Friday Night Links

• "Rolling up your sleeves and actually shipping something is much, much more valuable. If you take no other advice from me ever, ship something." [patio10]
• If anyone in the Trump administration is listening, there is exactly one useful thing you can do now. The President has exactly one unilateral power which is dangerous to the regime: the power to declassify. This power can be trivially slowed to zero by the bureaucratic process, which is what happened when he tried to use it normally. Instead, the President can order the US Marshals to seize and publish the documents. Which documents? All the documents—not just those about his specific beefs (though certainly those as well). [Gray Mirror]
• From 2010 through 2016, the New York Times ran an average of a couple of articles per week complaining about the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision freeing up campaign spending. But then in 2017, it dawned on the Times that Hillary had spent twice as much as Trump, so now unchecked campaign spending was a good thing. [Sailer]
• And speaking of the rule of law, is there much of it left in America anymore? Antifa and BLM rioted for months with impunity. Public figures (including the woman who may soon be President of the United States) raised money to bail criminals out of jail, law enforcement was told to stand down, the media lied, and the madness just kept rolling. Now, here we are a few days after the election, and the public shrugs (at best) at the idea of election fraud. At locations where votes were, and are, being counted, and in defiance of the law, corrupt Democrats have refused Republicans access. It’s been heartbreaking to see small bands of patriots having so little power, even with legal documents in hand, as they confronted corrupt Democrats who’ve denied them access. Where were the federal Marshalls and where was AG Barr? [American Thinker]
• "Nate insisting that the polls akshually got it right and he personally nailed the election is a good reminder that success mostly comes down to ego and a willingness to blindly push through any negativity and shower yourself in glory no matter what. Very Trump-like." [@L0m3z]
• You hop on your Kangaroo and lead a radical labour strike in Sydney demanding free Victoria Bitter for miners in West Australia. A handsome man in a Lenin cap approaches you with love in his eyes. But he is only 5'10". Wat do? LOL! I’m sure I'd make polite conversation, but I'm totally allergic to leftist men and short guys, so it wouldn't be likely to go anywhere too exciting! [niccolo]
• We have also seen a stabilization in the financial condition of many airlines. Buoyed by government support, significant funding in the capital markets, and the ability to reduce costs, airlines have significantly extended their cash runway. Since the coronavirus outbreak, we have seen an extraordinary response from governments around the world to support their airlines. This includes almost $200 billion of direct assistance in the form of loans, payroll support and other initiatives, as well as billions more of indirect support provided by many countries. Governments around the world recognize that airlines are a critical part of the global infrastructure and country-specific economies. Airlines have also raised a record amount of funding from banks and the capital markets. The U.S. airlines alone have successfully raised over $40 billion since March. These factors, combined with the rise in passenger traffic and the reduction of their expenses, will enable the vast majority of the world's airlines to navigate through this crisis. We at AerCap have experienced the improved conditions as well in the form of a significant increase in our cash collections and a marked slowdown in rent deferral requests. [AER]
• I’m speaking, of course, of the world that Richard Stallman predicted in 1997. The one Cory Doctorow also warned us about. On modern versions of macOS, you simply can’t power on your computer, launch a text editor or eBook reader, and write or read, without a log of your activity being transmitted and stored. It turns out that in the current version of the macOS, the OS sends to Apple a hash (unique identifier) of each and every program you run, when you run it. Lots of people didn’t realize this, because it’s silent and invisible and it fails instantly and gracefully when you’re offline, but today the server got really slow and it didn’t hit the fail-fast code path, and everyone’s apps failed to open if they were connected to the internet. [Jeffrey Paul]
• Consider as a thought experiment a state law requiring that all votes be counted in secret by an unelected board named by the party in power.  Could it survive a constitutional challenge? [American Thinker]