Archive for 2022
July 7, 2022
ALL BUBBLES POP: At least 40% of Denver homes for sale saw price reductions in May.
DISPATCHES FROM THE RED ZONES: When It Comes to Post-Pandemic Economic Recovery, Red States Are Leading the Way.
GET A NEW LAPTOP: Acer Aspire Laptop. #CommissionEarned
OH NO: Storage firm Drobo has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
First formed as Data Robotics in 2005, Drobo manufactured solutions for remote and network storage. Parent company StarCentric filed bankrupcy papers with the California Northern Bankruptcy Court (San Jose) on June 20, 2022.
According to official court documentation, the company is to hold its first creditors meeting on July 19. There is also a final deadline for filing claims against the company, which is October 17, 2022.
The company has no commented publicly on the decision. However, the company appears to have been badly affected by the coronavirus. In February 2020, the company tweeted about production delays, and in March 2020, its CEO Mihir Shah addressed concerns over how the coronavirus would affect the company.
“We are in close contact with all of our suppliers and we are trying to mitigate the impact of any delay in the supply chain,” he wrote in a blog post.
There have been no further blog posts since then. Drobo Support hasn’t tweeted for over a year, and Drobo’s main Twitter account has been silent since December 2021.
I love my Drobo — I’m on my second one after outgrowing the original — which is basically a complicated RAID array for people who don’t want to have to think about the complexities of RAID arrays.
I hope the company pulls through Chapter 11 and can maintain product support, but it doesn’t look good.
THAT’S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN INSTITUTIONS BREAK TRUST WITH THE SOCIETY THEY’RE SUPPOSED TO FURTHER AND PROTECT: Institutional Confidence Among Americans Plummets to All-Time Low.
MARK STEYN ON BORIS JOHNSON: The Long Goodbye.
Boris elevated his sibling to the House of Lords, since when Jo Johnson has been entirely forgotten – and within three months of that devastating loss the older Johnson had won an amazing victory:
Whatever one feels about Boris Johnson (and almost any one who’s had any truck with the man has, if he’s honest, highly mixed views) today’s election is a spectacular triumph for him. On the day Andrew Scheer, the Canadian Tory leader, announced he would be stepping down, the UK Tory leader led his party to their biggest share of the vote in half-a-century and swiped seats held by Labour since 1935 – from Blythe Valley to Bishop Auckland. Both Scheer and Johnson are unprincipled opportunists, but the latter is a fighter who knows how to return the ball and swat it down the opposition’s gullet.
And so he did. And then he utterly squandered an eighty-seat majority. As I concluded that post-election piece:
It would be nice to think that the Conservative Party might now think it safe to offer a bit of conservatism. But that would be too much to hope for…
And so it proved.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: Boris Johnson Resigns as Tory Leader amid Cabinet Defections, Scandals.
(Updated and bumped.)
NO. US carriers want to bring ‘screen zero’ lock screen ads to smartphones.
Android smartphones can be a rough market, and to squeeze as much profit out of a phone as possible, carriers often sell every square inch of a phone to the highest bidder. Packed-in, often un-installable crapware apps fill your app drawer and advertise their services. The rules are a lot looser for packed-in apps compared to Play Store apps, so data-hungry companies like Facebook often pay for a spot where they can more easily harvest data.
According to a report from TechCrunch, one new startup is inventing a new, more invasive form of crapware: lock screen ads. The company, “Glance,” is a subsidiary of Indian ad tech company InMobi, and TechCrunch reports the lock screen “content” company is “planning to launch its lock screen platform on Android smartphones in the US within two months.”
Glance’s app is a full-screen takeover of the lock screen. It looks a lot like a generic swipe-heavy social network, like TikTok or Snapchat Discover, but it only shows content from Glance. Imagine if every time you turned on your phone, you were first presented with an auto-playing video from a popular off-brand TikToker, and you get the idea. The company’s website promises “unparalleled reach” and “authentic engagement” from its captive audience. Naveen Tewari, founder and CEO of InMobi, gave a rather dystopian description of his company’s strategy to Forbes India, saying, “Consumers will move from seeking content to consuming what is shown to them.”
I thought it felt invasive, 30 years ago, when I first starting seeing ads on gas pumps.
Plus this from the comments: “I can’t wait for the first full screen lock screen ad that looks like a lock screen and manages to capture my PIN.”
Guaranteed that will happen.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Clueless Democrats Are in Full ‘Let Them Eat Cake’ Mode Now. “Starting at the very top, this current crop of D.C. Dems is the largest collection of dullards they’ve ever had in power. They’re a bunch of pants-wetting demagogues who are completely devoid of any intellectual heft. Because of that, they’re dumb enough to believe the lies that their flying monkeys in the mainstream media continually tell for them.”
BIDEN SELLING US OIL RESERVES TO EUROPE, ASIA: Madness.
HERE’S TO YOU, MR. OTTO FREDERICK ROHWEDDER: I didn’t realize it till today, but I am only one generation removed from the advent of commercially available sliced bread. On this day in 1928 (after the birth of my parents), the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri began marketing pre-sliced loaves of bread. These loaves were an instant hit, made possible by a bread slicing and wrapping machine invented by Otto Frederick Rohwedder of Davenport, Iowa.
So popular did these time-saving, pre-sliced loaves turn out to be that they gave rise to the saying, “It’s the best thing since sliced bread.” Many a great invention has come along since 1928—from the transistor to helicopters to personal computers to gene-editing. But seldom does anyone say an invention is better than sliced bread.
For a very brief period in 1943, sliced bread was banned by Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard (of Wickard v. Filburn fame). It’s not easy to come up with a sillier wartime conservation method. A letter to the New York Times summed up the reaction of many American women (and men):
I should like to let you know how important sliced bread is to the morale and saneness of a household. My husband and four children are all in a rush during and after breakfast. Without ready-sliced bread I must do the slicing for toast—two pieces for each one—that’s ten. For their lunches I must cut by hand at least twenty slices, for two sandwiches apiece. Afterward I make my own toast. Twenty-two slices of bread to be cut in a hurry!
Initially government officials made threats to take “stern measures if needed” to stop the sale of sliced bread. But it didn’t take all that long for the ban to be rescinded.
ROLLING STONE SMEAR IS MORE PROOF ELITE JOURNOS DON’T GET FAITH: Did you hear about the horrendous crime committed by several of the Supreme Court’s conservative justices? They prayed … Oh, the humanity!!! PROMOTED FROM LAST NIGHT.
ASK THIS DEM IF RIGHT MEDIA WORKS: Rep. Sharice Davids (D-Ks.) got rid of a bunch of green “energy” stocks right after the Washington Free Beacon’s Chuck Ross blew the whistle.
EARLY PRIME DEAL: Fairy Sword 12×50 High Definition Monocular Telescope. #CommissionEarned
DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: S.F. fires nonprofit hired to clean Tenderloin amid allegations its workers sold drugs, harassed residents. “Over the past few months multiple staff members have witnessed extremely inappropriate behavior that contributes to the chaos on the street rather than support cleanliness and safety.”
THANK YOU, GOV. YOUNGKIN! (NOW PLEASE KEEP IT UP): “Youngkin Appoints ‘Wokeness’ Critic to UVa Board of Trustees.”
It’s shocking to me how many GOP governors with the power to appoint a serious people to the boards of state universities use that power to appoint rich donors who view it as an honor and wouldn’t dream of making waves. These governors need to appoint people who know something about how the beast works and how it should work. The need to be people who can’t be intimidated.
THIS WAS A TOUGH ONE TO WRITE: What’s Going On with the Highland Park Killer’s Parents? “It’s a story involving guns, police visits, a mysterious UPS Store mailbox, and a legal system with a ‘catch-and-release’ policy regarding the dangerously mentally ill.”
IGNORE THEM: Pirates Ahoy!
HAS THE CALIFORNIA GOP FOUND A CANDIDATE WHO CAN WIN A STATEWIDE ELECTION?: I am a pessimist, but you never know.
SOME OF US DON’T KNOW HOW TO QUIT: “Ow. Stop hitting me…”
SHE’S AMAZINGLY BAD AT EVERYTHING: ‘She’s Amazingly Bad at This’: Harris ‘Seriously’ Gives Incoherent Speech in Highland Park.
Well, maybe not everything. We haven’t asked Willy Brown.
Maybe this thing of giving people jobs because of their sexual organs and skin color is a bad idea? Perhaps? I mean, we don’t want to be extreme or anything, but perhaps we should try to give jobs and appointing people according to …. what is it called? Oh, yeah, competence. Seems like that used to work.