.@realDonaldTrump asked about 'QAnon' — "They like me" and "love the country" pic.twitter.com/STeZOG1jRa
— Jon Nicosia (@NewsPolitics) August 19, 2020
Sliver of a silver lining: If he knows he’s got a dedicated mob of devoted cultists waiting to embrace his every hate rally and hate-tweet, the Squatter-in-Chief is a lot more likely to haul arse on January 21st… or November 4th.
!!! Trump is told that QAnon believes he's saving the world from a secret satanic cult of cannibals and pedophiles. He says, "Well, I haven't heard that. But uh, is that supposed to be a bad thing? Or a good thing? If I can help save the world from problems…"
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) August 19, 2020
The president is a self-absorbed moron propped up by spineless conservatives and unethical grifters who don’t care about associating the White House with the Qanon freaks.
— Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) August 19, 2020
If only it weren’t for the human collateral damage…
It really can’t be underscored how repellent and dangerous Trump’s playing footise with Qanon like this is. It’s not just harmless dingbattery. It is wrecking families and inspiring kidnappings. It is very likely to yield further violence. He could put an end to it overnight. https://t.co/PjF3hNPKvi
— Julian Sanchez (@normative) August 20, 2020
You can't even call it a conspiracy theory. It's an extremist ideological delusion. Like believing there's an alien mothership behind the Hale Bopp comet. https://t.co/Pz7TtleBER
— Zeddy (@Zeddary) August 20, 2020
FBI: The deranged QAnon conspiracy theory poses a potential domestic terrorism threat
Combating Terrorism Center at West Point: it's a public security threat & potential domestic terror threat
Trump: "these are people that love our country."
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) August 19, 2020
Hear me out but what if maybe Republicans are actually human beings with agency and when they do awful things it's by their own choice not because a lib didn't take a soothing enough tone in telling them not to.https://t.co/4zP3Meu96U
— Wurmplewobble (@Weedledouble) August 20, 2020
Jeb,
If you took the nut jobs, racists and haters out of Trump’s Republican Party, there would be nothing left but a box of hats and 100,000 unread copies of Junior’s book. https://t.co/5Ob4kYqauU
— The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) August 20, 2020
sorry karl this is your platform now, the imaginary satanic pedophile ghostbusters were nice to trump so they’re in charge, enjoy the ride https://t.co/3SNjgW2mqT
— kilgore trout, new tone haver (@KT_So_It_Goes) August 20, 2020
Hey if you’re troubled by Trump’s embrace of QAnon, an extremely helpful (but of course not the only) thing you can do is vote for Joe Biden.
— Synanon Offical (@OfficialSynanon) August 19, 2020
RaflW
Side note, but this is really important. GOP ratf*k won’t fly in WI.
@Bencjacobs
The Wisconsin Elections Commission just voted by a 5 to 1 margin that Kanye West did not file in time and thus that he will not appear on the ballot in Wisconsin in 2020
Doug R
Well, trump’s* embrace of Qanon proves it’s a Russian op. Sometimes the fringe work pays off.
dlwchico
My sister, who is 51 and an RN (though she hasn’t actually worked as one for about 15 years) has been going off the deep end. She thinks the pandemic is overblown (it’s just a flu). Won’t wear a mask.
Wrote me an email a few months ago that railed against people trying to take our freedom.
Today she sent an email that linked to the website for the Epoch Times. She used to be a fan of Obama and thought Trump was terrible but now I think she is probably going to vote for Trump. We don’t talk that much anymore so I’m not sure. I’m afraid to ask her if she believes this Q bullshit.
R-Jud
A dear friend, someone who’s really cared for me these last few years, has gone full-metal QAnon/“Plandemic” nutcase recently. I don’t know how to talk to her anymore. I’m heartbroken.
Also she’s English, and a nurse, which just makes it so weird.
Jonas
Well, it’s 2020. A global pandemic is raging. The President of the United States is a bloviating, corrupt, ignoramus allied with Russia displaying clear signs of mental degeneration, who embraces a crazy conspiracy cult that believes he’s some kind of messianic figure fighting cannibals and pedophiles who have entrenched themselves throughout the federal government.
This appears not to be the plot of some kind of dystopian, darkly humorous video game, but the day’s headlines. Fuck me.
PsiFighter37
@RaflW: Good.
I still don’t understand how Kanye went from calling out Dubya on live TV for shitting on black people to where he is now. Mental illness sucks.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Soylent Green is people!
Roger Moore
@RaflW:
I hope they can find some kind of criminal charge for the Republicans who helped him. At the very least, there should be something for submitting obviously fraudulent signatures.
JPL
@dlwchico: Respond that you are sorry but haven’t purchased this weeks Enquirer yet.
MattF
Trump buys the all the premises– he’s a genius, he’s saving the world, he never lies, any disagreement is a hoax, any reports that differ are fake news. So… color me not surprised.
Starfish
@dlwchico: I have a friend who passive-aggressively leaves books by liberal politicians around her wingnut parent’s home. Perhaps you can send her some magazine subscriptions?
zhena gogolia
@dlwchico:
She needs a psych eval.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
@MattF: Dump doesn’t buy the premise. He knows he’s a fraud, that’s why he has so many deep insecurities. When he’s alone with his cheeseburgers he knows he incompetently bankrupted casinos, Manhattan real estate, and a football league and squared his inheritance and no one will invest in him so he had to become a money launderer and a scam artist selling mail order bovine flesh; he knows the elite, from who he craves affirmation, view him as a dim witted scum married to an illiterate escort. That why he openly talks about his love for the uneducated – they’re the only suckers who can’t see him for what he is.
Barbara
@R-Jud: @dlwchico:
Some people deal with adversity that they have no control over only through denial or by fixing blame on someone. Think of Jews being blamed for the plague. The world has to have order, and not just the obvious biological order as simple as, the virus wants to live and keeps reproducing, but order that makes sense to you.
prostratedragon
Liszt, “Mephisto Waltz No. 1:” Horowitz
Another Scott
@dlwchico: Sorry. :-(
She might find this interesting, or might claim it’s all fake…
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/how-three-conspiracy-theorists-took-q-sparked-qanon-n900531
Good luck.
Cheers,
Scott.
Mike in NC
Just read that Fat Bastard has called on his cult to boycott Goodyear Tires because the company doesn’t allow employees to wear politically oriented stuff to work, including MAGA hats. You can’t make up shit this crazy.
rikyrah
@RaflW:
????
R-Jud
@Barbara: Right. For her specifically I think this is a reaction to the trauma of actually having treated COVID patients who died. At least the “Plandemic” shit is.
But I don’t know how to show up for that trauma when she’s also claiming that my ordering a new bed from Wayfair contributed to child trafficking. She needs help I can’t give; her boyfriend is enabling her.
I was in a really dark place a few years ago and she pulled me out, but I don’t know if I can do the same for her here.
Chris Johnson
@Doug R:
No shit it is, very obviously so. Administered through 4chan and 8chan, tracked where possible through Facebook and Google, functioning as stochastic terrorism: QAnon is literally a Russian operation.
The interesting thing is to see which Republicans aren’t on board with the full Russian warfare against America. Karl Rove apparently is not on board. I think you’ll find a lot of these guys without a bad word to say about QAnon, because they need to stay out of the way of the operation or assist it.
trollhattan
@Mike in NC:
And the NASCAR car bearing his name is contracted to…Goodyear.
Kent
CA fire update since this is an open thread.
Currently in San Francisco with blue skies and 71 degree weather. Drove down yesterday from the Portland area partly to do family business at the Chilean Consulate and partly to do some college visits with the 17 year old. My wife is flying in tonight to meet us.
Yesterday afternoon we obliviously driving down I-5 around the CA border when our scheduled hotel for last night in Vacaville called to say there were fires approaching the hotel and smoke everywhere but they were still open and not in the evacuation zone. What? I ask? What fires? So I ask daughter to get her phone off TikToc and look up CA fires. The desk clerk at the Holiday Inn Express in Vacaville said they had lots of people in the lobby evacuated from their homes who were looking for rooms and asked if I wanted to give up the reservation. I said sure and we found a hotel in Redding instead, well north of the fire zone.
This morning there was ash all over the car in Redding. Contemplated whether it was smart to continue to SF or not but my wife was flying down tonight and we had pre-paid hotel reservations in SF and google maps said the road was clear. Figuring that no fires would jump across the bay we continued on. We have some complicated notary business to do at the Chilean consulate related to my wife’s family estate in Chile and it would be another month to make another appointment if we skipped this one.
Driving past Vacaville there were large sections of grassy hills that were burnt on each side of I-80 where the fire jumped the freeway and closed it yesterday. But today all was normal except for the heavy smoke. Forest fires would be smoldering for weeks, but I guess these grass fires just come and go really quickly.
Daughter and I were planning to continue south to visit Stanford, Santa Clara, and a few private schools in the LA area but having second thoughts now if the whole state is on fire. We have hotel reservations in Santa Clara for tomorrow but nothing past that. This is weird. The whole state basically caught on fire in 24 hours.
bluehill
I guess ISIS isn’t the only group trying to radicalize people.
oatler.
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch:
movie looks like documentary of 2020 right down to the greenhouse effect and corruption from the top down.
featheredsprite
@Jonas: The sad thing is that your description of Q beliefs is apparently accurate.
Jeffro
Some enterprising young reporter should ask “sir…about QAnon and their belief that you are somehow, behind the scenes, fighting satanists and pedophiles…can you at least hint at some of your tactics and victories? We’re all dying to know more! Please, sir!!”
Seriously. Just let ‘er rip there, trumpov! the Q folks will love you!!
WereBear
After decades of Faux News pounding the lie of the day into their heads, they can think only in the moment and so contradictions do not “take.” Which is how they fall for ALL the Q conspiracies?
Barbara
@R-Jud: There’s no doubt that people can feed each other’s paranoia. My dad and two of my siblings have/had paranoid tendencies but it’s usually more personal, not geopolitical in nature. Still, I really hate engaging with that kind of thinking. My response would be something like, 1, there have been diseases throughout history, and 2, nobody’s powerful enough to control a virus like this. And that would be it.
Jay
@Mike in NC:
Goodyear makes the run-flat tires the Secret Service uses, even on the Presidential limos.
and they allow LGTBQ and BLM merch to be worn at work, just not the White Supremacy stuff like MAGA hats, Blue Lives Matter, or All Lives Matter.
Alison Rose
All these GOPers who are shocked, shocked to find Qanon lovers in their party need to have all the seats. Y’all encouraged this shit for yeeeeeeeears and now you’re going to pretend you’re offended by it? Fuck off.
Eunicecycle
@Mike in NC: And Akron, Ohio is NOT amused.
rikyrah
????
Kent
I can’t decide who are worse. The Q-idiots or the racists. I lean towards the racists. Either way they are all deplorables.
Eric S.
Has Dollhands commented on QAnon before today? It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if today was the first time he’s heard of them.
Morzer
Where Trump and the truth are concerned, I think Patrick O’Brian summed it up rather well in his novel The Thirteen Gun Salute:
Martin
@Jay: He’s said that if the 60,000 mostly Ohio Goodyear workers lose their jobs over this, its fine, they can just find other jobs.
This is a good electoral strategy.
Martin
@Eric S.: Oh, he’s commented on them before. He knows they are supporters, he doesn’t care that they’re dangerous to every other human on earth.
Haydnseek
@Kent: No, the whole state isn’t on fire. If you continue south to check out schools in the Los Angeles area it won’t be normal due to the virus, but not because of fires. Get a grip. I’ve lived here for 68 years, and the only fire that I ever feared was the one in the San Gabriel mountains that threatened Mt. Wilson. I see the antennas there from my kitchen window. Please stay safe. As you travel south you’ll be safer.
Martin
Anyone interested in a rundown of the Uber/Lyft thing in California?
Scout211
@Kent:
If you read through the California fire thread from yesterday, most of the SoCal jackals said things were much better in the southern part of the state.
You made the right choice to stay in Redding last night, though. I-80 was closed in both directions last night at Vacaville.
West of the Rockies
Maybe this Qanon shit is a bridge too far for another 100K would-be Trump voters nationwide, enough to tip a dozen counties leftward. That’s fine by me.
lowtechcyclist
@Morzer: Damn, that’s perfect.
I don’t know if Stephen Maturin is my favorite fictional character, but he’s definitely in the top five.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Kent: We have 2 major fires here in LA, one between Lancaster and Frazier Park(between the 14 and 5) and the other north of Azuza in the San Gabriels. Most of the worst of the fires are up north.
Jay
@Martin:
most QAnon are mostly dangerous to themselves.
they have created/been sucked into a delusional world view, pushing “normies” out of their lives and relying on an online “support network”.
QAnon is going to end with the bang of mass suicides, like other mass cults, not with a whimper.
laura
@Kent: play it safe and amscray. Yesterday was a holy terror – and things can change in an instant. St. Mary’s will still be here after the fires are out ?
Regarding this whole Q business – it is terrorism and will not be surprised that it is one of the subjects of concern that the Senate Intelligence Community has on its radar but the GOP cant be bothered to do anything about.
Chris Johnson
@Martin: He called ’em a MOVEMENT. That is exactly the framing Russia wants them to have. They are not, they are a propaganda operation for the purpose of radicalizing and panicking Americans. It’s Putin 101, dead center in the middle of his tactics.
eclare
@Morzer: Very good description.
Roger Moore
@Kent:
As one of the quoted tweets points out, the Q-idiots are also racists.
HumboldtBlue
@Kent:
If ya come back north on 101 let me know and I’ll stand on the corner waving a flag and dancing.
Bill Arnold
@dlwchico:
Tell her that QAnon was originally an experimental right-wing Israeli influence operation, to raise up an easily and rapidly manipulable stochastic online and meatspace army. [of gullible nutcases but don’t say that.]
The original (competent) talent left (got bored?) and it’s now a confused cult, the reins (disinformation feeds) being fought over by multiple actors, both state and non-state.
This might even be true, at least until somebody convincingly takes credit.
Adjust actors for the target person. If one is strong of mind, review Q documents to see who they don’t criticize for clues. (Sigh, I need to do that.)
Jay
BTW, hellofa problem you guys are having down there with Boater Fraud just before the election,….
Kent
We will probably continue south because we are this far anyway. And distance learning HS doesn’t start until Sept 1 back in Camas. It’s hard to get a grip on what is actually happening because nearly every damn newspaper in this state is paywalled and you can’t even get one or two free stories before they start asking you to subscribe. And all the TV news web sites have so much pop up crap it’s hard to navigate on a phone.
All the schools are closed, but you can still do your own walking tours and see all the same stuff you would if there was some undergrad leading you around. This is my second child and so I’ve done a ton of these college tours. Usually it is just a lot of walking and looking at buildings from the outside with a peek inside the library and sports facilities and a look at a sample dorm room which are mostly alike. But they are useful to see how the school is laid out and what the surrounding neighborhoods are like since it is a place to live for four years.
Mostly we are sick of quarantine and in need of a road trip and this is the excuse.
San Francisco is beautiful right now, other than the pandemic.
HumboldtBlue
@Morzer:
That’s perfect and that is one of the best books in the whole series. His character development was top notch.
I’m gonna come back with my Lord Liverpool from the same Napoleonic era.
mrmoshpotato
Oh JEB!
What a stupid, stupid man who’s paid no attention to his own party for at least 40 years.
Baud
Is anyone else hungry for some fried children?
Kent
I think that’s unlikely. We will just want to get home. Last time we passed through your neck of the woods I was biking down with the same daughter when she was about 10 and my 77 year old father. We biked down 101 and CA-1 from Astoria to SF. Me on a tandem pulling a trailer and my dad on his recumbent. I photo blogged the whole trip
http://kentalind.blogspot.com/
mrmoshpotato
@Jay: Not us. It’s all the Soviet shitpile mobster crime family and their grifting trash friends.
Old Dan and Little Ann
I know one full blown Q believer. That boy ain’t right. My book of faces post about the chicks dying in the mail triggered him to reply with a YouTube video regarding some grand plot about a cashless society. He’s asked me before why I always delete his replies. Duh. The same reason I pick up dog shit in my yard. I don’t Fucking want it there and no one else needs to see it either.
Roger Moore
@Martin:
How much of a rundown does it need? As far as I can see, it’s pretty simple:
lowtechcyclist
So Nancy has decided for some reason to SMASH Ed Markey; she’s endorsed Kennedy’s challenge.
catclub
One of the clues to Q (according to the nutters) was that if you take a random assortment of letters out of two different Trump tweets, you get ‘I am Q’. Both times! maybe it is Trump and a sockpuppet.
HumboldtBlue
@Kent:
That’s fantastic, that must’ve been an awesome trip.
Kent
@Roger Moore: What’s your sense of how this is going to resolve? I would personally be happy to see Uber and Lyft crash and burn and come limping back into CA but I don’t have a sense of the CA politics. I’m a suburbanite who never uses them. I was surprised at how fast the state of TX caved to their extortion and overruled Austin when I was living there.
Jeffro
@Kent: Q nuts are worse… They are racists whose minds won’t let them accept that they have been conned, so they’re willing to believe any number of insane things
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Roger Moore: Fuck’em.
Kent
@HumboldtBlue: It was. I try to do some big summer adventure with each daughter before they get too old. One of the perks of being a teacher.
Jay
trollhattan
@Kent:
Yup, it’s off the charts bad because there are so many major events in widely scattered locations. They have to decide which fires to ignore for now.
We drove the kid to her new school yesterday, down 80 and past The LNU Complex southern edge, which at the time was about 5 miles north of the freeway in a canyon. 1.5 hour drive.
Last night it had marched to and across the by then closed I-80. Only we didn’t know that and ended driving unknown farm roads in the dark along with every truck, RV and SUV on the planet. 5.5 hours. My phone was on 4% when I got home, as I was using it for nav.
Ugh. Air quality index is [checks] 279. And it’s snowing.
Good luck!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@catclub: It gets worse, if you hear a train nearing an at grade crossing you’ll hear it’s horn, ITS “Q” IN MORSE CODE!
Kent
You think? My sense is that the racist fucks in authority like say Jeff Sessions or the police union guys do more damage to our society than these Q nuts. There are a lot of powerful people maintaining institutional racism in this country. But maybe I’m out of touch with this Q thing. I have a hard time really taking it seriously as a real threat.
RaflW
@Kent: Inciweb is the public fire info site, though CalFire may be better specifically in California. No paywalls, no ads, no hype.
I’m back in MN, but watching Colorado closely. One of the three main fires our there is now the second biggest in Colorado recorded history, and another is really just a matter of miles from our condo (which is in a decent sized town so I’m not that concerned. It could burn, but that would mean that the fire season had gone super-catastrophic, and people with far more to lose than me would be so fkkd that I’d just be a whiner by comparison).
Baud
I would like a Qanon person if they are into Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Calouste
@Roger Moore: That’s the conclusion in drew and led me to delete my Lyft account. I’ll see after the pandemic how I’m going to get around if I would need a service like that. There are still taxis.
Bill Arnold
@Another Scott:
How three conspiracy theorists took ‘Q’ and sparked Qanon
That’s an interesting piece, yes, but the identity of Q remains a mystery publicly AFAIK. In that it resembles the origins of bitcoin. (“Satoshi Nakamoto”. Here’s a theory list from 2019)
NoraLenderbee
Northern CA isn’t all on fire either. Most of the fires in the Bay Area are in fairly remote or limited-access areas with relatively low potential for property damage or loss of life. We stood on a mountain south of SF yesterday watching the smoke clouds. It looks like hell, and it’s shocking the way they all started at once. But for most of us, life will be back to normal soon*.
*For some definition of normal.
Baud
Hillary will be on the MSNBC pre-game show.
Roger Moore
@Jay:
I wish I had your confidence. There have been numerous incidents of QAnon followers engaging in violence against people they believed were part of the conspiracy, and that’s likely to intensify if they think they’re losing. The group is a ticking time bomb.
trollhattan
@Haydnseek:
There are a metric fuckton of fires, large ones scattered across much of the state. This linked article has a good interactive map.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article245112075.html
And fire season now extends to and through November, even in NorCal. No historical precedent.
dmsilev
@Kent: It really depends on the ballot initiative the companies are pushing (and spending lots of money advertising for). If that passes, it carves a big loophole in the law which, more or less, let’s the companies continue business-as-usual. I don’t have a good sense as to how likely it is that it will pass; I haven’t seen any polling, but there are so many initiatives here that a lot of people default to voting no on anything even vaguely controversial, so they start out with a high hill to climb. But again, big ad budget.
Jay
@trollhattan:
a big problem limiting which fires they can tackle, is that CA relies on indentured servitude from prisoners for the majority of ground crews,
and SARS-Covid-19 is tearing through the Base Camps/Prison Camps.
NoraLenderbee
And some of them, I assume, are good people.
RaflW
@Roger Moore: Uber reported a larger than expected loss last quarter, and total trips were down 13%, mostly attributed to Covid.
I don’t know how much that all plays into the CA fight, but probably at least a contributing factor to it all.
My sense is, from the biz press I’ve bothered with, they don’t really have a workable business model except to smash taxis and transit and hope for duopoly pricing afterwards? (IDK – I’ve used Lyft a little, and Uber on one Lyft-less trip, so I’m not that into the whole ‘ride-share’ thing much). We’ve continued to use taxis some with the view that if no one rides taxis, they won’t be around if/when Uber-Lyft fails.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@trollhattan: I think Haydnseek’s point was that SoCal isn’t a blazing inferno.
HumboldtBlue
@lowtechcyclist:
And according to the progressives she just opened up the door for challenges to sitting Democrats after she warned that any businesses who worked with challengers would be black-balled by the DCCC so that’s going to be interesting.
trollhattan
@Jay:
It gets complicated which fires fall under what jurisdiction. NFS gets control of and prime responsibility for those that start on federal land and Cal Fire leads others. Mutual aid brings in firefighters from all over, and the prison crews are part of that. Yesterday PG&E lost somebody who was part of a response.
Evacuation centers are being sited in hotels due to COVID, but IDK what rural areas do since they won’t have adequate rooms.
Jay
@Roger Moore:
since Q first appeared in 2017 there have been a handful of violent acts by QAnon “believers”.
Nazi’s have killed far, far more in the same timeframe.
And QAnon-ists sadly, number in the millions.
Roger Moore
@Kent:
I don’t think the state legislature is going to back down. They had every chance to exempt companies like Uber and Lyft when they wrote AB5 and decided not to. There’s no way they’re going to spend the very limited time left in the legislative session giving in to blackmail.
I don’t have a very good idea of how popular Prop 22 is or how voters will react to the companies’ actions. I’m personally mad as hell about it. It makes me want to vote no even more than I already did, but I have no idea if I’m typical or not.
HumboldtBlue
OK, I completely screwed up the Lord Liverpool quote. Must be time for a beer.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@trollhattan: Have they leased the superscoopers from Canada yet this year? I’ve not heard anything about them being used, just the DC-10.
Kathleen
Here’s a link to Goodyear’s response from Cincinnati Business Courier. It appears the slide was fake.
https://www.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/news/2020/08/19/goodyear-responds-to-trump-tweet.html?ana=e_me_set2&j=90524613&t=Morning&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTUdGak1HVTNaV0V6TTJW
Calouste
@RaflW: Their business model sucks, because drive share is a pretty easy market to get into, so they won’t get a duopoly. And any new entrant to that market won’t have the billions of debt that Uber has, and says thank you very much for familiarizing the public with the concept of ride share.
Kathleen
@HumboldtBlue: Doesn’t the DCCC rule apply only to House races?
HumboldtBlue
@Kathleen:
I was under that assumption, but folks took a look and said, “cool, challenges are coming.”
AOC was one of the first comment and it’s going to be interesting going forward how that plays out. They argue if she’s going to take a role opposing an incumbent they will as well.
mrmoshpotato
@Baud: I could go for all these morons cannibalizing each other the basement of an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Kathleen: I’d think so, and folk have to remember the DCCC is composed of incumbent Democratic House members so their primary goal is retaining their seats. Their secondary goal is electing more Democrats.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@HumboldtBlue: I don’t believe AOC is a member of the DCCC.
Roger Moore
@RaflW:
My sense is that Uber and Lyft- and some of the other gig-work companies involved in this, like DoorDash- are basically long cons. During the height of the dot com bubble, I asked a friend who knew more about this stuff than me what was going on with all these companies. It seemed obvious to me that they didn’t have a viable business model, so I didn’t understand why smart venture capitalists were putting money into them. He explained their business model was to sell stock to greater fools and get out before the house of cards collapsed.
Investors obviously learned a lesson when the bubble collapsed, and you couldn’t make enough money just by slapping “dot com” onto the end of a random business anymore. But Uber, Lyft, et. al. have added a little spin to the basic concept. Instead of just going for a quick IPO and sell off, they’re trying to pretend to be viable businesses and future reapers of monopoly rent once they’ve crushed the competition. They’re willing to lose money subsidizing their customers for years to convince people they’re going to be profitable in the future. But the same basic idea holds: they’re hoping to make it big selling stock, even if the company itself isn’t viable.
trollhattan
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
IDK. Earlier this year I’ve seen a DC-10 and a 747. I can hear some of the fleet today but seeing them is out of the question. They fly out of McClellan and Mather fields.
Doug R
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
We’ve got a few fires to fight ourselves, I’m sure we’ll lend them equipment when we can spare it.
https://globalnews.ca/news/7286199/b-c-wildfire-map-2020/
Chyron HR
@HumboldtBlue:
Yeah, just today she really opened up the door to the thing they’ve been doing for the past several election cycles. Let me guess, she also just retroactively justified the “Biden’s a senile rapist” line they’ve been pushing since March?
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
@lowtechcyclist: It’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature ⚡
Bill Arnold
@Roger Moore:
This is my impression too. Uber has some extra sauce – asshole libertarianism often with fuck-yous to the controlling governments. Sometimes it works.
HumboldtBlue
@Chyron HR:
You’re going to have to ask them.
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
I’m not sure and too lazy to go searching at this point, what with the convention coming on and it’s also nearly DAME TIME! (Damian Lillard is an extraordinary basketball player who led his Portland Trailblazers to an upset win in game one over the fucking Lakers.)
Dan B
@Jay: A reminder: Tuesday is when Steve Bannon is on the schedule at the RNC!
Speculation as to who else might be arrested before their speaking slot? Asking for some very best, bigly best, very disturbed Qanon “friends”.
Morzer
I have a great deal of respect for Pelosi as a manager and vote counter, but I think she should have stayed out of Markey/Kennedy.
Roger Moore
@Bill Arnold:
The one I’m really on the fence about is AirBNB. I think the original concept- people renting out space in their homes when they aren’t going to be using it- is reasonable. And I honestly think they’ve found a real need in the temporary housing market: sometimes it’s much better to rent a house rather than some hotel rooms. But they’re incredibly destructive in areas suffering housing crunches. Houses are being converted into de facto hotels, and it’s meaningfully contributing to homelessness. They seem like a business that could be really valuable if they were better regulated.
Kent
Of course they are a long con. The most insanely stupid part of it is the self-driving part. I can’t conceive of what Uber is thinking to dump billions into self-driving Taxis. Right now they complain about labor costs, but their drivers do 100% of their vehicle maintenance, storage during off hours, insurance, liability, etc. etc.. If Uber gets rid of the drivers and owns its own fleet of self driving cars they are going to need immense infrastructure to charge, maintain, clean, service, and store them. And they will have immense capital and liability costs.
Anyone who thinks self-driving Taxis are a good idea only has to walk out into an ordinary San Francisco street with all the construction, homeless, bikers, scooters, jaywalkers, double-parked vehicles, and such and try to imagine how computers are going to navigate that.
Kent
Exactly. It’s not at all like Facebook which holds a monopoly because everyone you know is already there and no one would be on some new startup. All an uber competitor would need to do in any random city is some clever marketing and they would be in the door. Especially if they had a clever niche like driver-owned co-op or something that would make people pick them.
Taxi companies should have done this long ago. They were too ossified to respond. It’s not that people didn’t like taxis. They didn’t like having to make a voice call and not know when some taxi would show up.
Kent
AirB&B should be the easiest to regulate. Because you can’t hide the houses or rentals. They are stuck in place and any diligent city regulatory agency can just pull up AirB&B app and go find them all on foot and issue them citations or licenses or inspections or whatever. I can see all the AirB&B rentals for a give city in an instant. I can’t find all the Uber drivers. I can only hail one of them at a time.
Ken
If as seems likely a couple of QAnon-ists are elected to the House, does anyone think the House might use its Article I Section 5 powers to expel them? It requires a two-thirds vote, but it has happened a few times.
Dan B
@Kathleen: My grandmother was a good friend of Mrs. F.A. Seiberling (Gertrude). F. A. Founded Goodyear. My grandmother Anna Jones and Gertrude were both trained operatic singers. They collaborated on bringing musicians and orchestras to Akron. They often stayed at Stan Hywet, the 100 room home on 3,000 acres. I have some paintings from Gertrude to this day.
My father was a chief chemist for the company F.A. founded after the NY bankers took control of Goodyear. F.A. spent a lot of time on the factiry floor talking to the workers and knew most by name. It was a management style the NY bankers did not like.
Eunicecycle
@Dan B: we love Stan Hywet! Beautiful old house, with gorgeous gardens in the spring and summer and thousands of lights and decorations in December.
Ken
10 SOUND HORN
20 ACCELERATE
30 GOTO 10
joel hanes
removed after reading contradictory evidence.
Martin
@Kent:
Things are generally fine here in SoCal, and are fine in almost all parts of NorCal that you will drive through.
In a way, this isn’t terribly uncommon. Every few years we’ll have widespread outbreaks due to storms or winds or whatever. What’s unusual now is that while the fires aren’t threatening people broadly, we’re being told that much of the firefighting infrastructure isn’t functioning due to Covid. So what would otherwise be difficult and unfortunate, would at least be manageable, and right now CalFire is kind of shrugging and saying ‘we don’t know if we can handle it or not’, and that takes us to places that we don’t know what they look like. At least I don’t know – maybe folks who have been in the state longer have seen it. Generally speaking things on the ground aren’t bad apart from Vacaville area – not a great time for a scenic Napa drive, but we’re alarmed because we don’t know how it’ll look next week because things have changed. Odds are it’ll be fine. At least the feds are giving us resources this time, unlike last summer.
Generally speaking when traveling during fires, try and route around the major ones, and pay attention to your traffic app (Google or whatever) for any minor ones that pop up. I’ve driven through small fires that were burning up against the side of the freeway a number of times (once in Saskatchewan) and it gets your attention, but most fires are quite small and low to the ground. I assume most people here have dealt with that. Driving into LA from out of state on 4th of July night will pretty much guarantee you see plenty of that.
Steer around the large ones particularly if they’re below 50% containment. They really do a good job of closing roads and rerouting, but firefighters are trying to get in, residents evacuating – they don’t need you there. Over 50%, they’ve got a handle on it, it’s just burning wilderness, and things are getting back to normal.
There aren’t fires too close to anything in Santa Clara or around Stanford, though you will be very aware of large fires some dozens of miles away. It’s safe, but it’ll be an experience. I’ve spoken to prospective students and parents with a pumpkin orange sky and continual ash falling, and you can immediately tell who is from CA and who is not. The CA folks are concerned of the overall state of affairs, but pretty much just shake it off. The out of state folks are full ‘what the fuck is going on’.
And a tip – don’t brush ash off of the paint on your car – it’ll scratch. Clear your windshield so you have visibility and just let it blow off.
trollhattan
@Kent:
The left turn will remain the Friedman Unit of self-driving cars until such time as we capitulate. They do not have an adequate solution.
My fear is self-driving semis will be given free reign of the interstates, maybe Mitch and Missus Mitch will throw the trucking industry a bone on their way out and compel states to allow it, lest they lose federal funding. IMO we’ll see self-driving trucks long before passenger vehicles.
The Pale Scot
@dlwchico:
The Epoch Times. That smarmy fuck that interrupts my concerts on uTube, that guy will be sent to the Siberian salt mines when the revolution comes
Dan B
@Eunicecycle: My grandmother stayed at Stan Hywet with my twin red-headed aunts and my father and would perform for the Tuesday Musical Club and other guests. My father loved all the servants’ secret passageways.
We were offered to stay in the carriagehouse but my mother was afraid my brother and I would griw up with only Firestone and Goodrich kids as playmates.
joel hanes
@Martin:
things on the ground aren’t bad apart from Vacaville area
The Santa Cruz mountain fire around Felton, Boulder Creek, etc. seems me to be just as bad or worse in terms of damage to structures — a _lot_ of people live in those hills, among the redwoods, wherever the ground is flat enough. Big Basin State Park is burned; Butano State Park too, I think. The coastal town of Davenport lost some structures … I don’t know the extent of the damage.
One bad windy day and things could get very ugly.
lgerard
@Bill Arnold:
It’s
O’BrienSorosLadyraxterinok
@Kent:
Thanks for linking to blog. Sent link to son
The Pale Scot
@R-Jud:
Have you noticed whats going on in England for the last four years. Boris gave his brother a peerage, multiple instances of incompetent but loyal people being hired and placed in positions that require expertise and experience. Multiple instances of corporations given contracts that they are completely incapable of executing. The government in response to the coming Brexit clusterfuck hired a newly formed corp to provide extra ferries. the corp has no ferries, there are no ferries available worldwide to buy or lease, etc.
Sound familiar?
Boris is Trump’s mini-me
Fair Economist
@Kent:If you’re looking for a road trip, the 101 is a more interesting way to get south than the 5, although it takes about 2 hours longer IIRC. The 5 is really boring through the Central Valley, and there’s relatively little to do. The 101 goes through a lot of towns, including the major destination areas around Monterey and Santa Barbara, and there’s generally more scenery to see. (The Sierras are great to look at, but due to air pollution you can rarely see them from the 5.)
Fair Economist
@dlwchico: I would swamp her with stories about COVID deaths and long COVID. There are literally thousands of stories at this point.
Martin
@Roger Moore: Yep, that’s pretty much it. I’ll add that they did get a stay of 2 weeks, at which point they need to show the state a plan to convert contractors to employees, and if they can’t the state can remove the stay and enforce the law. So, they’ll shut down in 2 weeks instead of tonight.
As you note AB5 codified the court ruling but also made it easier to comply with, so AB5 helps a number of categories of contractors that wouldn’t have been able to avoid employee status. AB5 is not the cause of this – it’s the labor law written more than 30 years ago that the courts have clarified interpretation of – mostly because gig companies distorted it so badly.
People outside of CA need to understand just how worker-favored CA labor law is. Part of that is there is a social contract focus there. I believe this is part of a longer, slow, and probably irregular process to address the social program problem in CA. California spends a wild amount of money on Medicaid – roughly as much as the Texas govt spends on everything in their state – Medicaid, roads, schools, universities, etc.
The public contract had been that employers, prohibited from increasing wages during WWII and other times, would take responsibility for health insurance and retirement and other benefits as as way to attract workers. That’s where Kaiser Permanente came from. But over time they’ve shifted those costs back to the taxpayer, with gig employers being the most egregious examples. This was a way to pay no payroll taxes (the contractor pays all of those) and provide no benefits, dumping everyone on either Covered California, which the state has not treated like garbage like most other states, or on MediCal.
It is unsustainable for corporations to simultaneously argue that taxation is killing them and that the cost of basic services for their employees are also not their problem. So California has to shift that back into balance somehow. I think we’re back in wait-and-see mode on single payer, but the economics of it are difficult when so much payroll tax revenue is being shoveled through the feds.
Clearly the national GOP has no interest in solving this, and Dems can’t get enough of a hold to solve it either, so I think the state has decided to start to crank the problem back via labor laws. Will it hurt to lose Uber/Lyft from the state? Near term, possibly, but two results may come from this:
Uber/Lyft are proposing providing some fractional credits for employee benefits, which is fine, but that’s just a payroll tax which they thus far have steadfastly avoided and now want to redefine in their terms. I’m not sure how this will shake out, but I don’t hear very many people in favor of the initiative.
Martin
@joel hanes: Shit. I really like Big Basin.
Bill Arnold
@Fair Economist:
That’d work, and is generally useful. Do you have a collection of links to share? (I have some but they’re haphazard.)
The Moar You Know
@Martin: My whole life, 54 years. I’ve seen two things with regards to fires; one is it comes in cycles, and two is that CalFire, with regards to “saving metropolitan areas” has a great success rate, but they also have lost entire small towns and not infrequently either. It would help if they had ever been adequately funded or staffed, but that’s never been the case in my entire life.
KithKanan
@Fair Economist: Not right now it isn’t. Massive fire in the Salinas area and other areas so the first several hours of that drive would be through smoke. I’m hunkered down here in SLO 100+ miles from the fires and I can barely see the hills a mile or so away.
Morzer
@The Pale Scot:
Yes, but what are you going to do when the Siberian salt mines stamp him “Return to sender” and refuse to accept delivery?
Sloane Ranger
@The Pale Scot: In all fairness, almost all of the reasonably smart, competent Tory politicians were Remainers. They’ve been frozen out of active politics and those that haven’t have been passed over for senior Ministerial roles. True believers in Brexit only required.
The Pale Scot
@Sloane Ranger: I think the problem in the US and the England comes down to 30%-40% of their populations are bent because they get the feeling that being English speaking and white isn’t as special as it use to be. In the US it’s loss of internal racial dominance, in the England it’s loss of external racial dominance. In England specifically, the core is mostly retired defined pension own their own house types. In the US the it’s high school educated business owners upset that being white and moderately successful didn’t get them where they think they should be, mostly because asset inflation still puts them in the precariat. They see of themselves not being taken seriously by the “elites”, which is Dump’s eternal gripe.
Rupert’s focus on enhancing that gripe and other MSM’s clickbait is a problem that’s not going away.
J R in WV
@Kent:
In Firenze (aka Florence) Italy, you can ask any business to call a cab, and the guarantee is that one will arrive in 3 minutes. It never took us that long, either. Really well done for a giant tourist center.
Tho one guy was kind of a prick, pulled in really close to big concrete pots of plants, then gave Ruth a hairy eyeball when the door touched the planter. He took us back to the hotel, tho…
People running the Palace we toured were rude, also… probably lots of ugly tourists to deal with all day long. Rural Tuscany was wonderful, small town folks were sweet and helpful. Mostly.