Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

Joe Lieberman disappointingly reemerged to remind us that he’s still alive.

Don’t expect peaches from an apple tree.

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

Fani Willis claps back at Trump chihuahua, Jim Jordan.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. don’t touch it.”

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

A consequence of cucumbers

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

DeSantis transforms Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

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Tech News and Issues

Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Checking In On Twitter’s ‘God Emperor’

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Since Puck is distinctly a niche publication, thought I’d share this piece from ‘former restructuring and bankruptcy advisor at Lazard’ William Cohan, “Will Elon Lose Control of Twitter?”.

(Bad news first, probably not, assuming he still wants to keep it… )

Oh dear, what is going on these days with Elon Musk at Twitter? Let’s see: Twitter is being kicked out of its office in Boulder because—wait for it—Elon decided to stop paying the rent. He’s stopped paying the bills for Twitter’s use of Google Cloud and, according to my partner Eriq Gardner, for JAMS, the arbitration administrator that is adjudicating many of Musk’s legal disputes with his ex-employees. He’s also facing a lawsuit from the Wall Street P.R. firm, Joele Frank, which claims it’s owed more than $830,000 in fees for advice it provided during Musk’s campaign to buy Twitter last year.

As a former restructuring and bankruptcy advisor at Lazard, I can recognize the signs of a company in distress. After all, it’s a pretty obvious tell that there’s financial trouble brewing when a company stops paying its bills as they become due. That’s a recipe for financial disaster, or bankruptcy, or both. Last time I checked, if a company has more than 12 creditors—as Twitter does—then any three of them can join together to put a company into an involuntary bankruptcy proceeding. And Elon is in danger here. At some point, the creditors he is mindlessly stiffing on a regular basis are going to get sufficiently pissed to throw Twitter into bankruptcy.

But I don’t get it, dude. Elon is the world’s richest man, with a net worth of some $233 billion, according to Bloomberg, up an astounding $100 billion so far in 2023. Why is he not paying the people he owes money to? Why is he risking an involuntary bankruptcy filing? And then, of course, there is the upcoming interest payment of around $300 million due to the group of seven or so banks that still hold Twitter’s $13 billion of debt used to pay a portion of the $44 billion Twitter purchase price. I know Elon made the interest payments owed in January and in May. But will he make the next one, due in September? I suppose not paying those (metaphorical) nickels and dimes is one thing. But if he doesn’t pay the banks the $300 million he owes them in September, he will be asking for trouble in the form of a financial restructuring, or worse, a bankruptcy filing…

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“I’m a Brown Person. Do You think People on Substack Should Say I Should Get Kicked Out of the Country?”

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This is the most damning interview I have seen to date with a glibertarian techbro, and it is shocking:

Mike Masnick at TechDirt breaks it down:

I get it. I totally get it. Every tech dude comes along and has this thought: “hey, we’ll be the free speech social media site. We won’t do any moderation beyond what’s required.” Even Twitter initially thought this. But then everyone discovers reality. Some discover it faster than others, but everyone discovers it. First, you realize that there’s spam. Or illegal content such as child sexual abuse material. And if that doesn’t do it for you, the copyright police will.

But, then you realize that beyond spam and content that breaks the rules, you end up with malicious users who cause trouble. And trouble drives away users, advertisers, or both. And if you don’t deal with the malicious users, the malicious users define you. It’s the “oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now” problem.

And, look, sure, in the US, you can run the Nazi bar, thanks to the 1st Amendment. But running a Nazi bar is not winning any free speech awards. It’s not standing up for free speech. It’s building your own brand as the Nazi bar and abdicating your own free speech rights of association to kick Nazis out of your private property, and to craft a different kind of community. Let the Nazis build their own bar, or everyone will just assume you’re a Nazi too.

It was understandable a decade ago, before the idea of “trust & safety” was a thing, that not everyone would understand all this. But it is unacceptable for the CEO of a social media site today to not realize this.

Enter Substack CEO Chris Best.

***

And your reputation when you refuse to moderate is not “the grand enabler of free speech.” Because it’s the internet itself that is the grand enabler of free speech. When you’re a private centralized company and you don’t deal with hateful content on your site, you’re the Nazi bar.

Most companies that want to get large enough recognize that playing to the grifters and the nonsense peddlers works for a limited amount of time, before you get the Nazi bar reputation, and your growth is limited. And, in the US, you’re legally allowed to become the Nazi bar, but you should at least embrace that, and not pretend you have some grand principled strategy.

This is what Nilay was getting at. When you’re not the government, you can set whatever rules you want, and the rules you set are the rules that will define what you are as a service. Chris Best wants to pretend that Substack isn’t the Nazi bar, while he’s eagerly making it clear that it is.

It’s stupidly short-sighted, and no, it won’t support free speech. Because people who don’t want to hang out at the Nazi bar will just go elsewhere.

Personally, I would add that in addition to calling it the Nazi Bar, we should call it what it is- a safe space for hate speech.

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OpenAI’s Latest Image Generator is Pretty Damn Impressive

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I wrote about text-to-image AIs here last summer. Well, the latest bleeding-edge model is out; it is way more interesting, so I thought I’d drop an update.

It’s called DALL-E 2, and it’s made by OpenAI, which also produces the GPT text generation AIs I’ve written about. They’ve given early access to a bunch of people who have been posting the results on Twitter. It’s not super surprising that the shared images are impressive; AI enthusiasts aren’t going to be sharing the failures, which I assume are frequent. Still–the successes are very, very successful.

Here’s one, and then we can move below the fold so the blog doesn’t drown in tweets.

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Late Night Open Thread: Tweeters Review Twitter Buy (Proposal)

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As the business media have been careful to point out, any deal of this size takes six months or more to finalize. And, the unspoken subtext runs, many highly publicized megadeals never come to fruition, especially when the bid is led by a guy renowned for ideas about child-sized rescue submarines and brain implants. So it’s a little early yet to panic, not that logic ever stopped Twitter users…

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C.R.E.A.M. Open Thread: Hail to the Chief (Sh*tposter)

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A November 2021 post from Roy Edroso, professional Cassandra, is being recirculated around Twitter — “Operation Overlord: Why Elon Musk will run for President”:

Predictions are a mug’s game, as we all know, but I’ll lay one down right now: I think there will be a serious push over the next twelve years (assuming the nation lasts that long) to nominate Elon Musk as a Republican candidate for President of the United States. Since he’s not a native-born American this would require amendment of Article II of the Constitution, so I expect that to happen as well.

You may wonder why the Republicans would bother to elevate someone whose nomination would require all that extra groundwork. First of all, amending the Constitution would not be that big a deal; it’s not as if they respect the thing any more than they do the other instruments of government they’re always fucking with, and they might even enjoy the perverse challenge to put their shit-stains on the old parchment just as a flex; they might make “Let’s Go Brandon” the National Anthem while they’re at it.

My contention is that, from what we know about Republicans, policy no longer has anything to do with their decisions, and they mainly want be represented by someone who fits their idea of American greatness — which, as we see from their current avatar Trump, means their champion must be vicious and boorish and, above all, project a winning air. In my view Musk laps the field…

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: Spring Holidays

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Yes, it’s Politico, but the article is still positive:


Answer, per every Jewish respondent: Plain matzah always tastes like wet cardboard thrown into a toaster oven!

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Late Night Open Thread: Musk Buys Into Twitter

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Musk gets himself crosswise the SEC just tweeting, never mind attempting to influence the whole platform, but when you’ve got that much money I guess you have to keep shoveling it out of the yacht just to stay afloat. As a publicity stunt — EM’s main business form, AFAICT — it’s already accomplished its presumed goal, making The Richest Man both richer and more notorious in a single day. Per Reuters Opinion:

Unlike Twitter (TWTR.N), Edgar isn’t a household name. But occasionally the latter – the Securities and Exchange Commission’s public filing database – can be a more powerful platform. Tesla (TSLA.O) boss Elon Musk disclosed in a filing on Monday that he has acquired a 9.2% stake in Twitter (TWTR.N). That sent the company’s shares up more than 20%, adding $7 billion-plus to its market capitalization. It’s the ultimate attention-grabbing post.

As a measure of engagement, it’s hard to think of many posts on Twitter’s own platform that do better. One rare example might be Musk’s 2018 tweets that he was preparing to take Tesla private. Those posts sent the electric-car maker’s shares soaring. The SEC was unamused, forcing Musk to agree to let Tesla lawyers screen his posts.

Both the regulator and Twitter have come in for Musk’s ire. Musk has claimed the SEC is unfairly persecuting him. And he has tweeted about possibly creating an alternative to Twitter. Attacking how platform owners police content and threatening to move to a breakaway venue is a hallowed tradition – perhaps especially among popular posters like Musk, who has 80 million followers. He has elevated the practice by spending billions of dollars on Twitter shares…

Twitter is used to being entangled with critics. Silver Lake’s Egon Durban sits on its board after Twitter signed an agreement with the private equity firm and activist Elliott Management. Musk may stick around, tweeting as he goes along. When it comes to airing his opinions about Twitter itself, though, the SEC’s Edgar platform may have an edge.

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