San Francisco-based “co-living platform” HubHaus has collapsed, saying it has no funds, leaving people using its platform to rent rooms in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Washington DC, in limbo.
Source: A San Francisco ‘Co-Living’ Startup Suddenly Shut Down, Leaving Tenants In Limbo
Oh, look. A scammy “Web 2.0” app company reselling real estate in a ridiculous housing market has failed to understand either part of that equation.
A couple of friends installed flush-sized SD memory cards in their MacBook Air’s, which are used as hard drives by the OS, because they were running out of room on the internal drive. It occurs to me, well after the fact, that a non-trivial reason Apple removed those slots was to prevent this scenario, as upgrading to a larger hard drive is a primary reason to upgrade your laptop.
FEC documents show that Ellison made the $250,000 donation to the Security is Strength PAC on September 14th. The Security is Strength PAC has bought ads exclusively in support of Graham’s political ambitions, including his 2015 presidential campaign and his current reelection bid for the US Senate.
Source: Oracle founder donated $250,000 to Graham PAC in final days of TikTok deal – The Verge
Larry Ellison is one of the richest people in the world. $250K is lunch money for a guy like this. The truly sad thing about our American democracy isn’t that it can be bought; it’s that it can be bought so cheaply. It’s nauseating.
Pivar, 90 years old, is an art collector, scientist, and a founder (alongside Andy Warhol) of the New York Academy of Art. He ended up speaking with me for over an hour about his “very, very sick” friend in a conversation we wound up publishing in its entirety. Stuart told me—over and over again—that Epstein suffered from “satyriasis,” which he described as the male version of nymphomania, and that he used his money and power to “make an industry” out of having sex with underage girls. This apparently entailed Epstein having sex with “three girls a day” and “hundreds and hundreds” in total. He said he never knew Epstein was having sex with children until Maria Farmer, a student at the academy and an acquaintance of Pivar, had told him she had been assaulted and held hostage by Epstein. He also claimed that Epstein had never invited him to what he called “The Isle of Babes,” a reference to Epstein’s private island where much of the child sex trafficking allegedly occurred.
Source: I Called Everyone in Jeffrey Epstein’s Little Black Book – Mother Jones
This admission, from one of Epstein’s supposedly closest friends, sort of puts the nail in the coffin of this particular kerfluffle. Not only did ESR’s denouncement of using the word “pedophile” to describe Epstein miss the mark ethically and morally, it also missed the mark factually. Here, someone very close to him admits that he was a straight-up pedo. I’m sure this was all documented in the early days of these revelations, but I hadn’t wanted to read about it that closely. Given the broad outlines of what could be reported in polite circles, I was quite certain that the line had been crossed so completely that the line no longer existed, and this proves it. It doesn’t take a genius’ genius to figure that one out.
The whole article is a gift that keeps on giving, but this hook is what made me read the whole thing:
After Epstein’s arrest in 2019, a media narrative coalesced around the question of his strange place in the global elite: Epstein the master salesman, a man who had skillfully conned his way into the world’s most powerful circles, fooling everyone in the process. But after my travels through the book, after hearing more of the petty gossip and childish drama of the people who rule our world, I realized this was obviously incorrect. Built into the premise of Epstein the mastermind scammer is the notion that some kind of legitimate path to a legitimate global aristocracy exists. To call Epstein a grifter is to assume he circumvented some genuine meritocratic world order, where the “real” virtuosos dutifully climb the “real” ranks into the oligarchy, powered by nothing but their native talents.
The truth is that the elite world that Epstein ascended into, the one I tapped into by way of the black book, is populated with hordes of loathsome, boring, untalented people living their bumbling, idiotic lives while just so happening to wield some share of the preposterous global bounty that he and the rest were after. For all the mystery surrounding Epstein’s fortune, its existence is hardly more inscrutable than the wealth of any of his other billionaire peers. He earned it the same way they all did, which is to say precisely not at all.
This wasn’t some masterful hack into the global aristocracy. It’s what everyone does. It’s what the whole thing is. There is no scam here. It’s grifters grifting grifters all the way down.
But the final analysis — that Epstein was a tool in the employ of the CIA — was both novel to me, and is pretty convincing. It fits the facts pretty well.
Senate Republicans will be pushing full force for President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee at the start of hearings to confirm Amy Coney Barrett, while Democrats will try to make Republicans pay a political price for speeding toward her confirmation before Election Day and in the midst of a pandemic.
Politics Dominates as Amy Coney Barrett’s Confirmation Hearings Begin in Senate – WSJ
I don’t have anything to say about Amy Coney, or about the confirmation hearing circus. I just wanted to say that I’ve officially hit my limit on the number of times I can see “in the midst of a pandemic” in a news article. I don’t want to even debate the semantics of what it might mean, even if it were being used in good faith, in this particular instance. It’s just a dash of despair and paranoia that journalists just sprinkle on everything now, so it has come to mean nothing any more.
Yesterday evening, I got over a dozen notifications that my Apple Credit Card got hit with fraudulent charges, and their automated detection missed a few. Except for a couple of pizza places, several hundred miles from where I live, the charges were all from video gaming-related sites. So I’m guessing that one of the gaming companies got hacked. I can only think of 2 that have this card: Steam and Sony. I’m going to be watching for an announcement from Brian Krebs. It’s sorely tempting to reactivate my Twitter account to check the traffic on this…
“The app stopped working completely after three days and I am stuck!” said one user. Another said they “got already stuck twice when wearing it due to the unreliable app.”
“It worked for about a month until I almost got stuck in it. Thankfully it unlocked itself randomly and I was able to get out of it. The device left a bad scar that took nearly a month of recovery,” said another review.
Source: Security flaw left ‘smart’ chastity sex toy users at risk of permanent lock-in | TechCrunch
Today, in This-Is-TOTALLY-On-YOU Internet-of-Garbage news…
Of course, there is still a long way to go before any of the report’s recommendations become a reality. Even within the committee, there is not unanimity, with some Republican members expressing concerns over breaking up companies in particular. Republicans will also be more ideologically opposed to adding regulations or removing companies’ ability to arbitrate disputes themselves, rather than through the courts.
And then of course there is the enormous collective power of Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google – some of the world’s largest and richest corporations – who will be willing and able to do anything to protect their markets and profits.
I note, for the record, that AT&T was broken up long before Citizen’s United was decided, when our government still worked, because both sides actually compromised on legislation. I also remind everyone the the Supreme Court is NOT, in fact, the final say in our laws. If Congress doesn’t like the way a decision went, they can write a new law in light of what was decided.
But do you really think that a bunch of Congress-people are going to forego campaign funding from Silicon Valley by voting to break up four of the biggest corporations in the world? Even if they weren’t getting money from those companies before, you can bet their primary challengers would, the next time around. You can’t fix our corporatocracy until you get rid of Citizen’s United, and we will never be free of it now. As if we didn’t have a big enough problem with it before, the decision guarantees regulatory capture forever. Campaign funding and the life-and-death polarization of our two-party system will never allow for reversing it.
There’s no public interest in these hearings. There is literally zero chance that anything will substantively change. Even if they do break Instagram out of Facebook, or YouTube out of Google, what will that really do? Nothing. If this is really about the advertising market, then all you’re going to do is split your existing spend, and if there are just 4 entities involved in the market instead of 2, they’ll collude on pricing, as a middle finger to the government. And, like AT&T before it, they will eventually just reassemble themselves into something even more monstrous than before.
This is about money. It’s always about money. Congress thinks that these companies should be giving more of their money to their campaigns, and this is how they go about getting that done. Watch campaign contributions rise in the wake of these hearings, note that nothing effectively changes, and then remember I was right. This isn’t rocket surgery. We’ve seen this before from the Microsoft trial.
The House and Senate are both pushing forward with the so-called “EARN IT” Act, a bill that will undermine encryption and free speech online. Attorney General William Barr and the DOJ have demanded for years that messaging services give the government special access to users’ private messages. If EARN IT passes, Barr will likely get his wish—law enforcement agencies will be able to scan every message sent online.
Source: Stop the EARN IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption | EFF Action Center
Once again, I remind conservatives and Christians that every surveillance and law enforcement power we accede to the government in the name of terrorism or child pornography will eventually be used against people who quote and speak about the verbatim contents of the Bible, when they make such acts illegal.