Odds and Ends — 9 May 2024
Cryptocurrency, Investing, Money, Economy, Business, and Debt:
I saw my first Cybertruck yesterday, driving in Minnetonka. Even uglier than it appears in photos.
Binance Pledged to Thwart Suspicious Trading—Until It Involved a Lamborghini-Loving High Roller
Grayscale withdraws its Ethereum futures ETF application
Coronavirus News, Analysis, and Opinion:
Japan saw over 16,000 deaths from COVID-19 in May-Nov. 2023
Politics:
America is being led astray by a small handful of folks who are drunk-driving on originalism—and not in a funny Marx Brothers, spin-around-in-circles-and-all-fall-down sort of way. No, it’s in a children-murdered-in-their-classrooms, women-hemorrhaging-in-parking-lots, environmental-and-health-regulations-destroyed kind of way. And that’s because the whole nation is currently lashed to a small, stupid, perpetually changing theory of legal interpretation variously known as “originalism,” or “textualism,” or “original public meaning,” or “history and tradition.” A theory that is—unless you were born in the 1990s—younger than you are.
U.S. Won’t Supply Weapons to Attack Rafah
Does anyone think the Israeli’s don’t already have a large supply of stockpiled weapons, more than enough to turn Rafah into a pile of rubble?
Trump Asks Oil Executives for $1 Billion
As Donald Trump sat with some of the country’s top oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago Club last month, one executive complained about how they continued to face burdensome environmental regulations despite spending $400 million to lobby the Biden administration in the last year.
Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted.
Giving $1 billion would be a ‘deal,’ Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him.
Trump’s remarkably blunt and transactional pitch reveals how the former president is targeting the oil industry to finance his reelection bid.
https://twitter.com/middleageriot/status/1788250006975099217
FreedomWorks, the once-swaggering conservative organization that helped turn tea party protesters into a national political force, is shutting down, according to its president, a casualty of the ideological split in a Republican Party dominated by former President Donald Trump.
https://twitter.com/lesleyabravanel/status/1787994506572251469
Lithuania’s Foreign Minister:
https://twitter.com/GLandsbergis/status/1788231646866473024
Projection exemplified: Republican Congressman says KKK is “the military wing of the Democratic party”
https://twitter.com/DarrigoMelanie/status/1787882490373312713
Extending Trump Tax Cuts Would Cost $4.6 Trillion
The cuts expire next year. I have a hard time believing they’d be extended in a second Biden term.
https://twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/1788010467778294085
The Happiness Gap Between Left and Right Isn’t Closing
Why is it that a substantial body of social science research finds that conservatives are happier than liberals?
https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/1788018755739570297
https://twitter.com/TheRickWilson/status/1788181380863561822
Trump Tries to Expedite Appeal of Gag Order
Lawyers for Donald Trump asked a New York appeals court to rule on their challenge to the gag order limiting what the former president can say about witnesses in the criminal hush money trial.
I’m guessing that this will backfire, with an expedited ruling against Trump.
https://twitter.com/ryanjreilly/status/1788210203990646961
Serendipity:
Identity Theft Is a “Kafkaesque” Nightmare. AI Makes It Way Worse.
From hyperrealistic deepfakes to voice cloning, fraudsters are upping the threat level, potentially heralding, as one expert warns, the era of “identity hijacking.”
Want a free Hive account? Join Hive using my referral link.