IT’S A BAD YEAR FOR THE “WAVE OF THE FUTURE” INTERNET COMPANIES: Carvana Takes Another Hit. “Carvana is going to cut 1,500 jobs, which is about 8 percent of its workforce. . . . Based in Tempe, Arizona, Carvana is struggling with a cratering stock price and cash outflow. That’s because after seeing a surge of success in 2021 as the lack of new-car supply drove used-car prices up, the market has shifted. Used-car prices are falling while inflation is rising and that has negatively impacted consumer demand for pre-owned vehicles.”
Archive for 2022
November 22, 2022
LAUGHING WOLF: Asymmetrical Musings 4.
Sadly, I fear we are well on our way to learning a wrong lesson from the Russia-Ukraine war. For far too many, the focus is on drones, loitering munitions, and advanced artillery. The first two in particular have grabbed popular fascination, and what is being done with them is indeed amazing, successful, and more. There are already concepts for the next drone du jour, and a lot of armchair talk about how drones and other unmanned systems are the future.
To my mind, there are two big problems for anyone facing or under occupation in regards this. First, drones are the technology of today. Second, the enthusiasts miss the key point that makes drones possible: data.
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Knowing where to start looking for targets takes data. Controlling drones at remote ranges takes data. Sharing your wild hair for modifying a drone to hit enemy targets takes data. Sharing the 3-D printer file for grenade tail fins (and other delights) takes data. Assessing strike and other action results takes data. Data, and the ability to share/communicate it, are essential to fighting any invasion or occupation.
In last week’s craziness, I failed to link to the first three parts in the Asymmetrical Musings series, but they’re all quite good.
READER FAVORITE: iRobot Roomba i3+ EVO (3550) Self-Emptying Robot Vacuum. #CommissionEarned
JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON: The ‘Respect For Marriage Act’ Is An Exercise In Tyranny, And Everyone Knows It. “To paraphrase George Orwell’s famous line, if you want a picture of the future under the Respect for Marriage Act, imagine a boot stamping on Jack Phillips’ face — forever.”
JEFF BEZOS WAS A REAL CASE OF “APRES MOI, LE DELUGE:” Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year.
FRAUD, BULLYING, INTIMIDATION: Hunter Biden laptop repairman details ‘chilling’ warning from FBI agent. “That’s when Agent Mike turned around and told me that, in their experience, nothing ever happens to people that don’t talk about these things.”
PARTY OF YOUTH UPDATE: Nancy Pelosi Embodied America’s Gerontocracy Problem.
APOLLO X REDUX, SORT OF: NASA’s Orion spacecraft comes within 81 miles of moon’s surface.
DON SURBER: Why Michelle cried racism. “To be sure, black women straightened their hair for decades to fit in to white society. I get that they had to do that to get ahead, but those days ended long ago. But straightening her hair was her choice. Even with a Harvard Law degree and a husband as president, Michelle Obama straightened her hair. I thought it an odd and dated hairstyle but I am of the you-do-you school of thought, as long as you do not harm others. Now she contends she had to straighten her hair to get Obamacare passed. Given that it passed with Democrat votes only, she implies that Democrats were the racists because they were the only ones who could have stopped passage.”
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR WEEKLY INSANITY WRAP: Journalists Go Hunger Games on Each Other and I Can’t Stop Laughing. “Big-name journalists are going full Hunger Games on one another on their new home away from Twitter. There’s even a transphobic network server involved, I swear to you.”
- Profile in Courage: CBS News stands firm for nearly hours
- Welcome to the gerontocracy
- The EPA wants to quietly tax gasoline (and you) into oblivion
So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
KRUISER: Conservatives Don’t Worship Politicians—That’s a Lib Thing. “An emerging trend over here on the right — especially since the election — is the prevailing notion among some of Donald Trump’s most ardent admirers that he not be criticized at all. My response as someone who enthusiastically voted for him and has spent quite a lot of column space here at PJ Media writing flattering things about his presidency is this: what a load of crap.”
BLACK FRIDAY DEAL: Bose QuietComfort 45 Bluetooth Wireless Noise Cancelling Headphones. #CommissionEarned
ROGER SIMON: FTX Scandal Exposes ‘Woke’ as the Crime Syndicate of Our Times.
More than Enron, more than Madoff, this is the paradigm case of the United States in our times.
Greed has taken over society to such a degree no one can see straight, let alone see such obvious fakery when it’s in front of their eyes, especially when “social justice” pronouncements are there playing the role of papal dispensations without the inconvenience of any thoughts of God or the afterlife.
Bankman-Fried wouldn’t have happened if all kinds of people and organizations, celebrated and uncelebrated, didn’t want, above anything else, more and more of the cash from that trough.
No matter. As Gordon Gecko assured us in “Wall Street”: “Greed is good.”
These days, it’s practically orgasmic. Watching the various talking heads before his unmasking, extolling the supposed crypto genius as the next Carnegie or Vanderbilt is an object lesson in how these people think. (Make me rich, please, please—especially if I don’t have to do any work for it.)
Ditto for the various celebrities on his bandwagon—Larry David, Tom Brady. Who knows if they even understand what blockchain is, but they love the cash and it’s seemingly hip to invest in crypto—above the curve, doncha know?
But who is this Bankman-Fried really and what would make him think he could actually do things such as create a “back door” between his two allegedly separate companies FTX and Alameda, so he could do what he would with other people’s money?
Yes, he looks like a Rip Van Winkle holdover awakened from a Big Brother and the Holding Company concert, circa 1967. Maybe that was a plus—made him seem “cool” to his customers.
Related exit question: How Do We Protect Ourselves from Billion-Dollar Boy-Men?
ONLY CONSPIRACY THEORISTS WORRIED ABOUT THIS, AND IT’S A GOOD THING IT’S HAPPENING NOW: Scholar’s ‘Abolish the Family’ speech hosted at UMass Boston.
I’VE GOT A BAD FEELING ABOUT THIS: Harrison Ford Will Be De-Aged to Fight Nazis in Indy 5. The 80-year-old actor will appear as a 40-something for the long-awaited Indiana Jones sequel.
De-aging technology so far has been notoriously less-than believable, with actors ranging from Robert De Niro in The Irishman to Kurt Russell in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 often appearing like stiff Polar Express versions of themselves.
But Ford insists the new film, which hasn’t yet revealed its title, successfully pulls off a retro Indy. “This is the first time I’ve seen [the technology] where I believe it,” the actor said. “It’s a little spooky. I don’t think I even want to know how it works, but it works.”
After the sequence, the film’s narrative will leap forward to 1969 – using Ford as his current self – and that’s when the bulk of the action takes place.
Mangold explains he wanted “the chance to dive into this kind of full-on George [Lucas]-and-Steven [Spielberg] old picture and give the audience an adrenaline blast. So that the audience doesn’t experience the change between the ’40s and ’60s as an intellectual conceit, but literally experiences the buccaneering spirit of those early days.”
Their hope, producer Kathleen Kennedy added, was that audiences would watch the opening and think, “‘Oh my God, they just found footage.’”
Kathleen Kennedy, eh? What could possibly go wrong?
A SMALL MEASURE OF ACCOUNTABILITY: Cornell commits to punishing students who disrupted Ann Coulter’s speech.
STATE-SANCTIONED MUTILATION: Trans Biden Official Sought Justification For Performing Kids’ Sex Changes From Children’s Hospital. “Dr. Rachel Levine, currently the assistant secretary for health at President Joe Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), asked in a 2017 email exchange if any scientific literature was available to support ‘bottom’ surgeries for minors, according to emails obtained by activist Megan Brock and shared with the Daily Caller. Dr. Nadia Dowshen of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia replied she was ‘not aware of existing literature.'”