How to celebrate Black Friday

We have a little tradition here at Chez Myers for Black Friday: we stay home, refuse to do any shopping, and god forbid we would be caught dead in a shopping mall. We have never seen the point of going into a frenzy of spending money just because it’s a day off, and because corporations have spent the past week dunning us with ads for “sales” that are really just them flogging the same old merchandise with greater intensity.

However, we’ve lacked a patron saint for this day. We haven’t had anything like a Santa Claus to represent the true spirit of Black Friday. We needed an icon of failed, lying, greedy capitalism run amuck, and what do you know, one has dropped into our lap.

Samuel Bankman-Fried.

Bankman-Fried had become a legend by pushing an image of monkish aloofness, vowing to forsake the allures of his extraordinary wealth — sleeping on beanbag chairs, driving a Toyota Corolla — and to give away his fortune for the greater good.

Yet in April, when Avedisian was hired as a master of ceremonies for a conference in the Bahamas sponsored by FTX, Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange, she saw how the 30-year-old billionaire really lived: in a guarded island compound, every need closely catered to, the world’s elite at his beck and call.

That’s our boy. What better avatar of the spirit of the corporate world than a frumpy, disheveled, arrogant man-child who presents himself as a benevolent wise master, pretending to live a life of denial of the material world, while simultaneously indulging in the grossest excesses of greed and extravagant luxury?

Best of all, this month his lifestyle has undergone a magnificent pratfall, seeing billions of dollars evaporate, and reversing his image from wunderkind to poster child for incompetence.

“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information,” said Ray, who once oversaw the liquidation of Enron, one of America’s most infamous corporate frauds.

Poof, all gone. His Bahamian penthouse is on the chopping block, his island refuge is exposed as a shallow scam, his philosophical pretensions revealed to be a lie.

The odd behavior did not stop Bankman-Fried from building a brand as the volatile industry’s voice of reason. He’d been celebrated for pushing for crypto regulation on Capitol Hill, donating generously to pandemic-prevention efforts and Democratic politicians, and preaching a dogma known as “effective altruism” that used math and logic to determine where their donations could accomplish the most global good.

We can only hope his downfall cripples that “effective altruism” bullshit, too.

It’s also the case that SBF exposes the incompetence of investment bankers and venture capitalist. What brought him down was stupidity and greed and a lack of skill in running a big company — he was a cocky child handed a whole bunch of money by luck and persuasion, and he lost it all with the usual tawdry criminal failings. And he still has people fooled!

Pack said his firm declined to invest in Alameda after learning that Bankman-Fried had hidden $10 million in losses and planned to use their money to fund FTX, not Alameda, without telling them. The episode, he said, had many of the same issues that ultimately led to FTX’s bankruptcy: Bankman-Fried’s secrecy and deception about how money was spent; his cryptic messages and shoddy record-keeping; his excuses for losing clients’ funds.

“They were very brilliant traders. They made a lot of money … but they also lost it almost as fast as it came in,” he said. They had a “cold, emotionless, calculated approach to playing with other people’s money.”

Not brilliant at all. Give me $10 billion dollars and an indifference to the suffering of others, and I could throw it all away just as quickly by buying over-priced real estate and being stupid.

Sam Bankman-Fried is the perfect symbol of Black Friday: a dumpy, dead-eyed schlub wandering about in a vast, sterile penthouse, staring at a cell phone, going nowhere. The anti-Black Friday is sitting down in a home with your grandchild drawing and playing games and not spending a penny for the happiness of your existence. Maybe we’ll go outside later so she can ride her scooter around the block.

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are also runners-up for this distinguished symbolism. We have an embarrassment of idiots!

Well, that explains a lot about that shooter

Meet the Club Q murderer’s father. You’ll immediately regret it.

He goes on to say, “I praised him for violent behavior really early. I told him it works… You’ll get immediate results.” He’s definitely among the Republican base, emphasis on “base.”

Here are the immediate results his son got.

Longtermists are an existential risk

We all have lots to worry about already, with pandemics and climate change and political crises and growing irrationality, but one I’m increasingly alarmed by is the popularity of these pseudo-intellectual frauds parading about as “longtermists” or “effective altruists” who believe we should be worshipping potential future generations rather than dealing with real people in the here and now. It leads to distorted priorities. It doesn’t help that their thought-leaders are cocky ignoramuses. Émile P. Torres writes about William MacAskill’s opinion of the importance of climate change.

One finds the same insouciant attitude about climate change in MacAskill’s recent book. For example, he notes that there is a lot of uncertainty about the impacts of extreme warming of 7 to 10 degrees Celsius but says “it’s hard to see how even this could lead directly to civilisational collapse.” MacAskill argues that although “climatic instability is generally bad for agriculture,” his “best guess” is that “even with fifteen degrees of warming, the heat would not pass lethal limits for crops in most regions,” and global agriculture would survive.

I am not a climate scientist, but I know a number of them, and follow the work, and that statement is jaw-droppingly idiotic. Even with the amount of warming we’ve got now, we’ve had heat waves that kill large numbers of people, and this past year has seen a series of extreme weather disasters.

Record-breaking heat waves baked India and Pakistan, then monsoon flooding left about a third of Pakistan under water, affecting an estimated 33 million people. Temperatures exceeded 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 Celsius) for prolonged periods in many places, and even broke 122 F (50 C) in Jacobabad, Pakistan, in May.

The Asian heat helped to melt some glaciers in the Himalayas, elevating rivers. At the same time, three times the normal annual rain fell in Pakistan during the weekslong monsoon. More than 1,500 people died in the flooding, an estimated 1.8 million homes were damaged or destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of livestock were lost. Food for the coming seasons will be in short supply.

Extreme heat in Europe led to wildfires, especially in Spain and Portugal. The drought in Spain dried up a reservoir, revealing the long-submerged “Spanish Stonehenge,” an ancient circle of megalithic stones believed to date back to around 5000 B.C. Electricity generation in France plummeted, with low rivers reducing the ability to cool nuclear power towers, and German barges had difficulty finding enough water to navigate the Rhine River.

That’s just this year! And the trend is ever upwards! Keep in mind that when climate experts tell you they’re concerned about a 3 degree rise, they’re looking at the mean temperature…and the extremes will be far worse. It’s the extremes that kill people and devastate regions, not the mean.

Yet here’s MacAskill blithely claiming that a FIFTEEN FUCKING DEGREE rise would be acceptable. Agriculture would survive, he thinks, so we’d be OK. Never mind the floods & fires & storms & mass upheaval & total disruption & civilization collapse. William MacAskill thinks he’ll still get his corn flakes every morning.

But don’t listen to me. Torres contacted real climatologists about that claim.

For example, I shared the section about global agriculture with Timothy Lenton, who directs the Global Systems Institute and is Chair in Climate Change and Earth System Science at the University of Exeter. Lenton told me that MacAskill’s assertion about 15 degrees of warming is “complete nonsense—we already show that in a 3-degree-warmer world there are major challenges of moving niches for human habitability and agriculture.”

Similarly, Luke Kemp, a research associate at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk who recently co-authored an article with Lenton on catastrophic climate change and is an expert on civilizational collapse, told me that “a temperature rise of 10 degrees would be a mass extinction event in the long term. It would be geologically unprecedented in speed. It would mean billions of people facing sustained lethal heat conditions, the likely displacement of billions, the Antarctic becoming virtually ice-free, surges in disease, and a plethora of cascading impacts. Confidently asserting that this would not result in collapse because agriculture is still possible in some parts of the world is silly and simplistic.”

If we’re really worried about existential risk and the possible extinction of the human species, I say we need to tar and feather these longtermist fantasists and launch them on a rail to the moon. It looks like delusional crackpots are going to kill us all.

Fifteen degrees. My god, that’s insane.

Keep talking, Herschel Walker

The man running for the office of dumbest politician in America has put out another ad, this time slamming trans athletes…right after the Club Q shooting. It’s not just the bad timing, but also that he has teamed up with Riley Gaines, the indignant transphobe, which opens the door to sick burns.

Barely a day after a deadly LGBTQ bar shooting killed two transgender people and three other patrons, Georgia senatorial candidate Herschel Walker (R) released a campaign ad slamming trans athletes. Democrats are pointing to Republican anti-LGBTQ campaigns like Walker’s as the type of rhetoric that led to the murder of five people at Colorado Springs bar Club Q on Saturday night.

The video featured Riley Gaines, a self-described 12-time NCAA All-American swimmer. In March, Gaines tied for fifth place with trans swimmer Lia Thomas. Gaines has been complaining about it ever since.

Fifth place. She’s complaining about having to share a teeny-tiny footnote in a record book with a trans woman. That’s a photo of two cranky losers up there.

Be anti-woke, go broke

Peter Thiel funded it. Candace Owens promoted it. I had never heard of this GloriFi bank until it collapsed.

It’s whole deal was that it was “anti-woke,” whatever that means. Since it was run by a gang of rabid capitalists who didn’t know what “woke” means, that doesn’t matter. What it really was was an ideologically driven attempt to prove that conservative principles were profitable and practical. They weren’t.

As The Wall Street Journal, which first reported on GloriFi’s shuttering, puts it, the business was “anti-woke.” While GloriFi itself never publicly described itself as anti-woke, the company had no qualms about marketing itself as a service provider for right-wing America. In a July press release, the company described itself as “a pro-freedom, pro-America, pro-capitalism technology company . . . empowering members to put their money where their values are and preserve the Country they believe in.”

In other words, its foundation was built on far-right paranoia and their bizarre obsessions.

Pitching itself as a financial institution that allowed one to be “free to celebrate your love of God and country without fear of cancellation,” GloriFi’s marketing read more like a campaign ad than an enticing APR offer on a new credit card. Highlights from the “about us” page include: “OUR BILL OF RIGHTS IS NON-NEGOTIABLE” and “WE ARE ONE NATION UNDER GOD.”

In its short tenure GloriFi, managed to launch checking and savings accounts as well as credit cards, with plans to offer mortgages and insurance in a future that will no longer take place. Founder and CEO Toby Neugebauer pitched plans to offer gun owners discounts on home insurance, credit cards made of shell casing material, and assistance paying legal bills if customers shot someone in self-defense. Over the summer, GloriFi secured conservative commentator Candace Owens as a co-founder and spokesperson for the brand.

Guys. Guys. GUYS. I know this is news to you, but regular banks won’t cancel your account if you announce that you love god and America. That’s not a sound basis for differentiating yourself from the competition. In fact, it makes you look weird, and especially stuff like the special privileges for gun-owners and people who shoot other people was probably counter to profitability. Having a controversial freak like Candace Owens (what? Laura Loomer was unavailable?) as the face of your company didn’t project seriousness, either.

Predictably, it imploded.

But GloriFi was unable to translate ideological grandstanding into functional corporate management. Even before its public launch, the startup was plagued by reports of chaos amongst staff and financiers. GloriFi missed its planned launch date several times, at one point due to clashes with Texas financial regulators. Reports emerged of unpaid invoices and erratic behavior from Neugebauer, who had converted his home Dallas mansion into the company’s main office.

According to the Journal, the company was eventually forced to hire a law firm to investigate workplace issues, particularly around Neugebauer. In one memo reviewed by the Journal, GloriFi’s former Head of Human Resources Britt Amos described several employees at Neugebaur’s mansion telling him to “make sure I leave around six,” and explaining that “after 5 p.m. Toby starts drinking and things at the house deteriorate quickly.” Amos also described a meeting where a visibly drunk Neugebauer was “drinking Red Bull and putting alcohol in it.”

You know, being “woke” just means you’re aware of the social shortcomings of the existing system, and are concerned about fairness and equality. Declaring yourself “anti-woke” implies that you’re ignorant of reality and want a system that will screw people over, things I do not want in a financial institution.

Maybe I should try changing restaurants

We decided to splurge on Chinese take-out tonight, and of course we got a fortune cookie. I opened mine up, and this is what it said:

If money really changes everything, then maybe you should try changing the money.

Say what? I’ve seen cryptic fortunes before, but this one was particularly puzzling. And stupid. I scratched my head over it a bit, thinking, “but does money really change everything?” and “how do I change the money? You mean like getting a roll of quarters?” Then I wondered what this has to do with me, or any customer for vegetable fried rice.

Then I flipped it over.

[Read more…]

Yet another Twitter alternative

I tried out Hive Social. I don’t think I like it much yet.

What is Hive Social? It’s like a mashup of Twitter and Instagram, with a dash of MySpace. It offers the simplicity of Twitter before it went down the drain, puts a bit more emphasis on images like Instagram (or at least before video), and you can even add music to your profile. It’s interesting and certainly a bit easier to use than Mastodon.

Simplicity is good — it has a simple chronological timeline, none of that algorithmic crap that just gets in the way. That “dash of MySpace” isn’t appealing at all, nor is the melding with Instagram and emphasis on images. Mastodon is really easy to use, I’ve never understood how people can complain about its difficulty.

But here’s the deeply off-putting part, for me. You get on, and it’s just a wall of images. Not text, not words, none of the stuff I’d prefer. What I immediately see is selfie culture, picture after picture of attractive young twenty-somethings showing off their makeup and posing game, and I don’t want to click further. I mean, that’s all fine, I think it’s fabulous for the younglings to thrive and have fun on social media, it’s just not for me, and we grizzled old people don’t belong at that party.

If I were to join in and felt obligated to flaunt my beauty, it would be nothing but spider photos, and it would be another place where I don’t fit in at all.

All you beautiful people would be less uncomfortable than I’d be, so try it out. It’s mobile only, so you’ll have to rummage around on your phone to find it. I’ll just lurk for now, as is appropriate for a homely old person, I guess. Maybe it will grow on me.

High heels vs AR15, guess who won

It was an epic battle in Club Q: one hateful gunman inflamed with the rhetoric of conservative pundits versus a room full of unarmed dancers and partiers, and one guy who took action, Richard Fierro.

As he looked up from the floor, Fierro spotted the shooter’s body armor and instead of running from the attacker, moved toward him, grasped the body armor, then stripped suspected gunman Anderson Aldrich of his rifle and beat him bloody with it.

“I grabbed the gun out of his hand and just started hitting him in the head, over and over,” Fierro told the Times, describing a scuffle in which he found himself atop the 300-something pound gunman, who had momentarily lost his grip on his rifle. “I just know I have to kill this guy before he kills us.”

He said he enlisted the help of another patron, Thomas James, to secure the rifle so it was out of reach of their attacker.

He also enlisted the help of a drag performer from the club, asking them to kick the gunman. The performer, he said, “stuffed a high-heeled shoe in the attacker’s face.”

That was so satisfying to read. That’s what we all need to do, fight back against the gutless cowards.

An important part of the heroism, though, is that Richard Fierro was at that club with his family because he loves the lgbtq community, wants to support their businesses, and enjoyed their company. He’s on the side of light.

His wife also made a statement.

With an incredibly heavy and broken heart we lost Raymond, who had been a part of our lives since our daughter was in high school. Raymond was Kassy’s boyfriend. We are going to miss him and his bright smile so much. We are going through a lot of emotions as a family and as a brewery. The loss of lives and the injured are in our hearts. We are devastated and torn. We love our #lgbtq community and stand with them. This cowardly and despicable act of hate has no room in our lives or business.

I’m proud that this family is on our side. Also disgusted at the Tucker Carlsons and Chaya Raichiks and all the Christian evangelicals who have been encouraging the hate for so long