What’s the point of prices marked as $X.99 cents?

Elon Musk has to somehow find ways to make his purchase of Twitter for $44 billion work as a business deal as opposed to an ego trip. He has borrowed $13 billion from banks, and analysts are saying that he and the banks are going to take a financial bath on this deal because Twitter is simply not worth the price he paid unless it can drastically cut costs and greatly increase revenues. This article lists the revenues and expenses from 2012 until 2021, and since Musk has taken it private, this may be the last chance we’ll get to look at the books.

The company, launched in 2006, has shown a loss for every year since 2012 except for 2018 and 2019, with 2021 having a $221 million loss. Its revenue has grown over the years and was $5 billion for 2021, with $4.5 billion coming from advertising and 0.5 billion from other sources such as data licensing. About half of its revenue comes from outside the US.
[Read more…]

Changing times

Today at 2:00 am is when the US changed from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time which required shifting clocks back by one hour. It is also the cue for many (including me) to grumble once again about this clock adjusting process that takes place twice a year. I went around changing all eight clocks last evening and then a few minutes later, there was a brief power cut, which meant that I had to again set the time on four clocks that are plugged in.

Not every part of the US changes times like this, with some staying on Standard Time all year round.

Exceptions include Arizona (except for the Navajo, who do observe daylight saving time in Navajo Nation), Hawaii, and the overseas territories of American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the United States Virgin Islands.

I grew up near the equator where the amount of daylight stays pretty much the same throughout the year. and thus does not require fiddling around with clocks twice a year. But irritation with the practice is growing in the US and arguments for keeping one time throughout the year seem to becoming more frequent.
[Read more…]

How a US Civil War battle song became a Sri Lankan school cheer

(This is an edited and updated version of a post I wrote back in 2014.)

In the urban areas of Sri Lanka, schools tend to be mostly single-sex K-12, and among the boys’ schools there were intense sporting rivalries. During those games, boys would show their support for their teams using generic cheers that were common to many schools. These cheers originated long before my own time. One of them was used when one’s team had suffered a setback and was meant to rally one’s side to show that this was not a cause for concern. It consisted of the following words set to music.

Hurrah for the Mary! Hurrah for the lamb!
Hurrah for the [school name] boys who do not care a damn!
Now everywhere that Mary went the lamb was sure to go
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!

Each school would simply insert their own name, making the cheer available to any school.

This cheer made no sense whatsoever even by the extremely low standards of Sri Lankan school cheers. But the last line was particularly puzzling since, apart from being absurd (a lamb shouting?) it was a complete non-sequitur. I used to vaguely wonder how and where this cheer could have possibly originated but after leaving school, I forgot both the cheer and the puzzle of the last line.
[Read more…]

The counter-intuitive appeal of the lottery

Every day I read reports of how the jackpot for the Powerball lottery, one of the many lotteries run by states in the US, keeps increasing in size. Under the system, if a drawing does not produce a winner, the jackpot rolls over with the value of the new bets added to the old. Currently the prize is about 1.2 billion dollars.

In an interesting article, Kathryn Schulz discusses the history of how the lottery became a ubiquitous presence in American life.

How this came to be is the subject of an excellent new book, “For a Dollar and a Dream: State Lotteries in Modern America,” by the historian Jonathan D. Cohen. At the heart of Cohen’s book is a peculiar contradiction: on the one hand, the lottery is vastly less profitable than its proponents make it out to be, a deception that has come at the expense of public coffers and public services. On the other hand, it is so popular that it is both extremely lucrative for the private companies that make and sell tickets and financially crippling for its most dedicated players.

[Read more…]

John Oliver on the need for bail reform

On the most recent episode of his always excellent show Last Week Tonight, he focuses on the abuses of the cash bail system where people can be held in jail for a long time before trial simply because they do not have the money to post bail. This hurts poor people the most. One of the worst abuses is to use the system to coerce people who have been held in jail for a long time before trial to confess to crimes they did not commit with the promise that the time they have already spent in prison will be sufficient punishment.

I think that people should be released on their personal recognizance unless they are a risk to society or have the means to flee. Most poor people who commit petty offenses can easily be caught if they do not show up for their trial. Bail in such cases is punitive.

Wordle and cheating

I do the daily puzzle known as Wordle. For the three people in the country who have never heard of it, it consists of a hidden five letter word and one tries to guess the word in as few tries as possible, with a maximum set at six. After each guess, you get three kinds of feedback: a letter is highlighted green if it is the right letter in the right location; yellow if it is a letter that is used in the word but appears in the wrong location, and grey if the letter is not used at all. The puzzle is similar to the game Master Mind. The answer is from a list of 2309 common words but guesses allow from a pool of about 15,000 words (fewer than the average vocabulary which is estimated to be between 20,000-35,000 words), many of which can be quite obscure.

The puzzle is a little diversion during the day that takes about 10 minutes at the most. But it has attracted an enormous amount of interest and this article looks at the strategies that computers and expert players use to try and get the word in the least number of tries. Computers take an average of 3.41 tries to get the word while expert players average slightly less than four.
[Read more…]

Second Walker accuser speaks on camera

The second woman who accused Georgia Republican senate candidate Herschel Walker of pressurizing her to get an abortion in 1993 when they were having along affair has revealed herself on camera, though she has kept her name secret and wants to be known as just Jane Doe. You can see the interview in the above link. It is an explosive interview full of details that substantiate her charges against Walker.

Responding to the ABC News interview, Walker issued a statement Tuesday saying, “This was a lie a week ago and it is a lie today. Seven days before an election, the Democrats trot out Gloria Allred and some woman I do not know. My opponents will do and say anything to win this election. The entire Democrat machine is coming after me and the people of Georgia. I am not intimidated. Once again, they messed with the wrong Georgian.”

But the woman has produced copious documentation including photographs of them together as recently as in 2019 that clearly show that he is lying about not knowing her at all.
[Read more…]

Film review: Last Year at Marienbad (1961)

My tastes in art are decidedly lowbrow. I am the kind of person who would benefit from reading certain authors (James Joyce, William Faulkner) and poets (T. S. Eliot) and seeing the films of certain directors (Luis Bunuel, Frederico Fellini) within the framework of courses taught by experts in those areas who can explain to me what the hell is going on. If ever I needed to be reminded of this, my recent viewing of this film by director Alain Resnais and screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet certainly did so. I had heard of this film ages ago and was intrigued by the fact that some film connoisseurs rave about this film (it has a 95% rating of critics at Rotten Tomatoes) while others have placed on the list of the fifty worst films of all time. So when I finally got a chance to stream it, I did so.

[Read more…]

Will Bolsonaro go quietly?

Jair Bolsonaro has still not conceded the election, more than 12 hours after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. was declared the winner of Brazil’s presidential election. While the election was fairly close, with Lula getting 50.9% of the vote (60.3 million) to Bolsonaro’s 49.10% (58.2 million), the margin is large enough to be conclusive. Bolsonaro had earlier vowed not to concede and he and his three sons remained silent in the presidential residence.

Meanwhile, many of his prominent supporters have conceded that he lost and many world leaders (including Joe Biden) were quick to congratulate Lula on his victory, suggesting that they were trying to send a message discouraging Bolsonaro from harboring any hopes of staying in power using the military. Biden’s words are especially important given that Brazil’s military in 1946 staged a US-backed coup and then ruled the country until 1985. Bolsonaro is a former member of the military and has close ties to them.

Another factor is how quickly the results were known, by close to midnight on election night, giving little time for conspiracy theories about the election being stolen to grow, the way that they did in the US where the final results were declared after some days.