amazon announced that they would stop hosting Parler tonight.  This comes on the heels of Apple banning Parler from the App Store, and Google banning them from the Google Play Store.

The short answer of what this means for Parler is that they’ll probably be down for a few days until they find a new host, and there will never be a Parler app on a mobile device.   In other words, their status on the Internet — meaning how they will be treated by other tech companies and potential investors — has been demoted from something like Twitter or Facebook to a porn site.  I don’t mean that as a joke, and if you want to understand why, read on.

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Every City Has One

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I’m sure Adam will have a much more complete post about the Nashville bombing as soon as facts are more clear.  In the meantime, I just want to note that the bomber sure picked an effective target.  His apparent intentional and careful targeting of what the Post is calling the AT&T “transmission building” led to a regional telecommunications blackout of pretty impressive proportions.  911, cell and Internet service were affected.  The Nashville airport closed for around four hours.

A few years ago I toured a similar facility in Rochester, and it’s an impressive building.  It is overbuilt — something like 4 stories tall, but built so heavily that it could have been ~15 (my memory isn’t 100% on that) — lots of brick and concrete.  It has redundant generators, steel roll down window shields in the lobby, and 24/7 security.  It has to be impressive, because, like the Nashville building, most of the Internet and telephone traffic for the region passed through it (at least at the time I toured it).

I’m not revealing any secrets when I say that every city has a similar building, they’re a pretty important failure point, and they’re generally downtown, facing busy city streets.  They probably should be better protected, but I guess we needed to spend our post-9/11 money on turning cops into stormtroopers and giving them armored vehicles instead of hardening these buildings.  Another factor must be the almost complete lack of regulation of telecoms once they branched out from land lines into cellular and Internet.

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Billionaires, Republicans, and the Assault on Society

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While we’re waiting for…oh, I dunno, something or other, an article I chanced upon today about wine and income inequality triggered a thought about what we are really up against in the ongoing fight for our country.

Eric Asimov, the New York Times wine critic, published this about a week ago:

Among the many ways the rich are different from you and me: Only they can afford grand cru Burgundy.

That wasn’t always the case. In the 1990s, middle-class wine lovers could still afford to experience that rite of passage — drinking a truly great wine, not simply to enjoy it, but to understand what qualities made it exceptional in the eyes of history.

It might have been a splurge, perhaps requiring a few sacrifices. But it was feasible, just as it was possible to buy first-growth Bordeaux, or the top wines of Barolo, Brunello di Montalcino or Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon, to name a few other standard-bearers.

Billionaires, Republicans, and the Assault on Society

Not any more. The TL:DR is that prices for top wines–not just Burgandies, but all the iconic names/regions–have diverged from most other bottles:

In 1980, the price of a first-growth Bordeaux was roughly four times the price of a fifth-growth Bordeaux, he said in a phone interview, referring to an 1855 classification that ranked top Médoc producers in five tiers, or growths. Nowadays, he said, as prices have risen for all these top wines, the ratio between first- and fifth-growth price is more like 10 to 1.

The driver: demand from the top 1 percent, or one tenth of 1 percent:

In another example from Bordeaux, Professor Ashenfelter, along with two researchers from the University of Bordeaux, presented a paper in 2018 showing that as income inequality has increased since 1980, the price of first-growth Bordeaux has paralleled the rise in top incomes.

Asimov, no raving radical he, is nonetheless perfectly able to connect the dots:

Though the problem matters to wine lovers, the rising inaccessibility of fancy wines is just a microscopic example of how income inequality and the concentration of wealth in fewer hands have affected daily life.

The macroscopic story, as I see it, is the rich-to-ultrarich war on the idea  and the real life of society. They lead lives that are carefully demarcated in both experiences and physical spaces that are theirs, and very much not ours. They drink stuff we don’t–can’t, anymore, even as special treats, because they’ve bought it all. When they fall ill, they enjoy boutique health care, and have thus less and less stake (they think) in public health. And so on.

That’s what income inequality does, what it’s supposed to do: bifurcate the world into two, one that a small group enjoys in seemingly secure isolation, and the one everyone else lives in. Worse, the ethos evoked to defend such wealth and such distinctions is an atomized one, of meritocratic, individual success. That’s not a social vision; it denies the value of collective action; it is bloody lonely.

And, of course, it drives our politics. All the signalling–the bigotry, the divide-and-conquer hate, the religious dog whistling and so on–may in fact matter to some in the Republican political class, but the driver is making sure nothing impedes the progress of generational fortunes.

This is all obvious to most here, I think–but it reminds me that progressive income taxes and confiscatory inheritance duties are existential–not just for them, but for the survival of American democracy, and maybe America itself.

Probably won’t do much to bring down the price of Petrus (lots of Chinese and Russian and whoever gazillionaires to suck up the available supply, even if we got a handle on our gilded class). But that’s what it will take, I think, to get a sustainable politics back, and (when the virus looses its hold) the kind of social and cultural world we might like to inhabit.

Enough such windy stuff.

As I said to Mr. Gorbachev: Open Up This Thread!

(ETA to add the link to the Asimov article.)

Image: Willem Kalf, Wineglass and a Bowl of Fruit, 1663

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Kodak Non-Moment

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On July 28, to much fanfare, the Development Finance Corporation (DFC), a government entity formed from USAID in 2018, announced a commitment to loan $765 million to Kodak to have them start manufacturing base chemicals used for pharmaceuticals.  Gross incompetent Peter Navarro was deeply involved, blathering some nonsense that I won’t bother to repeat.

Today’s Kodak is just a shell of the former company.  It employs a mere 1,300 people (when it had up to 100K employees years ago).  Over the years as their film business burned out, they sold off every profitable division, leaving one large, old industrial complex in the center of Rochester, Kodak Park.  Imagine everything that the word “park” conjures up, and invert it — Kodak Park is dirty, old and polluted.  The story around Rochester is that when it rained near Kodak Park, the raindrops would burn the paint off of parked cars.

Still, Kodak owns a plant that can manufacture chemicals.  So, I guess it is a candidate to make pharma chemicals, and perhaps some startup costs and time could be saved by using their existing infrastructure.

But, there’s more than just a chemical cloud over Kodak Park and this deal.  In June, while negotiations were happening, Kodak’s grossly overcompensated CEO, Jim Continenza, bought 46,737 shared of stock as part of his compensation plan.  So, when the stock went from ~$2 to $30 on the day of the announcement, one might wonder if someone grabbed the invisible hand and forced it to shove $1.3 million into Continenza’s pockets.

Shockingly, even the Trump Administration’s SEC is investigating, and now the whole deal is up in the air.  I’ll wager it will never happen, because the “deal” signed on July 28 was a couple vague paragraphs that aren’t even a letter of intent.

This is of a piece with getting GM to manufacture ventilators.  It’s as if someone who had been in a coma since the 70’s suddenly awoke and was asked to name two big US companies:  “GM and Kodak.  Now get me a Tab and a Hostess Fruit Pie – it’s almost time for Bonanza!”

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So About That Third Party Spoilers Thing… The Libertarian Presidential Candidate And A Possibly Rabid Bat Edition

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What effect might his have on Ms. Jorgenson’s views on the US healthcare system? Well let’s just say kvetching was involved!

There is, as of 11:10 PM EDT, no word on the condition of the bat and whether it has contracted anything serious or life threatening from coming into contact with Ms. Jorgenson.

Open thread!

Obligatory:

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Work At Home Only Works When You Pay People A Decent Wage

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Today I called the company that dumps chemicals on my lawn to get more chemicals dumped on my lawn. (I know, I’m a bad human.) It was a low quality experience. I was on hold for a loooong time listening to their pre-recorded excuse making and entreaties to log on to their website or use their app to change my plan. No, and fuck no, were my thoughts on those requests — I knew that signing up for the website or, Yahweh forbid, the app, would require me to jump through a dozen hoops that would probably include my account number or some other piece of info that I don’t have. I wanted to talk to a human to hear my alternatives for getting cancer from the chemicals leached through my front lawn, pick an alternative, and not think about it again for a few years.

When I finally talked to the harried customer service representative, she just didn’t do a very good job, probably because she was out of context. My guess is that she normally drives to some call center, sits in a tiny cube in front of her company-issued computer, talking on a company-issued phone, where she deals with idiots like me who call to talk about their lawns once every 5 years (which might severely underestimate how long it’s been since I interacted with this company other than to write them a check.) Doing that from home clearly didn’t allow her to put her best foot forward.

I think I know why: Most of the companies with whom I do business have an online site that I use to do so, but there are a few times when I want to get on the phone and deal with a human. Generally, that person is low paid, and one of the main requirements for their job is that they park their ass in a chair in some God forsaken business park for 8+ hours per day. In our gleaming new post-COVID future, the theory of the case is that these people will embrace working from home due to the convenience and savings of not having a commute.

Perhaps, but just as it is a burden to expect an employee to transport themselves to a call center, it is a much greater burden to expect them to have a reliable Internet connection, a quiet and secluded place to work, and the minimal technical wherewithal to fix minor issues with their company computer, if the company deigns to provide them one. The ability to work from home requires that the employee has a home from which they can work efficiently. And this is often not the case for employees paid $12.50 per hour, or whatever the lawn service is paying.

In other words, if you want people to work from home, you can’t pay them shit wages. You need to pay them enough so that they can maintain some kind of home office. And the fuck-the-poor salaries and benefits that these miserly enterprises dole out just aren’t enough to support a home office. So I predict as soon as this crisis has passed, these companies will pack the cubicles in their office parks, because we all know that the invisible hand just doesn’t allow a living wage.

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