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bolverk

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by bolverk

  1. I wonder when we start to watch what we say and begin to self-censor, even here on Surly. Almost all of us could be traced—if one had the means and were so inclined—in some way or another through our IP addresses, our 3.50 subscriptions, emails used to sign up, etc. Obviously, we're not that big of a deal and could be pretty far down on a watch list, but we also have some connected people and some stark-raving lunatic true believers who might have some other dubious connections.
  2. Are you willing to share, at least vaguely, what kind of research it was? Asking solely for when I'm arguing with one particular person IRL in mind and he says, "Maybe they should've pulled the plug, dude."
  3. Dems have been warning the Olds for 25 years that Republicans were coming after their SS and Medicare, but by and large, the Olds continued to vote for them. I guess that prospect wasn't as scary as non-white people and gays
  4. It goes back several years. In the US, we spray/dip/apply (I can't remember which) dead chickens that have been plucked with bleach before selling them. In Europe, they don't/can't for whatever regulatory purpose (sounds unhealthily to me). So, we aren't allowed to export our dead poultry there for consumption.
  5. Supposedly blocked on the grounds of which court should hear the case. Meanwhile, they'll continue deporting people, who I'm sure will get their own judicial review after they've wasted away for months/years in a Salvadoran gulag under the guise of the Venezuelan war we find ourselves fighting. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/us/politics/supreme-court-trump-venezuelan-deportations.html The Supreme Court ruled on Monday night that the Trump administration could continue to deport Venezuelan migrants based on a wartime powers act for now, overturning a lower court that had put a temporary stop to the deportations. The decision marks a victory for the Trump administration, although the ruling is narrow and focused on the proper venue for the cases, rather than on the administration’s use of a centuries-old law to justify its decision to send planeloads of Venezuelans to El Salvador with little to no due process. The justices did not address the question of whether the Trump administration improperly categorized the Venezuelans as deportable under the Alien Enemies Act, finding the migrants had improperly challenged their deportations in Washington, D.C. The justices determined that the migrants should have raised challenges in Texas, where they were being held. “The detainees are confined in Texas, so venue is improper in the District of Columbia,” according to the court’s order, which was brief and unsigned, as is typical in such emergency applications. In a concurrence, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh stressed that the justices were in agreement that the migrants should receive judicial review, but that they were divided over where the case should be heard. “As the court stresses, the court’s disagreement with the dissenters is not over whether the detainees receive judicial review of their transfers — all nine members of the court agree that judicial review is available,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote. “The only question is where that judicial review should occur.” The case is perhaps the most high-profile of the eight emergency applications the Trump administration has filed with the Supreme Court so far, and it presents a direct collision between the judicial and executive branches. The administration had asked the justices to weigh in on its effort to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport more than 100 Venezuelans to a prison in El Salvador. The administration claims the migrants are all members of Tren de Aragua, a violent street gang rooted in Venezuela, and that their removals are allowed under the act, which grants the president authority to detain or deport citizens of enemy nations. The president may invoke the law in times of “declared war” or when a foreign government invades the United States. On March 14, President Trump signed a proclamation that targeted members of Tren de Aragua, claiming that there was an “invasion” and a “predatory incursion” underway as he invoked the wartime law. In the proclamation, Mr. Trump claimed that the gang was “undertaking hostile actions” against the United States “at the direction, clandestine or otherwise” of the Venezuelan government. Lawyers representing some of those targeted then challenged the order in federal court in Washington. That same day, planeloads of the deportees were sent to El Salvador, which had entered an agreement with the Trump administration to take the Venezuelans and detain them. A federal judge, James E. Boasberg, directed the administration to stop the flights. He subsequently issued a written order temporarily pausing the administration’s plan while the court case proceeded. The Trump administration appealed Judge Boasberg’s temporary restraining order, and a divided panel of three appellate court judges in Washington sided with the migrants, keeping the pause in place. One judge wrote that the government’s deportation plan had denied the Venezuelans “even a gossamer thread of due process.” At that point, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to weigh in, arguing in its application that the case presented “fundamental questions about who decides how to conduct sensitive national-security-related operations in this country.” Lawyers for the migrants responded sharply, arguing that the temporary pause by Judge Boasberg was “the only thing” standing in the way of the government sending migrants “to a prison in El Salvador, perhaps never to be seen again, without any kind of procedural protection, much less judicial review.” The American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward, the groups representing the Venezuelan migrants, said that the president had bent the law in an “effort to shoehorn a criminal gang” into the wartime law in a manner that was “completely at odds with the limited delegation of wartime authority Congress chose to give him through the statute.” Lawyers for the migrants said the migrants sent to El Salvador “have been confined, incommunicado, in one of most brutal prisons in the world, where torture and other human rights abuses are rampant.” The Trump administration replied on Wednesday in a brief that contended that the government was not denying that the Venezuelan migrants should receive “judicial review.” “They obviously do,” the acting solicitor general, Sarah M. Harris, wrote. Rather, the government argued, that “the pressing issues right now are ‘procedural issues’ about where and how detainees should challenge their designations as enemy aliens.” Ms. Harris argued that the migrants should have filed their legal challenge in Texas, where they had been detained before the deportation flights, rather than in Washington. She asked the justices to lift the temporary block on Mr. Trump’s order, calling the pause “an intolerably long time for a court to block the executive’s conduct of foreign-policy and national-security operations.” Ms. Harris claimed that the migrants’ lawyers had offered a “sensationalized” narrative. She added that the government denied that the migrants might face torture in El Salvador, writing that the government’s position is “to abhor torture, not to invite brutalization.”
  6. "This could've been a dating quarrel. Do you know the sexual orientation of the boys involved?" "What if it comes out Metcalf called Anthony the "n" word?"
  7. https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/the-false-tariff-headline-that-sent-stocks-on-a-2-trillion-ride-2224ef75 https://archive.is/98rc1 A wild stock-market swing based on false information added $2.4 trillion in value and erased it almost as quickly Monday morning. The episode played out in just over half an hour, all based on misleading reports that said President Trump was considering a 90-day pause to implementing tariffs. The rally-turned-rout underscored how feverish many investors are for any information that might calm the market and how easily misinformation and Wall Street’s high-frequency trading strategies that react to headlines in seconds can impact asset prices. News that tariff-shocked investors had been dying to see began circulating on social media shortly after 10:10 a.m. in New York: “HASSETT: TRUMP IS CONSIDERING A 90-DAY PAUSE IN TARIFFS FOR ALL COUNTRIES EXCEPT CHINA,” the headline read, in an apparent reference to words from Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council. Stock indexes soared. After trading as much as 4.7% lower early in the session, the S&P 500 rose to trade up 3.4% in a jarring intraday reversal. The broad-based index added $2.4 trillion in market value in the 10 minutes from 10:08 to 10:18 a.m., according to Dow Jones Market Data. By 10:41 a.m. it had all been wiped out. The S&P 500 erased $2.5 trillion in value in around 23 minutes after the White House quickly denied that such a pause was being discussed. After the false headline caused the S&P 500 to trade in its widest intraday range since March 2020, the index closed down just 0.2%. The origin of the report remains unclear. The headline was circulating on social media by 10:13 a.m., when a widely followed X account known as Walter Bloomberg posted it. The anonymous account has for years posted trading-related news throughout the market day, often in the form of all-caps newswire headlines copy-and-pasted from the Bloomberg Terminal. The account, which has nearly one million followers, isn’t associated with Bloomberg News. The Walter Bloomberg account and others like it are popular with market watchers who don’t have access to Bloomberg’s expensive news-and-data terminals. The headline in question didn’t come from Bloomberg’s newswires, however. And the news was quickly gaining steam with major outlets. A CNBC anchor read the news live on air around 10:15 a.m., before warning viewers that, “We’ll try and source that, exactly where that came from.” At 10:20, Reuters sent the same news over its wires, attributing it to CNBC. “As we were chasing the news of the market moves in real-time, we aired unconfirmed information in a banner. Our reporters quickly made a correction on air,” a CNBC spokeswoman said. A Reuters spokeswoman said: “Reuters, drawing from a headline on CNBC, published a story on April 7 saying White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett had said that President Trump was considering a 90-day tariff pause on all countries except China. The White House denied the report. Reuters has withdrawn the incorrect report and regrets its error.” The original headline might have been an inaccurate summary of an interview Hassett gave on Fox News earlier Monday morning. In a “Fox & Friends” interview before the market opened, Hassett was asked if the White House would consider a 90-day pause on the tariffs. “Yeah, I think the president is going to decide what the president is going to decide. There are more than 50 countries in negotiation with the president,” Hassett said, without elaborating further on a potential pause.
  8. Is this another one of those "they didn't come for me so I didn't speak out" kind of situations? Like when we all saw the State's security apparatus swoop in on a college campus and start prematurely cracking heads because they didn't like the speech or who was speaking but pretended it had something to do with disrupting classes and blocking sidewalks? Like when a prominent university starts firing academic staff over their disagreements with how that college is handling its shit because, again, we didn't like the people they're attempting to protect? Like when a governor pardons a murderer because the victim held an opinion he didn't like? Just asking questions so that we're clear if future signs start cropping up.
  9. No. White people absolutely do accept their benefits (which come in many variable ways), but they'll say stuff like, "well, I paid into it and deserve my check," while pretending others don't also contribute to our national well-being because anyone who isn't white must necessarily be a welfare queen and, therefore, is wholly undeserving of any sort of assistance.
  10. Understanding what's moving the market and where it will go is now more a matter of comprehending the psychology of a single man and how investors respond to his megalomania than anything you might have learned in B school.
  11. "We" aren't sinking the ship. "We" don't have any power to that. "We," however, have been sounding this alarm for fucking years, but the moderates in the middle have the memories of goldfish. If you are a Gen Xer, every single Republican administration that you've experienced as an adult has ended in an economic disaster: Big Bush, Shrub, and Trump. And every single Democratic administration has had to clean up his predecessor's mess. One would think that people of normal intelligence could maybe pick up on a fucking pattern by now and consider that maybe those loony leftists know what the fuck they're doing and talking about. After trying -- repeatedly and desperately -- to point shit out, sometimes you just get worn down, and all you have left is falling back on bitter and angry ridicule.
  12. Got stumped on both Wordle and Connects and had to step away. That helped with the former but not the latter. I ended up just saying "fuck it" and plowed ahead after a while and plowed ahead into wrongness. Wordle 1,388 4/6 ⬛🟨🟨⬛🟨 ⬛🟨🟨🟨⬛ 🟨⬛⬛🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Connections Puzzle #666 🟪🟩🟩🟩 🟨🟩🟦🟨 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟩🟪🟩🟩 🟩🟪🟩🟩 🙂 Daily Quordle 1169 7️⃣4️⃣ 6️⃣5️⃣ m-w.com/games/quordle/ ⬜🟨⬜⬜🟨 🟩🟨⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜🟩⬜⬜ ⬜⬜🟩⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜ ⬜🟨🟩⬜🟨 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟩🟩⬜🟩⬜ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬜🟨⬜⬜🟨 ⬜⬜🟨🟩⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟩 🟩⬜⬜🟨⬜ ⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜🟨🟨 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
  13. It's a helluva thing that Ford makes some kick-ass smaller cars for the European market that compete pretty well, but not in the US of fuckin' A where you can't buy a normal gotdam car from them anymore.
  14. Our tariffs on the world.
  15. Wordle 1,387 4/6 ⬛🟨🟨⬛⬛ ⬛⬛🟩🟨⬛ 🟩🟨🟩🟨⬛ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Connections Puzzle #665 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟪🟪🟪🟪 🙂 Daily Quordle 1168 6️⃣8️⃣ 4️⃣5️⃣ m-w.com/games/quordle/ ⬜⬜🟨⬜🟩 ⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟨 ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟩 ⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜ ⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜🟨🟨 ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟩 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟨⬜⬜🟨⬜ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟩🟩🟩⬜🟩 ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩⬜⬜🟨 🟩⬜⬜🟨⬜ ⬜⬜🟩⬜🟩 🟨🟩⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟩⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
  16. I'm loving this episode! And yeah Sherman is low key hawt. ETA: She's got that jolie laide, as the French say, thing going on.
  17. Gothic on Vacation had me rolling.
  18. Jack Black's "monologue" was great!
  19. Right. But as the article suggests, we won't be getting solid numbers from all the stuff they look at for a while. Therefore, no rate drops should be expected anytime soon.
  20. I don't know why you guys are trying to reason with GRU. Despite his original post excoriating this board for not discussing certain issues in its six pages, e.g., the tent and knife shit, all of his points have indeed already been discussed. Y'all are talking to a liar who claims to have already read this entire thread, a troll trying to rabble rouse, or a stupid motherfucker who has the memory of a goldfish. Put BJ Johnson, the aforementioned GRU, a prick who's been banned from this site 30-something times, on ignore. Please don't engage that asshole.
  21. Based on this article, it doesn't sound like the Fed will be lowering rates any time soon -- unless, of course, Trump somehow got away with firing Powell. The Fed Isn’t Rushing to Save the Markets This Time With stocks in a steep decline and tariffs inducing recession jitters, the patience of investors may be tested. The notion that the Federal Reserve will rush in to rescue investors in a crisis has comforted investors for decades. But in the big market downturn induced by President Trump’s tariffs, no Fed rescue is in sight. Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, made that clear on Friday. The tariffs are much “larger than expected,” he said, and their immense scale makes it especially important for the central bank to understand their economic effects before taking action. “It is too soon to say what will be the appropriate path for monetary policy,” he said at a conference in Virginia. In fact, I’d say, the likelihood of further market declines is much greater than the chance that the Fed will turn the markets around in the immediate future. What U.S. stock investors have experienced until now is what’s known on Wall Street as a correction — a decline of 10 percent or more from a market peak. The correction doesn’t end, by this common definition, until the markets have turned around and that peak has been surpassed. For days, though, the market momentum has been almost entirely downward. So another dubious distinction is in sight: a bear market, which is a decline of at least 20 percent from a market top. For the S&P 500, which closed at 5,074.08 on Friday, down from its peak of 6,144.15 on Feb. 19, a bear market is already within shouting distance, a scant 2.6 percentage points away. It would be lovely to be able to say that the stock market bottom is near, or that it has already been reached, Edward Yardeni, a veteran market watcher, said in a conversation on Friday. “I’ve been pretty good at picking market bottoms, and I’m not shy about calling one when I see one,” he said. “But that usually has happened when the Fed has taken action. And right now, its pretty clear that Powell won’t be doing that.” The Fed is holding back this time for good reasons. The impact of the sudden new range of tariffs imposed by the president — and the tit-for-tat tariffs announced on Friday by China that are likely to be followed by similar moves from a host of other countries — is far from clear. But this much is certain. Tariffs are a tax, one that is likely to slow economic growth as well as raise prices. Those effects complicate the task of the Fed, which has a dual mandate: promoting full employment (and economic growth) and holding the rate of inflation down to a reasonable level. With the Fed still battling inflation after the runaway surge in prices of 2022 and 2023, it is reluctant to lower interest rates when price increases in a range of goods could be just around the corner. And on Friday, the latest jobs report from the government showed that the economy in March remained reasonably strong. Employers added 228,000 jobs for the month, far more than anticipated, and while the unemployment rate rose slightly, to 4.2 percent from 4.1 percent, there were few signs of substantial weakness. Given that backdrop, Mr. Powell seemed to be signaling that it would take an actual slowdown, with substantial job declines, to justify rate cuts under current circumstances. Consumer confidence has declined, and an Economic Policy Uncertainty Index that is closely watched by economists and business executives has soared. But concrete data isn’t here yet. If they’re not rolled back, the tariffs are likely to take a while to result in widespread layoffs — and without strong evidence of a slowdown, the Fed may be reluctant to act. Yet the Fed has already come under pressure from President Trump to lower interest rates. This is the “PERFECT time” for a Fed rate cut, he said on the Truth Social media platform on Friday, shortly before Mr. Powell’s speech. Maintaining Fed independence is important in the markets, and there was no indication that this overt presidential pressure had any effect on Mr. Powell’s staunch resolve to bide his time, and to lower interest rates only when and if the Fed decided it was time to do so. So investors may need to be very patient, and to hope that changes in tariff policy occur rapidly enough in Washington to turn the markets around and, more important, avert a recession. Recessions are typically associated with wide-ranging job losses, and they cause immense hardship in the real world as well as in financial markets. cont'd:
  22. Austin Public Health loses $15 million to federal grant cuts Austin Public Health is losing millions in funding and 27 full-time employees due to cuts at the federal level, the agency's director said. Five of Austin Public Health's grants have been eliminated so far, resulting in the loss of an estimated $15 million over time. That money paid for APH’s Refugee Services Clinic, COVID vaccination program and diabetes care program, among other services. APH did not specify the funding agency for all of the lost grants. The Department of Government Efficiency has made cuts at a number of federal and state health organizations. Last week, it announced it would terminate hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to the Texas Department of State Health Services, including some COVID-era funding that was distributed to local health departments. At an Austin City Council public health committee meeting Wednesday, APH Director Adrienne Sturrup described learning about the cancellation of funds that filter through the Texas Department of State Health Services, one grant at a time, across recent weeks. "I've called it death by a thousand cuts," she said. Sturrup expressed concern about more cuts that could be coming. “There is no federal windfall that’s going to come through to support our efforts,” she said. “It will really be, unfortunately, us taking a hard look at what are the things that we just can't support, and where we're going to have to turn to the community for help.” Sturrup said APH is working with Austin City Manager TC Broadnax to find open positions in other city departments for the affected employees. But APH representatives said they anticipate an additional 28 full-time employees could lose their jobs. APH’s 2025 fiscal year budget included around $39.4 million in grants — around 30% of its total budget. Grants pay for about half of full-time positions at the agency. Some of the lost dollars were associated with COVID-era grants, but Sturrup said that funding helped the department to respond to other threats including mpox and measles. “Public health nationally has historically been underfunded. The additional dollars that came through from the pandemic not only gave us the opportunity to scale up to respond to the community's needs, but in some ways to right-size,” she said. “That is one of the reasons why the state health department allowed locals to continue to use those funding dollars after the pandemic ended.” Sturrup said APH is working with City Council to extend certain affected programs with local funding — but some may shut down entirely. One program in limbo is a clinic that provides vaccinations and medical support to refugees and asylum seekers. “We will be able to float that program for a little bit longer," Sturrup said. But there are no guarantees about the program's future. Sturrup said similar programs from agencies in other jurisdictions have had to shut down. "They can't afford to take the risk to continue to provide services with the uncertainty of reimbursement,” she said.
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