Good morning! Hello! How are you? #768
Weekend organizing, Politics Elon and SBF again ugh, some potty problems
Good morning! Hello! How are you? All well? Lovely weekend? I am good, I’m cold! It’s cold! It is 31 degrees out there, though it is now rapidly going to warm up. I re-mulched my pepper plants and put on a Planket, which is just the best brand name for plant blanket. I mean, is it just a tarp? Yes. Erm, no. It’s a Planket! I’m hell-bent on getting these bell pepperds to full growth. I mean, do they need 3 more weeks or so, maybe more? Sure. But who cares, we’re gonna try! Also havested a bunch more bok choy, yummy. And tomatoes. Still getting tomatoes in mid-November feeling pretty good about that. Is it a lot of tomatoes? Well, no. But it’s something.
All the winter crops are doing lovely. Garlic, wheat, lettuce, carrots, beets, napa cabbage, snow peas, herbs, fennel. Actually the broccoli isn’t doing great. I think I was way too late on it through a combination of factors. Maybe it’ll make it overwinter instead of being fall broccoli. Lol.
Most of this weekend was spent indoors, though. We are undergoing a massive re-organization, trying to get rid of some very large shelves in the garage so my truck will fit in there. Coincidentally, or maybe not, I’d already started a large reorganization in the garage of all the space below the workbench. I also bought one of those awesome wheeled toolchest workbench things for my studio, with like a bajillion drawers in it, and my god I love it so much. So many drawers. So basically stuff got shuffled from room to room. Some stuff from the garage went to the attic, some went to the “box room,” (what we call the equipment room). Then a good two or three hour distraction in the box room fixing the home audio-Homekit integration which has been broken for, oh, a year or so. Then a bunch of stuff from the box room to the studio into the new drawers. Just constant circles around the house. Between thee new workbench and the new under-bench organization in the garage we generated a massive pile of bins and sorters and tookboxes that are now unused. It is… a lot. Depressing. Too much plastic. It’s funny how Steralite bins have been historically excluded from my plastic loathing. They tricked me! The pile will go to the free swap section of the collection center. It’ll get snapped up.
Oh another thing I did recently was this complicated wiring system to get music outside where I do my gardening. The area is under the porch, but it’s not dry, everything gets dripped on through the porch slats. So you can’t just have a speaker there. So I wired it from the outdoor, GFI outlet with an all-weather extension cord, drilled a hole in my garden shed, passed the cord through, sealed up the whole, then mounted the speaker on the door, so I could open the door and play music, and then close the door and protect the speaker from the elements. Will I inevitably forget to close the door when it rains? Probably. But for now, it is awesome.
Yeah I feel good about that.
We had the new neighbors over on Saturday night that was fun. Sat on the screened in patio by the fire and chatted about stuff. Used the organizing paradigm of going down our 22-house street and giving them the rough lowdown on each neighbor. Not like gossiping or anying just sort of who they are, what they do. But it was more a convenient launchpad for other conversations, and it was decently wide-ranging. They seemed pretty cool. Complete other end of the neighborhood but hey, that’s only a half-mile. They also lived in Brooklyn previously, like three blocks from where we lived. In between, they went elsewhere for a while and I don’t think we quite overlapped in the hood, but it was close. I swear half the neighborhood is from New York or lived there for a while.
Other than that, the weekend was really just spent gawking at current events. Lotta time with the Kornacki-cam, keeping tabs on the Senate and House races. They called the Senate for Dems just minutes before the neighbors arrived, so Emma and I did a little celebration. Just phenomenal I am so excited about that, and of course so excited about the Georgia runoff again and we all have to go donate to Rapheal Warnock again, that dude is the hardest working man in the senate, amirite? Most senators? One election every six years. This guy? He did four.
Looks like Republicans will get the house but what a catastrophe for them it is going to be such a nightmare. I mean, obviously the best thing is for the Dems to keep it, but if they can’t, I want Republicans to take it by one seat. 218-217. There were fifteen special elections during the last house session. I want the Republicans to be in jeopardy of losing their majority every single time. A glorious, unmanageable mess. Kevin McCarthy is so fucked. Half the Republicans blaming Trump for their catastrophe (they’re correct), half of them saying he’s the only thing holding them together (they’re also correct). There is no ditching Trump, Rupert Murdoch is dreaming (sure made for a good SNL opening sketch though). The Republicans are Trump, Trump are the Republicans, there is no pretending otherwise, not for at least a generation. DeSantis is a Trumper it’s just a different colored suit. Same malevolence, same substitution of a platform for anger.
It seems, at this point, possible that the Republicans won’t be able to elect a leader for either the house or senate by the time the session begins. That would be so gloriously appropriate. Every single event is an opportunity for these people to kill one another it’s insane. They’re not a party they’re the Hunger Games.
Then we have the two guys who are both hell-bent on blowing $30-plus billion dollars each. It is totally insane that we have two suposed geniuses (genuii?) competing for the greatest destruction of weath in history. Dave Chapelle’s all on SNL talking about the previously spellbinding Kanye blowing a billion dollar fortune in a week or two, but reality has surprassed that, it’s not even impressive anymore. Elon and SBF are all like “hold my beer.”
I don’t even know where to start with these two anymore. Eh, fuck it, let’s start with SBF. Conventional Wisdom, and some Tweets from various former employees, has the FTX debacle looking like fraud on SBFs part. Really complicated fraud! Secret backdoor systems to hide transactions from the auditors. Just crazy shit. It’s very hard to tell what’s real right now, there’s been no more official information since Thursday or so.
But! First, SBF just tweeted two random-ass Tweets last night then stopped. Like:
Like what the hell is this! The second one (which just says “2) H”) was right before I went to bed, and I was on the edge of my seat. Would there be more? Was it going somewhere? Nah. Been eight hours no, no more tweets. Who the hell knows.
Also it turns out that Michael Lewis has been “embedded” with SBF for the last six months so OH MY GOD that is going to make the best book ever. I mean, I have half a mind to just stop paying attention now, so when the book comes out I can enjoy it. He’s selling the film rights right now, without having written a word. He is going to make a fortune.
Walter Isaacson has been writing a book about Elon Musk, and these recent events will definitely make that book more interesting, but I can follow the Twitter saga more clearly than the SBF one, and I don’t think Isaacson is “embedded.” Whatever that means. Is Michael Lewis in the Bahamas with SBF right now? Does he get to be on the plane when SBF makes a run for it to Hong Kong to avoid extradition? Seems unlikely. He’s probably at home with his amazing wife, former MTV-VJ-turned-Amazing-photographer Tabitha Soren. (Oo in making that link I see Tabitha has a new website, looks great Tabitha).
At least SBF’s flame-out is kind of exciting. He seems to have been trying a heady new cocktail of tactics at a heretofore unseen scale propping up his fake currency and using it as collateral for real money or something. Combination of good old fashioned grift with some high tech brilliance. Details are sketchy, but I am very, very into reading a long, detailed account of the technical details.
Elon, on the other hand, well, he’s just applying good old fashioned hubris and idiocy at an unprecedented scale. Actually, I suppose it’s not even that big. Enron had $73 billion-ish of liabilites when it went bankrupt. Some are saying (great phrase) that FTX may surprass that, so, you know, if you’re gonna flame out go big. Elon’s probably won’t rank in the top five.
But make no mistake, at this point I think that it is inevitable than an Elon-lead Twitter will go bankrupt. I was pretty confident of this last week, but I’m even moreso this week. It is past the point of no return. Sure, if you scroll your timeline it looks kinda similar, and there are even a few blue-chip advertisers — they haven’t all abandoned ship yet. But for a variety of factors, I think he’s cooked:
Even before he took over, his takeover attempt had killed about $0.75-to-1 billion ish in revenue because Twitter completely whiffed their up-front ad sales, because they couldn’t tell any of the advertisers with any confidence who was going to own the site. Losses prior to this were about a billion a year. Now let’s call it $1.75 billion.
The debt service was originally a billion a year. Now we’ve got a $2.75 billion hole. See this lovely thread for an analysis of the debts Elon holds. tldr they’re floating point loans and can’t be refinanced. So fucked. Let’s call that, conservatively, another $0.5 billion. Now we have a $3.25 billion hole.
The subscription service seems to have only netted a few hundred thousand participants before they pasued it because it is broken and idiotic. Let’s be absurdly generous and say $10 mil of revenue. Good for him he’s now at a $3.24 billion hole.
Elon moved $4 billion over from Tesla to Twitter. He can only do that so many times, especially at this garbage Tesla stock price, and with the covenenants on the other $30 bil he borrowed to buy this thing (ish, I am simplifying here. we don’t know the exact amount). And that money probably isn’t gonna last him a year.
And no one is going to want to invest in it at his old valation now.
With the additional sacking of most of their contractors, and the impending World Cup, the odds are better than not that the site will go down. If we are to believe the whistleblower whom Elon spoke so highly of, a crash of Twitter could be cascading, catastrophic and unrecoverable. I am less certain of this, but of course if this happens it’s an immediate game over and at this point I’d say the odds are better than even.
Elon seems to be on the “the only salvation is subscription” road right now. He’s wrong, and he will waste time to discover this. The only salvation for Twitter right now is if Elon stops being in charge. Elon’s poor strategic execution here aside, the biggest problem at Twitter this point is Elon’s continued presence as an obstacle to generating revenue.
The longer it takes for him to realize this, the more of his investment he has lost.
And this isn’t, like, money in the bank for him. If Twitter goes to zero, the creditors on that $30 bil are coming for his Tesla stock. The stock has dipped, but not near enough to accomodate the chaos this foreclosure will occasion.
It’s unclear to me if the banks can act before bankruptcy, but every day that guy is in charge, the less possible it will be to save Twitter. I believe it is still salvageable, for someone else. It will be forever scarred by these wounds, but it could be saved.
Oh and also along the way Elon’s going to kill off the idea of subscription being a viable internet business model for another few years so, you know, thanks for that. Everyone will have Elon to thank for all the ads they say.
I know a lot of people don’t care about this and I suppose that is the healthier approach. I’m not usually a car-crash gawker, but you gotta stop and wonder about both the Twitter and FTX dramas happening simultaneously. Our brains want to weave a pattern in them and pronounce it the end of the era of geniuses or somethign but lol, nope, people gonna still keep pretending their are brilliant white man internet genuii out there. I care much more about Twitter than FTX. I want it to live.
Jane’s gotten into this situation where she doesn’t want to pee. She won’t say why, doesn’t seem to hurt or anything she just seems sort of caught in a big version of the problem some adults have, where she doesn’t want to stop what she’s doing. But it’s getting worse. Last night it took nearly an hour for her to decide to pee, and even when she did it, she sat on the toilet trying to hold it in and not pee and then cried as she peed. It was… somewhat alarming? I wasn’t pressuring her, really, but I did say that daddy wasn’t going to play Lego with her until after pee. She could do what she wanted but that’s what I was going to do. I think the problem here is I’m conflating two lessons into one, and the whole “you can do what you want but you can’t make me do something I don’t want” is already a complicated lesson and she seems hellbent on not learning that one, and then to combine that with any bathroom stuff is maybe a bridge too far for her brain. We’re really at a loss and it seems to be getting worse. She’s peed her pants once and was utterly indifferent to it, so that’s not going to provide a negative reinforcement to her.
She’s also refusing to brush her teeth more and more. I feel like there is some key to all this, some autonomy lesson I’m missing, and just writing about it means I’m going to have to listen to twenty people tell me to listen to more Doctor Becky but I try that shit, man. Yes it works once in a while but the ratio between “Doctor Becky’s tricks worked” and “Doctor Becky has realistic advice for when her tricks don’t work” is… bleak. She stresses me out. I await the tell-alls from Doctor Becky’s kids in the future.
Justa mix today. Mostly new, except for a 1975 song which came on random this weekend and honestly isn’t even that old. Oh and Camper Van Beethoven, weirdly. That song just popped into my head this weekend for no reason. God I used to listen to it incessantly. Had the cassingle. Cerron Brendan Reilly track is so great. Stil very into this new Will Shef.
Ta Ta for now.