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bolverk

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by bolverk

  1. 23 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

    Naturally. But hopefully with some more specifics as to what the move from the eastern district to main DOJ means. Why is that significant? 

    My best IANAL guess is that it means they're pulling him from the field and putting him on a short leash.

  2. 7 minutes ago, Player said:

    IIRC - it's Randall's. 

    That's what I always assumed with them being such a shitty store based in Houston and him being such a shitty person living in Houston.

    • Like 9
  3. What's the world going to look like on the other end of this tunnel? While there's a thread in DT for business closures, this thread should be more than simply that. Let's talk big picture stuff, which inevitably will include politics, and put it all in one place. To get the discussion started, here's a good piece in today's NYTimes that maybe we can start from.

    It’s 2022. What Does Life Look Like?

    The pandemic could shape the world, much as World War II and the Great Depression did.

    David Leonhardt
    By David Leonhardt
    Mr. Leonhardt writes The Morning newsletter.

    It’s 2022, and the coronavirus has at long last been defeated. After a miserable year-and-a-half, alternating between lockdowns and new outbreaks, life can finally begin returning to normal.

    But it will not be the old normal. It will be a new world, with a reshaped economy, much as war and depression reordered life for previous generations.

    Thousands of stores and companies that were vulnerable before the virus arrived have disappeared. Dozens of colleges are shutting down, in the first wave of closures in the history of American higher education. People have also changed long-held patterns of behavior: Outdoor socializing is in, business trips are out.

    And American politics — while still divided in many of the same ways it was before the virus — has entered a new era.

    All of this, obviously, is conjecture. The future is unknowable. But the pandemic increasingly looks like one of the defining events of our time. The best-case scenarios are now out of reach, and the United States is suffering through a new virus surge that’s worse than in any other country.

    With help from economists, politicians and business executives, I have tried to imagine what a post-Covid economy may look like. One message I heard is that the course of the virus itself will play the biggest role in the medium term. If scientific breakthroughs come quickly and the virus is largely defeated this year, there may not be many permanent changes to everyday life.

    On the other hand, if a vaccine remains out of reach for years, the long-term changes could be truly profound. Any industry that depends on close human contact would be at risk.

    Large swaths of the cruise-ship and theme-park industries might go away. So could many movie theaters and minor-league baseball teams. The long-predicted demise of the traditional department store would finally come to pass. Thousands of restaurants would be wiped out (even if they would eventually be replaced by different restaurants).

    The changes that I’m imagining in this article are based on neither an unexpectedly fast or slow resolution, but instead on what many scientists consider the baseline. In this scenario, a vaccine will arrive sometime in 2021. Until then, the world will endure waves of sickness, death and uncertainty.

    Before we get into the details, there is one more caveat worth mentioning: Many things will not change. That’s one of history’s lessons.

    The financial crisis of 2007-9 didn’t cause Americans to sour on stocks, and it didn’t lead to an overhaul of Wall Street. The election of the first Black president didn’t usher in an era of racial conciliation. The 9/11 attacks didn’t make Americans unwilling to fly. The Vietnam War didn’t bring an end to extended foreign wars without a clear mission.

    Yet if the pandemic really does shape life for the next year, it will probably be remembered as a more significant historical event than those precedents. It could easily be the most important global experience since World War II and the Great Depression. Events that hold the world’s attention for long stretches — and that alter the rhythms of everyday life — do tend to leave a legacy.

    Spoiler

     

    Weak companies will die
    “It’s only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett likes to say, “that you learn who’s been swimming naked.”

    His point is that companies with flawed business models can look healthy in good times. Out of habit, many customers continue to buy from them. But when the economy weakens, people have to make decisions about where to pull back. They often start with products and services that they find the least valuable or that they can replace with a cheaper alternative.

    A downturn, says Emily Oster, a Brown University economist, “is an opportunity to revisit inefficiencies.” And the coronavirus is likely to cause a larger version of this phenomenon than a typical recession.

    Local newspapers will be one casualty. They were already struggling, because Google, Facebook and Craigslist had taken away their main source of revenue: print advertising. Between 2008 and 2019, American newspapers eliminated about half of all newsroom jobs.

    The virus has led to further declines in advertising and more job cuts — and could end up forcing dozens more papers to fold or become tiny shells of their old selves. If that happens, their cities will be left without perhaps the only major source of information about local politics, business, education and the like.

    Traditional department stores are another example. In recent years, they have lost significant business to online retailers and quietly lost even more to big-box stores. Many Americans have decided they prefer either specialty stores (like Home Depot) or discount stores (like Costco) over the one-stop-shopping experience that Sears, Macy’s and J.C. Penney have long offered.

    Now the virus has interrupted in-person shopping and caused many consumers to shift even more business online, to Amazon, Target and Walmart. “The retailers doing fair to poorly are absolutely not coming out of this,” said Mark Cohen, a former executive at Sears and Federated Department Stores who teaches at Columbia Business School. “Many, many of them are going to fail, have already failed or will fail when they reopen.”

    If they do, they will create spillover victims — the hundreds of malls that rely on department stores for rent and foot traffic. The roughly 250 fancier malls around the country, like The Westchester in suburban New York and The Galleria in Houston, are likely to survive, Mr. Cohen predicted. Some will convert old stores into spaces for experiences, like dining, bowling, medical care or a golf driving range.

    But many of the country’s remaining 1,100 or so traditional malls are at risk of failing. Even before the virus, Amazon turned two former malls near Cleveland into warehouses, a physical manifestation of changing shopping habits.

    A third at-risk industry — higher education — is a bit different from the others, because it’s so heavily subsidized by the government. Yet dozens of colleges, both private and public, are facing real trouble.

    College enrollment in the United States has been growing almost continually since the Civil War. It kept growing even after the baby boomers finished college, because a rising percentage of young people were enrolling. But the 150-plus-year boom appears to have ended about a decade ago. Undergraduate enrollment fell 8 percent between 2010 and 2018.

    Why? Birthrates have fallen, and the percentage of young people going to college isn’t rising significantly anymore. The population trends are especially stark in the Northeast and Midwest, where many colleges are. Late last year, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a bracing report called, “The Looming Enrollment Crisis.”

    The virus is exacerbating almost every problem that colleges faced. They have already lost revenue from summer school, food service, parking fees and more. Perhaps most significant, the recession is hammering state budgets, which will probably lead to future cuts in college funding.

    The immediate question is whether colleges will be able to bring back students this fall, as administrators are desperately hoping. If they can’t, enrollment and tuition revenue are likely to drop sharply, creating existential crises for many less selective private colleges and smaller public universities.

    Yuval Levin, a conservative policy expert and the founding editor of National Affairs, put it this way: “The top 20 schools are probably not going to change. But what is actually higher education — more than 4,000 universities — I think will change a lot.”

    Of course, business failures can be healthy. They are part of the “creative destruction” that the economist Joseph Schumpeter famously described, allowing more efficient and innovative rivals to rise. The disappearance of many old department stores won’t be a tragedy if they are replaced by stores people prefer.

    But some of the virus-related destruction will have damaging side effects. When local newspapers close, corruption and political polarization tend to rise, while voter turnout tends to fall, academic research has found. Cuts to higher-education budgets could make it even harder for poor and middle-class students to graduate.

    “The biggest danger that we face as a sector,” Ted Mitchell, a former college president who now runs the American Council on Education, an industry group, told me, “is a loss of the gains we’ve made over the past 20 years in the access for first-generation and minority students.”

    Habits will change
    If you talk to students, parents and teachers about remote learning during the pandemic — from preschool through college — they’re likely to tell you that it’s been disappointing. It went “very, very badly” last spring, Mr. Levin says, and many parents assume it will not be much better this fall.

    But if you talk to white-collar workers about their experiences with videoconferencing, you will hear a different story: It doesn’t replace the richness of in-person conversations, but many meetings work perfectly well over Zoom, FaceTime or Google Meet.

    Millions of workers are returning to the office or will be soon. Many have no choice, including teachers, janitors and retail workers. But for many white-collar workers, the remote-work experiment shows no sign of ending — a trend that could depress the commercial real-estate market and business travel long after a vaccine is available.

    Twitter has told many employees that they can plan to work from home forever. In New York, several major companies, including Barclays, JP Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, have said they don’t expect to use as much Manhattan office space as they did before the pandemic.

    As Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, said this spring, “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.” Working from home creates its own efficiencies — less time spent on traffic-clogged roads, more flexibility for parents and people caring for elderly relatives.

    Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, has 200 economists around the world who report to him, and he has noticed that they are more efficient than before the pandemic struck. In the past, he would often get on a plane for a short meeting with a few economists. The virus has caused them to move these meetings online, where they share screens with one another and work on databases at the same time.

    “We’ve gotten used to it very quickly and like it,” Mr. Zandi said. “I just don’t see us going back.” Because other businesses are having the same experience, he predicted, “Business travel is going to fundamentally change.”

    In-person meetings and conferences will continue to happen. But the threshold for what requires travel, and the time, cost and fatigue it brings, will rise. “Maybe we’ve discovered that we don’t need to travel as much as we did before,” said Cecilia Rouse, the dean of Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. American Airlines and Delta Air Lines recently offered buyouts to employees, and Airbus cut thousands of jobs, signs that the companies expect airline travel to be depressed for years.

    The larger theme is that crises can force or accelerate behavior changes. Some of the old behavior will revert when the pandemic ends. But not all of it will. In some cases, people will realize that they were sticking to old habits out of inertia and prefer their new habits.

    Politics will shape the economy
    The biggest source of uncertainty about the post-virus American economy is political. Past crises have transformed the economy, but almost always because of government policy.

    The Civil War allowed Abraham Lincoln and his allies to create a transcontinental railroad and a national network of public universities. The Great Depression led to a raft of federal laws that reduced inequality. The housing crisis that began in 2007 helped elect a Democratic president and Congress that extended health insurance to millions of people.

    If President Trump wins re-election this year, it may not lead to any major new economic legislation, partly because he has not proposed any. But Mr. Trump would continue to have vast regulatory authority, and he is likely to continue giving businesses more flexibility to behave as they want.

    One of the key post-virus implications could be further consolidation in many industries, with big companies becoming even bigger. Early signs indicate they are surviving the lockdown better than smaller rivals, in part because they have more cash on hand, better access to loans and an easier time switching to online sales.

    Consolidation, in turn, tends to increase income and wealth inequality, in part because the largest companies are run by highly paid executives, typically based in major metro areas, and the companies’ stock is disproportionately owned by the affluent.

    “My basic fear,” Heather Boushey, a leading progressive economist, said, “is that it leads to a rule by the oligarchs.”

    At this point, however, Mr. Trump is the underdog; he trails Joe Biden in both national and swing-state polls. Democrats also have a realistic chance to retake control of the Senate. (They would need to win five of the 11 races that appear competitive.) If Democrats control both the White House and Congress, they will be poised to embark on a sweeping economic agenda.

    Some analysts believe that they may even see some support from across the aisle. A big Trump loss, amid a pandemic and recession, could jolt the Republican Party into being more open to government action. “The debate for Republicans to be having in the 21st century is not big or small government — it’s what do we need from our government,” Mr. Levin said.

    Jake Sullivan, a top Biden adviser, said: “Even Republicans — younger Republicans — have recognized that the center of gravity is shifting on the relationship between the state and the market.” The virus, he added, “will only accelerate that.”

    True, predictions of forthcoming Republican moderation haven’t fared well in recent years. Yet even if they again prove wrong, Democrats may pursue an ambitious agenda by abandoning the Senate filibuster, as many progressives favor, and passing legislation on a majority basis.

    That agenda is shaping up to have two defining features. The first is reducing inequality — through higher taxes on the rich, greater scrutiny of big companies, new efforts to reduce racial injustice and more investments and programs for the middle class and poor, including health care, education and paid leave. The second is acting on climate change, which could cause even more global misery than the coronavirus. “Climate change cannot be solved by the private sector,” Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democrats’ minority leader, told me. “People under 45 realize it.”

    Mr. Biden may not seem like a history-altering figure, certainly like less of one than Barack Obama did. But he could wind up presiding over a larger scale of political change than Mr. Obama did, for reasons largely independent of the two men themselves.

    Ms. Boushey, who runs the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, argues that progressives are better positioned to pass sweeping change in 2021 than they were in 2009, after the financial crisis. Then, the only major policy area in which Democrats had a comprehensive, politically viable plan was health care — and, not coincidentally, it became Obama’s biggest policy success.

    “Although you had this crisis, you didn’t have the ideas that were ready to go,” Ms. Boushey said. Today, by contrast, progressives have spent years working through the details of plans on climate change, high-end tax increases, antitrust policy and more. And while Obama’s team had only a couple of months to plan for taking office amid a national crisis, Mr. Biden’s team would have almost a year. “There is a whole vision that I think is ready,” Ms. Boushey added. “And there is a lot more runway.”

    Mr. Biden and congressional Democrats would need to avoid getting bogged down in intramural squabbles between the center and the left. But the potential exists for the farthest-reaching period of legislative change since Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

    In less than 15 years, the United States has suffered the biggest two economic crises since the Great Depression, the worst pandemic in more than a century and the election of two presidents unlike any before them — and diametrically unlike each other. If there is a single lesson of the current era of American politics, it’s that change can happen more quickly than we imagined.

     

    (I've got a busy day ahead and likely won't participate much until tonight.)

    • Like 1
  4. 28 minutes ago, Born to Run said:

    That sucks man. It's crazy my small town dwelling brother who struggles to work from home because of internet speed, is also against any federal funding to get decent internet to the sticks. And he bitches about his taxes when small towns take the most and need the most. Those kids are being left behind, can't even internet their way out, and are left being indoctrinated as trumpers bitching about jerbs..

    They should all go hang out in the smoke pit and hope to become musicians

    The crazy thing is that at every step of the way, they're shooting themselves in their own feet and don't realize that's what keeps them from moving forward. These are self-inflicted wounds leading to a debilitating condition of paranoia, dependence, and assigning blame.

    The Internet *speed* there isn't really a problem though with the town being on the Interstate with decent fiber. The Internet *access* to dumbshittery and fuckheaded ideas that reinforce the worst impulses of small town thinking, however, is a huge part of it.

    Edit: I'm increasingly in the camp that believes some sort of Internet bullshit detector class that stresses critical thinking should be incorporated into the core curriculum as a prerequisite for high school graduation.

    • Like 2
  5. 10 minutes ago, MidTexHorn said:

    Sorry to hear that. Hope he handles it well. Midland is a cluster fuck of conservative bullshittery. Nobody wears masks unless forced to and the mayor is trying to work himself into a Fox News gig by throwing fits about mask orders and preaching about how much he trusts the locals to “do the responsible thing” when they’ve been completely irresponsible all along. 

    I grew up in Big Spring and monitor a FB page for local political issues, and the new mayor there models the worst type of blowhard Trumpian behavior. A week or so ago, he was behaving like such a jackass that half of the City Council walked out of the meeting leaving them without a quorum.

    Part of the problem, though, is that his best buddy is the owner?/moderator for this group of over 9,000 in a town of 25,000. Because of the heavy moderation against any dissent, the two have created a tremendous voting block who are fucking up any progress the town had been starting to finally achieve over the last ten years.

    The content of the (acceptable) posts is about the worst you can imagine, including the wildest conspiracy theories about mask wearing and Covid as a hoax. It's just so damned disheartening to see that town go from having a high school astronomy teacher (former neighbor when I was a kid) with its own planetarium in the high school to where now the football coaches use it to view film.

    The chemistry, biology, and physics teachers were absolutely stellar back in the 1980s, which allowed me to consider them as blow-off courses for easy credit in college. Today, judging by the most vocal deniers, I'm surprised they aren't all ripping air filters from their cars and home AC units out of fear of asphyxiating them.

    • Like 4
  6. On 7/7/2020 at 11:46 PM, Foggy Notion said:

    Looks like the Austin Monitor called Leffingwell and asked him if it was true.

    https://www.austinmonitor.com/stories/whispers/leffingwell-endorses-flannigan-opponent-kelly/

    “I was asked to endorse her,” Leffingwell said, by “some police friends of mine, retired policemen. I’ve always been a supporter of police and full funding of the police. I’ve got to support the candidate who supports the APD.” Leffingwell, who now lives in Hays County, said he is concerned about the possibility of a “massive cut” to the police department and thinks City Council is on a “dangerous path.” Kelly said, “I believe without the necessary funding we’re not going to be able to change (APD) for the better …. Our city won’t be as safe.” 

    Thanks for digging into this. Sounds like Leffingwell is sundowning, not that he ever came across as someone who was especially very sharp.

  7. 40 minutes ago, Voldemort86 said:

    Hate to say it, but they want to go after senators who are clearly vulnerable. the ad would lose credibility if it had a senator in there who could still likely win by 10-15 points.

    I hope this is Cornyn’s last gravy train election tho. Hopefully he’s voted out next time or he has to retire for some reason.

    Yeah, but they prominently highlight "Com'On Ted..." and he ain't even on the ballot this year. I understand that no one likes him, and there's some utility in that, but Cornyn is the silent but deadly stench of number two coming at you in the Senate.

  8. 1 minute ago, Ghost of LL said:

    No--it'd just be for the duration of the 'Rona.  But that looks like it may be another year.

    I don't think they have any feel for what the options are right now.  The last I heard, there was going to be an online option.  But yesterday, Morath laid down an edict that schools had to be in-person.  But I think it's unclear whether that forecloses some students being remote.

    New York would be an interesting option.  Mrs.LL would love it--being back amongst her people.

    According to Worldometers, Vermont only has 159 active cases right now.

  9. 26 minutes ago, Al_4_ISU said:

    Iowa hating Nebraska (and vice versa) is spot on accurate.

    Iowa liking Minnesota?  No fucking way.  Anecdotally, it would be Wisconsin or Colorado long before Minnesota.  It's like a northern version of Texas, except the people pretend to be all "aw shucks jeez dontcha know" instead of owning their arrogance outright.

    States that I do like: Colorado, New Mexico, Louisiana.

    States that I do not like: Oklahoma, New Jersey, Mississippi.

    I've never been to Iowa and am therefore agnostic about the concept, but you seem cool.

    • Like 1
  10. 9 minutes ago, Armybrat said:

    Oh, I read it as her already being up there.

    Just drive with her up as close as you can get without being quarantined, then fly back while she drives on to her school.

    Sounds simple until you start thinking about other states also joining in on the quarantine. PA does it? Okay, maybe doable. If OH does the same? Nope.

    Right now, it's impossible to predict the situation one month away.

  11. 26 minutes ago, HornPhD said:

    I grew up about 45 minutes south of Rochester and my summer job in college was at the Genesee Brewery next to the falls. Every employee received 2 cases of beer a month. Not to mention the free beers during and after work. 

    I also attended basketball camp at RIT as a high school student. It was my first exposure to people who were deaf. We would try hitting on the college girls attending summer session or the ones there for figure skating camp. Good times. 
     

    Drive her to Erie then take an Uber to the Cleveland airport? Is there an exception for taking a family to college?

    Good guess. Yeah, she goes to RIT and is studying digital media. It's an incredible school for all things related to visual communications thanks to generous endowments from Xerox, Kodak, and Bausch & Lomb, all founded in Rochester.

    Thanks for the link but I still don't see definitive answers to my questions. And, yeah, the easiest option right now is to just fly her up there and then deliver the vehicle later.

  12. 1 hour ago, crash_davis said:

    This is a great way of keeping people from moving to ATT or Verizon. Customer churn is a big metric to wall street. Keep customers and steal from others. That's the plan for success in the mobile space.

    Sure, but you still have to provide reliable service. This morning, I lost all connectivity for an hour. No voice and no data from 9am to 10am 

    Prior to the T-Mobile/Sprint merger, that was never an issue. Hell, I even cut the cord on my in-home internet and simply used my cellphone as a hot spot, but the last 3 weeks have started to make shit an untenable situation.

    Without any warning, I'll go from blazing speed to nada, which is incredibly fucked up for those of us who are reliant on a solid connection for our careers.

  13. Y'all may or may not remember but my daughter is deaf, so I'm probably a little over protective of her when it comes to her traveling alone and such. It's just an added stress that gets me worked up. Physically, she can handle her shit because she's 6'1", but to me she's still that small child I used to cradle in my arms.

    • Like 3
  14. 13 minutes ago, Lobo said:

    Does she have a place where she can receive mail up there already? 

    She's moving into an apartment with her best friend, so 'yes'? Her friend, though, is from Tucson and AZ is also on the quarantine list.

    My ex-wife has all the details but she refuses to talk to me - even for logistics planning (I said, biiIITCH!). It's fucked up because she's the one who cheated on me, precipitating the divorce.

    Irregardless, I'm realizing now how ill prepared this all is with the previously expected move in date shifting from late to early August.

    • Like 2
  15. 2 minutes ago, Lobo said:

    Well, not to get too up and personal into your shit...but when is this actual excursion scheduled for?  Because we are gonna have another bizarre move after the runoff announcements are made that will shift our state leadership’s thinking and may cause them to hem and haw about what we do next and how the rest of the nation perceives us.  
     

    and fuck you “no CR” fucksticks.  I’m a girldad trying to help another one help his daughter.  You don’t understand that, then fuck off you worthless pieces of inventory. 

    Up until last week, the first day of class had been scheduled for Aug 29, but they suddenly shifted the fall schedule forward to the 19th with plans to shut shit down at Thanksgiving. So, yeah, it's a moving target. Right now, she needs to be there by the 5th at the latest because of the quarantine.

  16. 9 minutes ago, InkaUtexas said:

    Well get on it man! We can use the wreath fund to repatriate you if need be. 

    It's going to happen, but I think we'll have to spend an extra night in Erie, PA, so that I can get into and out of the state in one day unless they place a quarantine on Texans too. But if Ohio follows suit, she's just going to have to fly alone and I'll bring the car later.

    Shifting sands...

    Edit: Wait, fuck, I wouldn't be able to get back to PA for the flight back without riding a bus. GDmit.

    • Like 1
  17. 1 minute ago, InkaUtexas said:

    I took my kiddo to Rochester and Oswego last summer. From Terra Haute you can make the jump pretty quick. Only issue I could see would be the tolls near Buffalo. You can run back roads up there for sure but will add to the timeline. Downtown Rochester was fun. Spent a few nights there. Some great bars, etc. 

    I enjoyed the waterfall they have downtown and the freshwater beach.

    • Like 1
  18. 17 minutes ago, Lobo said:

    do you have a global entry or similar TSA piece of ID?   A passport might work, but those others are better.  You’re gonna a pick her up and drive to New York.  You don’t need a hotel until the lower Midwest who right now have no quarantine with us.   Probably Indiana.  So that’s fine.  You’re gonna fuel up and eat the second day in northern Pennsylvania.  You’re gonna stop her in Rochester and fly back from there. It’s gonna a miserable trip of connecting flights.  But you’re gonna buy a prepaid Visa card tomorrow and use it to book the flight and you’re gonna use her new Rochester address as the Purchasing Address.  She drives you to that airport or buffalo or Syracuse.  you don’t use Ride share.  You present a generic Govt ID (for some reason those global entry cards, nobody ever notices the address).  You don’t enter your rewards program info and you print your boarding pass on paper ahead of time, don’t scan your phone or ID  in the airport itself, just hand them the paper and National ID card, anything that doesn’t have TEXAS printed at the top.  They let you board the plane.

    The ID stuff isn't likely to pan out. Yes, I used to fly all the time for my old job as about 2/3 of the clients were out of state. Since leaving there in 2014, I've only stepped into a plane once (I think), which is a weird thought now that I think of it after flying almost once per week.

    Hell, even my passport is expired. The last international trip I've taken was Paris in 2013.

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