Monday, June 22, 2020

June 22nd Links

  • The deeper hit to America is: how many asylum seekers will it take to destroy American morale? What number leave and break American spirits? Is it a small number like 50,000? Right now, a little over 3,000 renounce their citizenship each year, which is tiny, but remember that there's no foreign welcome mat geared towards the purpose. England might be a harbinger of things to come, as the UK loses over 100,000 native Britons each year and has so for a decade. Great Britain is circling the drain. Is it a mass exodus of 10 million? Think of the rush of talking to someone without the fear of the PC police. Magnify that by a town, a city, a state. How fast does the wave turn into a tsunami? The cry of the elderly to grandchildren would become: "Go East, young man." What does America say, if in the first year of the Russian Amerikanskiy Zone program 100,000 Americans leave the shores to escape the USG yoke, followed by 250,000 the next year and maybe 500,000 the third year? This would be in contrast to USG immigration policy focused on semi-literate Third Worlders and diseased gays. There would be silence. There would be no way to frame it positively. [links]
  • You joke (I think), but how aware are people that we narrowly skirted a third world-style coup here in the US just two weeks ago? You may recall that in the first week of June, the Antifa-Soros Media Industrial Complex was calling for a million "protesters" (aka rioters) to converge on Washington DC where the President was bunkered at the White House. In the run up to that June 6th weekend, the (Dem) DC mayor stood down law enforcement and National Guard, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff(!) started issuing strange public memoranda implying that they were on the side of rioters rather than the President (no reference to chain of command, "cannot abide divisiveness and hate", etc.) This is the classic Deep State color revolution checkmate: the imported mob storms the presidential palace while converged insiders preemptively scupper any official reaction. Whether the President flees or is sacked, he is discredited, and a new figure takes the helm "because of the unprecedented conditions of these turbulent times". AG Barr, head of the Depatment of Justice and one of the smarter and more perceptive guys in the White House, was sufficiently alarmed by the situation that he replaced the Federal troops around the White House (loyal to the JCS) with Department of Justice troops whose loyalty he could be more assured of. You know that moment in foreign wire service dispatches or Tom Clancy novels where different military cadres loyal to different government factions maneuver around the Capital to determine who will be in power next week? That happened here two weeks ago and almost no one noticed. That it didn't work this time (too few Antifa) doesn't mean the strategy is off the table. Notably, the deficiency on June 6th wasn't too few converged insiders (DC is awash with them, Barr notwithstanding) but too few outside mobbers. They'll be sure to rectify that next time. Just have to whip up a little more public frenzy and fund Antifa cells a little more... [Sailer]
  • We made the ferry to Seattle. The next morning, a hotel valet freed the muddy BMW from its hold. I found the footwells packed with detritus so specific to Northwest road trips: a crumpled coastal map, paper cups stained with double espresso, floor mats caked in Douglas fir needles. The car idled, defiant, next to a spotless Rolls Royce. I thought back to Cape Flattery's trailhead, when I wedged the BMW between lifted Toyota Tacomas. This is a deeply aspirational but supremely versatile vehicle, as all 3-Series have been. [Road and Track]
  • I really didn't want to post this. I love the Model Y, it's a great car and I really love Tesla. However... Caveat Emptor: My Model Y is leaking water through the headliner. Bring a bottle of water to delivery and test the seals on the roof of your model Y (around the edges of the glass roof). Shared this video (see attached GIF) with Tesla >48 hours ago and am shocked they haven't jumped all over this...crickets so far. Thinking I will want to return the vehicle. This is an incredible miss by the delivery team. I have to imagine the glass roof has to be removed, seals replaced and that the headliner and some electronics will have to be replaced, too...but again, no response from Tesla yet. Help me out here, Tesla, this thing cost me >$65k and can't be driven in the rain??? Stay tuned to see if Tesla does the right thing. Interested to hear what you all would do if your Model Y wasn't remotely waterproof... [TMC]
  • Here, the three highest ranked known references are owned by Google, Stanford, or have Lawrence E. Page listed as an inventor. It makes sense that these would be the most similar. The specifications are likely nearly verbatim or cover the same system. The highest ranked third-party patent is Patent No. 5,848,407, Ishakawa et al., assigned to Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. A heat map (a red color scheme is used here to signify the heat map is for a reference that pre-dates the claims) and claim chart can be automatically generated to help analyze the strength of the patent relative to this art reference. [JDBIP]
  • Folks in Diesel land will toss around the phrase "bulletproof" alot because the engine can loaf at 1200rpms on its way to 500,000 miles on the original pistons/rings/head gasket/whatever. Ok, fair, enough. But if you scrutinize most owners experiences they'll routinely drop $2k/year or more on mechanical repairs in addition to maintenance activities. I've known a few high-miler diesel ford owners who ran ~$4k a year in ownership expenses for repairs and maintenance for several years in a row. 3 years/50-60k miles and they've got $12k of receipts on their "bulletproof" vehicle. [Jalopnik]
  • The picture of King Charles II. was often set up in houses, without the least molestation, whereas a while ago, it was almost a hanging matter so to do; but now the Rump Parliament was so hated and jeered at, that the butchers' boys would say, 'Will you buy any Parliament rumps and kidneys?' And it was a very ordinary thing to see little children make a fire in the streets, and burn rumps. [Pepys]
  • Today's well-intentioned activists have become the useful idiots of big business. With their adoption of "open borders" advocacy—and a fierce moral absolutism that regards any limit to migration as an unspeakable evil—any criticism of the exploitative system of mass migration is effectively dismissed as blasphemy. Even solidly leftist politicians, like Bernie Sanders in the United States and Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom, are accused of "nativism" by critics if they recognize the legitimacy of borders or migration restriction at any point. This open borders radicalism ultimately benefits the elites within the most powerful countries in the world, further disempowers organized labor, robs the developing world of desperately needed professionals, and turns workers against workers. But the Left need not take my word for it. Just ask Karl Marx, whose position on immigration would get him banished from the modern Left. Although migration at today's speed and scale would have been unthinkable in Marx's time, he expressed a highly critical view of the effects of the migration that occurred in the nineteenth century. In a letter to two of his American fellow-travelers, Marx argued that the importation of low-paid Irish immigrants to England forced them into hostile competition with English workers. He saw it as part of a system of exploitation, which divided the working class and which represented an extension of the colonial system. [American Affairs]
  • McCrum is a great reporter, but even if you didn't know that, when a company is going around accusing reporters of conspiring with short sellers to bring it down, that is an almost infallible sign that it is going down. (Well, Tesla keeps going up.) Companies that are not doing fraud, when reporters ask if they have faked their revenue, respond by explaining where their revenue comes from. Companies that are doing fraud, when reporters ask if they have faked their revenue, call the police to try to get reporters arrested. The weird thing is that it worked so well for Wirecard for so long. The German financial regulator, BaFin, did file a criminal complaint against FT journalists and short sellers; it also banned short selling of Wirecard stock for two months, "to protect the company from speculators." The news about Wirecard, now, is sort of trivial; anyone who read McCrum's reporting and knew the almost-infallible rules of short-selling conspiracy theories already knew that Wirecard was faking its revenue. [Matt Levine]

2 comments:

whydibuy said...

I'm not sure how a coup could hold since the vast majority of the state's are conservative and armed. The saddest part is that police are always stooges of those in power. They will do the bidding of those who employ them. So in effect, police are mercenaries at best offering their services to the high bidder.

Anonymous said...

In my view, for SSC to be permanently deleted would be an intellectual loss on the scale of, let’s say, John Stuart Mill or Mark Twain burning their collected works. That might sound like hyperbole, but not (I don’t think) to the tens of thousands who read Scott’s essays and fiction, particularly during their 2013-2016 heyday, and who went from casual enjoyment to growing admiration to the gradual recognition that they were experiencing, “live,” the works that future generations of teachers will assign their students when they cover the early twenty-first century. The one thing that mitigates this tragedy is the hope that it will yet be reversed (and, of course, the fact that backups still exist in the bowels of the Internet).

When I discovered Scott Alexander in early 2015, the one issue that gave me pause was his strange insistence on maintaining pseudonymity, even as he was already then becoming more and more of a public figure. In effect, Scott was trying to erect a firewall between his Internet persona and his personal and professional identities, and was relying on the entire world’s goodwill not to breach that firewall. I thought to myself, “this can’t possibly last! Scott simply writes too well to evade mainstream notice forever—and once he’s on the world’s radar, he’ll need to make a choice, about who he is and whether he’s ready to own his gifts to posterity under his real name.”
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4870