Favorites October 20th 2022

San Diego, Balboa Park, June 2022

Mike Masnick @mmasnick

I think a lot of people are focused on the wrong issues regarding Ye and Parler. This really looks like a case of someone being taken advantage of.

techdirt.comYe’s ‘Buyout’ Of Parler Looks Very Much Like A Failed Company Taking Advantage Of Troubled Rich GuyYe, formerly Kanye West, has had quite a week or so. He got locked out of both his Instagram and Twitter accounts for posting anti-semitic nonsense. Immediately following that, he went on the Drink…

There was a whole episode of Bad Takes about the situation, and they lightly touched upon this angle, but I think it's probably the main thing that's going on.

Rep. Mike Waltz @michaelgwaltz

If Admiral Gilday believes that the Chinese Communist Party’s timeline to invade Taiwan has moved up to possibly 2023 why are we arguing about how many ships the US Navy needs to retire? Invest in American shipyards now to build the fleet we need to fight and win! @USNavyCNO https://t.co/M063q7LC3K

USNI News @USNINews

China's Accelerated Timeline to Take Taiwan Pushing Navy in the Pacific, Says CNO Gilday - USNI News https://t.co/Lo7ewczWqm https://t.co/gpQSU9R6lN

The Financial Times also picked this up, yikes. This does not seem fun.

Kim-Mai Cutler @kimmaicutler

Not arguing it should be used for this sole purpose, but you could fit a whole new research university in the amount of vacant office space available in SF right now. 20 million square feet.

socketsite.comEnough Empty Office Space for over 150,000 People in S.F.As we outlined earlier this week, the amount of vacant office space in San Francisco has just hit a new pandemic high of 19.9 million square feet. For context, the 1,070-foot-tall Salesforce/Transbay tower at First and Mission, which is the tallest building in San Francisco, contains 1.35 million sq…

To give a comparison, she points out that Stanford has 17.9M sqft of building space, Berkeley even less.

Brodsky @a_drewsky

data is my passion

Also, Louis Staples offers his thoughts and prayers to the author of the book about Truss' meteoric rise to the top, out December 8th. Truss is destined to be a trivia footnote. But at least she'll now draw a pension for life, (which is probably good policy).

Evil Sullivan That Kills You @Dimosar

me 5 seconds after the captain explains that we need to scan this civilization for warp drives before we can stop some asteroid from wiping them all out:

Bad news though, by 2373 the Maquis were totally crushed when Dukat allied Cardassia with the Dominion. So you're gonna have to start a new cell yourself.

Matthew Gertz @MattGertz

Adults scrutinizing school art for secret messages and putting the high-school artist through a star chamber. https://t.co/63FAKTlxj4

So, first of all, what a horrible bunch of adults. Secondly, I had to go look up Star Chamber, and found out that it was initially a special court set up for people too fancy for normal court, but has come to be associated with courts with arbitrary rulings, no "due process" rights and secretive proceedings.

Threads

• Thread Bob Wachter of UCSF about how he's thinking about COVID risk these days. TL;DR: there's not much evidence risk levels will be much lower for at least a couple years, so whatever you're doing now you shouldn't think of it as temporary.

• Interesting thread detailing the impact of the last four years of trade war with China initially started by Trump, but continuing to today. Too long to summarize, but one highlight was that EV battery imports from China skyrocketed despite there being a tariff in place making them an outlier.

• Short thread explaining why Biden's guarantee to refill the strategic reserve at $70 a barrel is a good policy.