THIS CALLS FOR A DEVASTATING COUNTERATTACK, TO SET AN EXAMPLE: ClintonWorld targeting Musk’s advertisers?
Archive for 2022
November 17, 2022
GOING TO THE MOON: An entire issue of Reason devoted to space. Robert Heinlein gets an article.
SEEMS PLAUSIBLE: Apple AirPods, the cheaper alternative to hearing aids?
READER BOOK PLUG: Christmas, 1776. #CommissionEarned I just finished reading this wonderful children’s book by Brian J. Benjamin. Highly recommended.
FORMER SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” STILL TRYING TO GENERATE PR: AOC launches (rather dumb) attack on Ticketmaster after Taylor Swift crash.
It’s not every day that a pop star’s fans are so rabid they break the internet. But that’s sort of what happened this week when the ticket sales website Ticketmaster crashed because so many Taylor Swift fans tried to buy tickets for her upcoming tour at once.
This has proven chaotic for many distressed fans. But it’s also got some progressive lawmakers up in arms, attacking the company and even calling for it to be broken up. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, responded to the crash by tweeting: “Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, it’s merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in. Break them up.”
The congresswoman is referencing a merger Ticketmaster conducted in 2010 with LiveNation, at the time its chief competitor and calling for it to be “broken up” through federal government intervention known as “antitrust.”
Ticketmaster may or may not be a monopoly. It now reportedly has up to 80% market share according to some sources, although its executives have claimed they only have about 30%. (To be clear, there’s nothing inherently wrong with a business having a near monopoly so long as it emerges naturally without special government favors or subsidies, like it appears to have in this case. Some industries can even be structured in a way where a monopoly is the most efficient way to supply the good.)
Regardless, for Ocasio-Cortez and others to blame the Taylor Swift crash on Ticketmaster’s possible monopoly is actually rather dumb. The number of vendors wasn’t the problem—it was the insane surge in customer demand that probably would’ve crashed any website or multiple websites.
This also may explain why Taylor Swift is trying not to be seen:
UPDATE: Ticketmaster cancels its public sale of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour tickets.
More: Amy Klobuchar: Taylor Swift ticket sales snafus more important than FTX fraud.
Unexpectedly!
(Updated and bumped.)
READER FAVORITE: Nonstick Fry Pan Cookware Set. #CommissionEarned
THE FTX COLLAPSE SUMMED UP IN 99 SECONDS:
I could talk about the FTX collapse for hours on end. But there's no time! Here's the whole awful glorious mess crammed into 99 seconds. #FTX #FTXCRASH #MelonHead pic.twitter.com/2lqq4rASu1
— Nobody Special (@JG_Nuke) November 11, 2022
SOUNDS CONVENIENT: Snakes may not have legs, but they do have two penises.
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Costner Reaches Out to ‘Yellowstone’s’ Red-State Faithful.
I don’t imagine that will go very well.
A MILLION TWENTY-SOMETHINGS GASP IN SHOCK: Netflix gives account holders the ability to kick off freeloaders.
REPORT: Paul Pelosi Seen Opening Door for Police on Body Cam Video as Originally Reported. “So why would NBC News scrub an awkward story about the husband of a House Speaker representing an embattled majority in the weeks before a midterm election to determine control of the House?”
CAN I CALL IT, OR CAN I CALL IT? Before Pulling Out of Rankings, Yale Law School Took a Hit on Key Metric: Amid controversies over free speech, the school’s ‘peer assessment’ score pushed it below the competition.
Yale Law School dean Heather Gerken is framing the school’s decision to pull out of the U.S. News & World Report law-school rankings as an altruistic one, arguing that the “profoundly flawed” rankings “disincentivize programs that support public interest careers.”
But a closer look at those rankings suggests that Yale, which has over the past year been the locus of a fierce debate about free speech and drawn unwanted attention for its response to campus controversies, may have had a selfish reason to jump ship. The elite law school was starting to slip on one of the key indicators that determine a law school’s overall ranking, according to U.S. News & World Report‘s published methodology, raising questions about how long it would continue to occupy the number-one slot.
Advantage: InstaPundit.
WELL, THEY’VE BEEN DOING THIS TO “ELECTION DENIERS” FOR A WHILE: DHS monitored ‘social media reactions’ to Roe overturn, collected legally protected speech, bulletin shows. It’s more problematic when it involves lefty speech though.
YES, BUT…: Sam Bankman-Fried’s media outlets must come clean. “The media outlets he buoyed with FTX investor money include a list of popular titles that lean to the left when it comes to covering issues like those Bankman-Fried is passionate about: Vox, the Intercept, ProPublica, the Law and Justice Journalism Project and the recently launched Semafor, a much-hyped news outlet cofounded by former BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith. Smith has brought several known names from the world of Beltway media on board, including Politico’s Max Tani and the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel, the latter of whom it’s fair to assume was looking for an exit after being suspended for retweeting a joke earlier this year. Semafor and Vox have disclosed Bankman-Fried as a financial backer in their recent reporting on the FTX collapse, but that’s about it.”
…who watches the watchmen?
NOW OUT FROM ROYCE BARONDES: Selected Source Materials on Federal Firearms Law. With annotations. He’s a law professor at the University of Missouri who successfully sued the University for violating his firearms rights on campus. We were also summer associates together at Dewey Ballantine.
THEY LET THEIR DANCING DO THEIR TALKING: This probably won’t surprise any of the super-smart Instapunditeers on here but it came as a fascinating piece of news for me to learn that honey bees use dancing to talk to one another, according to Apologetics Press’ Kyle Butts on HillFaith.
Most specifically, a “Waggle” dance is how a bee who finds a new food source tells the others in the hive where to find it. Butts contends such use of dance to talk is a skill that cannot be explained in an evolutionary context. Whatever you think on that question, I suspect we can all agree that, be it by God’s direction or natural selection, this is an amazing phenomena.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Could Sam Bankman-Fried go to prison for the FTX disaster?
Even if the facts seem may seem damning on the surface, lawyers contacted by Fortune cited two potential obstacles to any criminal conviction—though ones prosecutors could likely overcome.
The first is jurisdiction. Since FTX is an offshore business with headquarters in the Bahamas, and did not cater to Americans, defense lawyers could argue the actions of its executives are beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement.
The Justice Department, however, is good at finding a “nexus” linking overseas defendants to American shores, according to Randall Eliason, a former prosecutor who now teaches law at George Washington University. Two other lawyers who spoke to Fortune echoed this view, saying it would likely be easy for prosecutors to find a nexus in the FTX case—in the form of a tie between FTX and U.S. banks, emails, stateside meetings, or other interactions.
The second potential obstacle to a criminal prosecution comes in the form of intent. Specifically, Eliason says that any conviction will turn on whether SBF was not simply incompetent but whether he deliberately deceived investors.
“Mismanaging your company and losing a bunch of other people’s money is not criminal. It happens all the time. For a criminal case, there has to be deception,” he said.
Eliason added that he was not familiar with the details of the FTX debacle, but that prosecutors can show deception by means of something like a smoking gun communication, or by showing a pattern of behavior that points to fraudulent intent.
A longtime crypto lawyer, however, told Fortune he has no doubt that SBF’s behavior and FTX’s business practices clearly demonstrated fraud. The lawyer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, pointed to evidence like FTX’s terms of service as well as the company’s investor presentations and public statements by SBF.
Well, this might be a possible answer:
In the meantime though, will SBF show up for this discussion, which was announced by the New York Times in October? Yellen, Zelensky and Zuckerberg Will Speak at DealBook Summit. The conference, scheduled for Nov. 30, will bring together the biggest newsmakers in business, politics and culture.
We are pleased to announce our lineup for the DealBook Summit, to be held at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City on Nov. 30. Andrew will host a series of conversations with the biggest newsmakers in the world of business, politics and culture.
Among the speakers: President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine; Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen; Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s co-founder, chairman and C.E.O.; Shou Chew, TikTok’s C.E.O.; Mike Pence, former vice president of the United States; Andy Jassy, Amazon’s C.E.O.; Reed Hastings, Netflix’s co-founder and co-C.E.O.; Mayor Eric Adams of New York; Larry Fink, BlackRock’s chairman and C.E.O.; Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX’s C.E.O.; and Priscilla Sims Brown, Amalgamated Bank’s C.E.O.
It’s the people who brought you 2022 — C’mon Gray Lady, make this panel happen!
THE BIDEN YEARS ARE EQUALLY GREAT FOR EVERYONE! “Preliminary data for 2021 indicate suicide rates for all three race and ethnicity groups increased from 2020 to 2021.”
OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: San Francisco Launches Program To Pay Trans Residents $1,200 A Month For 18 Months. “The Transgender District and Lyon-Martin Community Health Services, in partnership with municipal city departments in the City and County of San Francisco, will provide 55 Transgender residents of San Francisco County with $1,200 a month in guaranteed income for a year and a half. The program will prioritize enrollment of Transgender, Non-Binary, Gender Non-Conforming, and Intersex (TGI) people who are also Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC), experiencing homelessness, living with disabilities and chronic illnesses, youth and elders, monolingual Spanish-speakers, and those who are legally vulnerable such as TGI people who are undocumented, engaging in survival sex trades, or are formerly incarcerated.”
RIP: Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson dies at 58. “Gerson, a former speechwriter for former President George W. Bush and a Washington Post columnist who commented on conservative politics and faith at the paper for more than two decades, died on Thursday at a hospital in Washington, according to an obituary in the Post. Gerson was 58, and the cause of death was related to complications with cancer.”