DL Open Thread: Friday, December 16, 2022
Latest Muskmare: Investigative Reporters Tossed Off Twitter. For allegedly telling people where the ‘Free Speech Absolutist’ was. Which wasn’t true:
Twitter suspended the accounts of more than half a dozen journalists from CNN, the New York Times, The Washington Post and other outlets Thursday evening, as company owner Elon Musk accused the reporters of posting “basically assassination coordinates” for him and his family.
The suspensions came without warning or initial explanation from Twitter. They took place a day after Twitter changed its policy on sharing “live location information” and suspended an account, @ElonJet, that had been using public flight data to share the location of Musk’s private plane.
Many of the journalists suspended Thursday, including Washington Post technology reporter Drew Harwell, had been covering that rule change, as well as Musk’s claims that he and his family had been endangered by location sharing.
“It’s impossible to square Twitter’s free speech aspirations with the purging of critical journalists’ accounts,” American Civil Liberties Union executive director Anthony D. Romero said in a statement. “The First Amendment protects Musk’s right to do this, but it’s a terrible decision. Their accounts should be restored immediately.”
Turning Child Care Into Big Business–What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Well, let’s see, first you create the haves and the have-nots. That’s before you find out how much profit goes to executive salaries and before you find out how the quality of care diminishes as demands for more profits grow. You know, just like everything in, say, health care:
Millions of American families are coping with a child care shortage brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. But one end of the business is thriving: national chains, some charging silver-spoon prices.
That split reality is another marker of how income inequality shapes access to basic necessities like child care, and how it has become harder for lower- and middle-income parents, usually women, to get back into the work force after pandemic disruptions.
The expansion of the chain child care sector as the rest of the industry shrinks means, “You’re going to increasingly have the haves and have-nots — child care operating more as a luxury good and less as a public good,” said Elliot Haspel, a child care expert at Capita, a family policy group.
He noted that the chains were generally expanding in higher-income neighborhoods, while the greatest need for services is elsewhere — particularly in rural areas and low-income communities of color.
The companies, including KinderCare, Bright Horizons and Lightbridge Academy, serve about one million of the 12 million children under 5 in some form of child care.
This year, the 50 largest for-profit child care chains opened or acquired 537 new centers, an 8 percent increase from the previous year, according to an annual survey by Exchange, a trade publication covering the industry.
There is nothing unusual about child care centers being run as for-profit businesses. But while the typical community-based center operates with thin profit margins, the chain centers can expect annual profits of 15 percent to 20 percent of revenue, according to industry analysts.
“Private equity likes this space because it’s so resilient,” said George Tong, a senior research analyst at Goldman Sachs who studies the sector. (Goldman Sachs has provided investment banking services to Bright Horizons.)
Resilience. One more casualty to poor working people trying to find decent child care.
‘There’s Always A Delaware Connection’. Stealing Jason’s catch-phrase. In service to the Trump Trading Card ‘Major Announcement’:
According to the fine print of the website selling the Trump images, the proceeds won’t go to his campaign. Instead, they flow to NFT INT LLC—a company that, also according to the fine print, Trump does not own or control. It simply uses Trump’s name and likeness through a licensing agreement with another (likely Trump-affiliated) company, CIC Digital.
Neither NFT INT LLC nor CIC Digital have a discernible footprint, either online or in the real world. Both corporations were registered this year in Delaware, which effectively shields their ownership and management from public view.
Meaning, yes, the money is going directly to Trump’s pocket. Only, the Corporate Bar, the Secretary of State, and the General Assembly deem that the public is not entitled to the information.
Black Graves Didn’t Mean Shit To Developers, Microsoft, and Mecklenberg County, Va. (BTW, I think you need the Oxford Comma there, don’t you?) Just cleared ’em out and built that data center expansion:
Nobody working to bring a $346 million Microsoft project to rural Virginia expected to find graves in the woods. But in a cluster of yucca plants and cedar that needed to be cleared, surveyors happened upon a cemetery. The largest of the stones bore the name Stephen Moseley, “died December 3, 1930,” in a layer of cracking plaster. Another stone, in near perfect condition and engraved with a branch on the top, belonged to Stephen’s toddler son, Fred, who died in 1906.
“This is not as bad as it sounds,” an engineering consultant wrote in March 2014 to Microsoft and to an official in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, who was helping clear hurdles for the project — an expansion of a massive data center. “We should be able to relocate these graves.”
Mecklenburg County, along with Microsoft and a pair of consulting firms, immediately began a campaign to downplay the cemetery’s significance. Their most urgent task was to make sure the cemetery wouldn’t be deemed eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, the federal government’s list of sites worthy of protection. That designation would likely trigger an archaeological investigation overseen by the state and could force the developers to steer clear of the graves. Without such a designation, the graveyard could be moved with relative ease.
Read this entire article after you’ve taken your blood pressure meds. Then ask yourself, “Is it likely that this is the only case of its kind?” Asked and answered, right? Here’s but one example.
Delaware Botched School Lead Testing Program, Then Hid The Botch From The Public. You may have read Amanda Fries‘ excellent reporting when she first unveiled it. Here it is all neatly wrapped up for you. I include it not only because it’s superb reporting, but because this highlights something the General Assembly must address: The longstanding and ongoing hiding of vital information by governor-after-governor and agency-after-agency from the public. The General Assembly has subpoena power. It has rarely used it. Use it. Bring these officials before the public and demand answers. Almost forgot–the General Assembly has the sole power to craft the state’s budget. Anyone see how the two could go hand-in-hand?
What do you want to talk about?
The money is going directly to Trump’s pocket (assuming someone is dumb enough to buy that shit). But I think we all know that “campaign” money also goes into Trump’s pocket eventually. It is not like he ever pays anyone for goods or services.
Does anyone think the graphic artist who did the Spaceman Trump NFT got paid? Thought of it makes me laugh.