DL Open Thread: Sat., Nov. 30, 2019
Trump Apparently Hallucinated That Taliban Cease-Fire. Hey, it’s hard to speak the truth when you’ve literally never done so:
“They didn’t want to do a cease-fire, but now they do want to do a cease-fire,” Trump said of the militants. “It will probably work out that way. . . . We’ve made tremendous progress,” he added.
But on Friday neither the Taliban nor the government of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani indicated that a cease-fire was near, or even being discussed in resumed U.S. negotiations.
How Amazon Took Over Baltimore. I mean every single element of the daily Baltimorean’s life. And, yes, just like in Delaware, Amazon is gifted all sorts of government subsidies to drive its competitors out of business:
BALTIMORE — Another big Prime Air 767 takes off from Baltimore-Washington International Airport — where Amazon’s shipping last year eclipsed that of FedEx and U.P.S. put together — and wheels above the old industrial city. Below, the online giant seems to touch every niche of the economy, its ubiquity and range breathtaking.
To the east stand two mammoth Amazon warehouses, built with heavy government subsidies, operating on the sites of shuttered General Motors and Bethlehem Steel plants. Computers monitor workers during grueling 10-hour shifts, identifying slow performers for firing. Those on the floor earn $15.40 to $18 an hour, less than half of what their unionized predecessors made. But in Baltimore’s postindustrial economy, the jobs are in demand.
To the south, near the harbor, are the side-by-side stadiums of the Ravens and the Orioles, where every move on the field is streamed to Amazon Web Services for analysis using artificial intelligence. Football players have a chip in each shoulder pad and baseball players are tracked by radar, producing flashy graphics for television and arcane stats for coaches.
Up in northwest Baltimore, a pastor has found funding to install Amazon Ring video cameras on homes in a high-crime neighborhood. Privacy advocates express alarm at proliferating surveillance; footage of suspects can be shared with the police at a click. But the number of interested residents has already outstripped the number of cameras available.
In City Hall downtown and at Johns Hopkins University a few miles away, procurement officers have begun buying from local suppliers via Amazon Business — and even starred in a national marketing video for the company. Buyers say the convenience more than justifies interposing a Seattle-based corporation between their institutions and nearby businesses. Critics denounce the retail giant’s incursion into long-established relationships. It is a very Amazon dispute.
Apple Goes ‘Full Putin’. Places Crimea within Russia. Another company that must be broken up.
What Happens When Doctors’ Groups Are Owned By Private Equity Firms. Just what you’d expect. The poor get sued. Relentlessly.
Will Trump Participate In Impeachment Hearings? He has one week to decide. Spoiler Alert: He won’t.
What do you want to talk about?
Here’s the explanation behind the change in format today. I know that not everybody subscribes to the Washington Post, The NYTimes and the News-Journal. So, rather than leave readers with some epigrammatic quote, I’ve decided to post just enough copy to provide context for non-subscribers. I will only do this for subscriber-only sites b/c I really want readers to investigate the articles I post and react to them.
There is another blog that provides copious amounts of quoted material, and they do it quite well. My goal is a little different: To bring intriguing material to our readers and to generate conversation.
That shitbag Pete Buttigieg is at it again, employing another GOP talking point.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ocasio-cortez-slams-buttigieg-free-college-gop-talking-point_n_5de18bd3e4b0d50f32a1f1bd
If he’s the nominee, I’m voting third-party again. I will not in good conscience vote for a piece of shit, even to keep a bigger piece of shit from clogging the drain.
Mayo Pete is bad for you, folks. He’s worried rich kids can go to public high school and use the library. They even drive on the roads!
Is this some kind of bullshit feint at populism? I don’t hear him talking about taxing rich people, just making them pay for public college — as if millionaires send their kids to public colleges.
He’s running neck and neck with Gabbard for the title of most heinous Democrat in the pool.
I respect Al’s opinion and I trust Mayor Pete is extremely far from the ideal candidate but if he is the nominee I will vote for him rather than Trump or a third party. Any Democrat is better than Trump. Even a DINO is better than Trump. Trump must not win.
If you live in Delaware, it really doesn’t matter who you vote for. The Democrat is guaranteed to get our 3 electoral votes. Which is why I can vote third party.
If I lived in Pa., I’d vote for any Dem. But I don’t, so I won’t.
I agree with Elaine. Every vote is like two votes.
There is one layer of the vote that is a mechanical process vote and one vote that is signaling. I don’t like what a third party vote signals here, but understand why and what Alby is signaling. It just doesn’t fit for me in view of how I feel about third party and spoilers.
Hey, to each his own. I just refuse to let people tell me what I have to do and why I have to do it.
You know why Russian propaganda was so effective? Because it wasn’t all false. I never gave a shit about “her emails,” because her corporate money-grubbing was all I needed to hate her politics, just like her husband’s before her.
And the same goes for Biden, and Mayo Pete, and Klobuchar, and all the other incrementalists who tell us the public can’t have nice things. But I notice the centrist politicians have lots of nice things. They don’t believe in equality; they believe in some bullshit “meritocracy” that rewards them for serving corporate masters.
This is not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. It’s the good being the enemy of the mediocre.