5 thoughts on “Weekend Open Thread”

1. Trump may have to look under the cushions for another $100 million.  The IRS audit he used for years as an excuse not to release his tax returns may have struck paydirt! 

   Trump May Owe $100 Million From Double-Dip Tax Breaks, Audit Shows

   A previously unknown focus of an I.R.S. audit is a dubious accounting maneuver that effectively meant taking the same write-offs twice on a Chicago skyscraper.

   If the I.R.S. prevails, Mr. Trump’s tax returns would look very different, especially those from 2011 to 2017. During those years, he reported $184 million in income from “The Apprentice” and agreements to license his name, along with $219 million from canceled debts. But he paid only $643,431 in income taxes thanks to huge losses on his businesses, including the Chicago tower. The revisions sought by the I.R.S. would require amending his tax returns to remove $146 million in losses and add as much as $218 million in income from condominium sales. That shift of up to $364 million could swing those years out of the red and well into positive territory, creating a tax bill that could easily exceed $100 million.

   Log in to Reply

2. Does EmptyG not see it is she who has delivered Speaker Johnson into the hands of the Democrats? No matter what he does, he needs to stay on good terms with the Dem caucus…because of her ego.

   They are still not listening, Madge. Please sit down now. They got you to do the stupid thing… your mission is accomplished.

   Log in to Reply

3. Quotes that didn’t age well aged like a fine Trump wine…

   “Pathological liar. Serial philanderer. He let us all down.”

   ~Spineless Senator Rafael Eduardo “Ted” Cruz on Donald Trump, 2016

   Log in to Reply

4. Plan? What Plan? There is no plan. Josh Marshal at TPM.

   Fight once, fight twice fight thrice.

   there’s a short piece in the Times of Israel this afternoon that captures a dimension of what’s happening right now in Israel that is mostly off the radar in the US. The piece is about a reported blow up between Netanyahu and IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi. Specifically it has the latter telling Netanyahu that because he refuses to make diplomatic arrangements for post-war government of Gaza the IDF is having to go back to fight again in areas it already took over. In some cases they’re having to go back and fight for the same ground a third time!

   (Here’s another article in Haaretz (sub req) on how the IDF is now going back into northern Gaza, which they conquered back in the fall. Privately the IDF says Hamas has reestablished control there because there’s no day after plan, which is a diplomatic to-do item. If you blow it up and leave why wouldn’t they just go back?)

   Netanyahu refuses to do that because there’s really no way to so without blowing up his governing coalition. But without some plan, the Israeli army is reduced to doing something like pushing water up a hill with its hands. The article is replete with examples of heads of the army or intelligence services trying to get someone to give them a strategy, or actually more than a strategy, just a goal. And it has Netanyahu getting mad because they’re going to the Defense Minister, himself a former high level IDF general. It’s not even a question of disagreeing on strategy really – that’s for the political leadership to decide. It’s refusing to come up with any strategy at all.

   Log in to Reply

5. WOTD "Enshittification" Noah Smith.

   The term “enshittification” was coined by Cory Doctorow, one of my favorite sci-fi authors, and a keen observer of internet trends. In a Medium post in 2022 and an article in Wired in 2023, he argued that a social media platform has a predictable life-cycle:

   1. First it lures a bunch of users with a great (and free) user experience, to create a network effect that makes it hard for people to leave. 

   2. Then, in order to make money, it attracts a bunch of business customers by doing things like selling user data and spamming users with ads. This makes the user experience worse, but the users are trapped on the platform by a network effect.

   3. Finally, the platform tries to extract more value from its business customers by jacking up fees, offering its own competing products, etc. This makes the platform a worse value proposition for the business customers, but because all the users are still on the platform, and because of their own sunk costs, the advertisers can’t leave. This is what Tim O’Reilly calls “eating the ecosystem” — mainly hits businesses.

    …since the marginal cost of producing misinformation is much smaller than the marginal cost of refuting misinformation, a free and disintermediated marketplace of ideas will tend to spread a lot of lies. There’s plenty of research showing that misinformation actually spreads faster on social media than true information. 

   This is why humanity has traditionally relied on informational gatekeepers — newspaper editors, TV anchors, and so on — to prevent us having to become full-time fact-checkers. Social media has very few such gatekeepers, and there was a huge (and ongoing) debate after the 2016 election about whether we need some sort of corporate editorial control in order to cut down on the amount of misinformation spreading on social media.

   Log in to Reply