Sunday, November 13, 2022

A Very Good Day and Turmoil on Twitter

Yesterday was a good day.  The Democrats kept the Senate.  Here is a thread that I have cut and pasted on why it is so critical that Senator Warnock win the run-off.  The words are from Dante Atkins, who can be found here.

A 51st Dem means no power-sharing in the organizing resolution. Dems have a majority on committees. no more deadlocks, no more discharge petitions for floor votes. That massively accelerates both the legislative process and the confirmation process.  The individual power of the two chaos muppets (Manchin and Sinema) is drastically reduced. both of them will now need to be opposed to whatever Dems are trying to do in order to block progress. The Senate is a gerontocracy. These guys are not healthy a lot of the time, or not present a lot of the time. We could have a death in a state with a Republican governor. A lot of things could happen. 51-49 versus 50-50 means you can have up to 2 absences/noes. A 51-49 majority means that VP Harris won't be required to be in DC to babysit the Senate all of the time, and can actually be a much a more effective VP who can be deployed for both policy and campaigning. So the upshot is, work for Warnock just as hard as you could if you thought that Schumer's gavel depended on it. Because as far as you know, at some point in the next two years, it very well could.

Kherson has been liberated from the Russians.  Apparently Ukraine will keep fighting all winter.  General Milley had voiced an idiotic thought that Ukraine would take the winter off, and so now would be a good time for Ukraine to negotiate with Russia.  Feh.

If you're not on Twitter, you haven't seen the latest Musk induced disaster.  It used to be that notable people got a blue check next to their names.  It indicated that they were who they said they were.  Musk decided to monetize the alleged cache' of the check.  For $8 a month, everybody could have a blue check with no identity verification.  It didn't go well, and was cancelled after two days.






The most consequential unverified account was one that pretended to be Eli Lily.  They put up a tweet that from now on insulin would be free.  Eli Lily lost something like $8B of market value based on that tweet.  Many people changed their display names to Elon Musk (the top name, above the @name), which made him very angry, so he banned changing that name, which made Christmas sad.

Anyway, Senator Markey (D- Massachusetts) got into it with Elon and they had this terse exchange.



Twitter is sort of a mess at the moment.   It's been pointed out that a tremendous amount of history has been documented on Twitter over the years, and that it will be bad for the people who write books if all of the archives are lost when Twitter folds.

Here is a picture of some of our wild life.


That's it, I have nothing else on offer.

11 comments:

  1. your wild life looks just like ours, without the snow in their hoofs. Hilarious twits- Musk will nor escape this one I reckon. "history lost"? because of a sosh ap? It deserves to be lost then, Very funny, this life in the interwebs.

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    1. Political uprisings, demonstrations in Iran, the Ukrainian war, much of the orange man-baby's first run for the presidency, police shootings of POC, police brutality during the BLM demonstrations, and etc., all documented via twitter. It really would be a loss.

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  2. I had heard that Lockheed Martin also lost share value as well as Eli Lily. Because ET went whole hog with his blue check for $8 and failed to require all Twitter users to agree to new terms of service, it is quite likely he will face significant lawsuits from these companies. I saw a meme of Kanye West, saying something like 10 easy lessons to ruin your reputation, ET beside him says hold my beer. It truly is a sh#t show. I'll probably stick around until Twitter implodes, but like you I agree there is a lot of information that will likely be lost as a result of his actions.

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  3. I never took up with twitter.. Didn't understand it.

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  4. We have all heard about Twittrs problems, but what about the other elephant in the room?? Mr Z's company has laid off 11,000 due to loss of advertising revenue...

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  5. That's very satisfying to read that so many people have been messing with Elon, or Ellon as my husband calls him.

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  6. I limit my twitter feed to 'latest tweets' so I miss a lot of this but I also don't get overwhelmed by all the MAGAt's constant and ridiculous lies and accusations about democrats. Though it might be entertaining to switch over right now for a day or two.

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  7. I'll take the wildlife in your yard over the wildlife on Twitter any day!

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  8. I can't stand him! I look at Twitter sometimes but don't participate. Happy about the good showing for the Dems!!

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  9. Oh, those tweets are hilarious! I am rarely on Twitter, though I did hear about some of the craziness. It is even better than I thought. I need to go back in a time machine and pop some popcorn!

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