Andreas Wacker

We have seen this movie before: An unelectable man trailing against somebody out of the Obama administration with a long Washington history. HRC was a flawed candidate, Biden comes out of the very same corner of the democratic party that never understood in the first place why 2016 was lost to the GOP. On top of that Biden’s middle name would be Angriffsfläche, if there would be such a thing as middle names in Germany, and if he would be from there.

If this one gets lost again then it is not caused by he winner, just like last time. All that banter coming out of the orange monkeys mouth can not bend this, as much as he would like to believe it himself. He didn’t win 2016. The left, the democrats (party and people) gave it away. Stupidly. Avoidable. With grave consequences: The justices alone will haunt progress for decades. The US lost its trust in the world, in a situation when an international role would have been needed more than in the last 40 years.

This Forbes (sorry) piece is my ‘for you’ google news section. So it is what Google-AI thinks I like. And yes, I agree with what the author says. It scares me, but I agree with much what he has to say.

Interestingly there are no new insights, no data points. Just an opinion that aligns with what I have been thinking. And so I like it. I nod while I am reading.

Time will tell if the crash will happen – or not …

In the end nobody knows. But that does not stop me from being emotionally (and financially) invested on one side of the potential outcome.

It is too late now. But it was a mistake to allow spaces in filename. An _ would have the same purpose. And everybody would know that This_thing would be a file. While that thing could be anything. It would also bring the point home that there might be a length limit to yet_another_thing_at_least_what_its_name_is_concerned.

There would be no downside. People get used to everything. Engineers failed to put up good resistance towards weird requests. And then have all the troubles to implement the stuff that users actually don’t benefit from.

And they could not put spaces in the end of the name, which leads to all sorts of funny things. Yes, academically speaking you can have all sorts of things. The question is just if there is benefit, and what get impacted …

The wsj writes that BlackRock’s profits jumped 21%. They manage $7.3T for their clients. In comparison the GDP of Japan was $5.7T last year.

Covid-19 has negative impact on 99 out of 100 companies. Just Zoom, care takers and the makes of ventilators might see an uptake in business. Did the geniuses at BlackRock invested in exactly that tiny slither of the overall economy? Nope. The WSJ writes:

But after the Federal Reserve rushed in to stabilize markets, many investment firms reaped the benefits of the Fed’s intervention in the second quarter.

In other words: They backup up their money tankers just in the right moment when the Federal Reserve turned on the money pump. How convenient. For the people who own the 7.300.000.000.000 dollars that BlackRock manages.

If BlackRock would be seized, and its managed assets would could be distributed evenly among all Americans everybody would get $22.500.

Simple: just take control of the accounting part. Deaths go down, economy booms. Everybody happy, except for the ones who died a horrible death (Covid is not gentle in that respect), and those who miss them.

It is extremely disconcerting when infection numbers become a subject of spin. If dead people are become an operation field for alternative facts. It started with the number of attendees to his inauguration. Now it is about dead people. Not good.

Specially since if you don’t have good data actually more people die. Data is one of the few weapons you have against that virus right now. It was not necessary to shut the entire country down. If the US would have had tests and data to figure out where the outbreaks are.

Contract tracing and masks is what helps. All over the world. Where it happens numbers are tiny: Taiwan, Japan and Korea have together more than 200 million people. Around 1300 people died there. In total. 9 of them in Taiwan.

TIL that if you have a jpeg with an EXIF image description Photoshop will hand this through and WordPress will auto caption the image when it gets used as a “Featured image” on a post.

Using a png file instead of a jpeg avoids this.

“The European union was formed in order to take advantage of the United States. They formed and they take advantage of the United States. And I know that, they know I know that, but other presidents had no idea.”

Why did other presidents have no idea? Well, probably since their level of sanity was greater. It is easy to find supporters who also will defend utter nonsense like this.

Once you wade neck deep in bs you probably no longer notice.

Question is just how / if one should engage with people that operate in a made up world like this.