Archive for the ‘business’ Category

Lori Lightfoot proves targeting opponents over Sam Bankman-Fried contributions is effective

Posted: February 5, 2023 by John Ruberry in business, crime, elections, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

Okay, Republicans, you have an easy lay-up shot at the basket. But of course, sure things, such as Red Wave midterm blowouts, can end up as air balls. 

America’s worst big city mayor, Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot, is running for reelection. She has eight opponents, a couple of whom, such as Ja’Mal Green and the Chicago Teachers Union-endorsed Brandon Johnson, are extreme leftists who provide answers to the question, “Can Chicago have a worse mayor than Lori Lightfoot?

Chicago’s elections are non-partisan. In the likely scenario that no candidate achieves 50 percent of the vote in the first round of voting, which is February 28, the top two candidates face off in an April 4 runoff. As with the congressional midterms, polling has been all over the place in the mayoral race, but the top four candidates in terms of popularity appear to be Lightfoot, former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas, businessman and vote-buyer Willie Wilson, and US Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia. 

The Chicago mayoral race is the first major election, unless you count December’s Georgia Senate runoff race, since the collapse of cryptocurrency firm FTX.

By most accounts Garcia, who endorsed Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential campaign, was the early frontrunner in the contest. But then Lightfoot went on the attack. 

You see, Garcia’s congressional campaign fund accepted $2,900 from former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, who was indicted last year for charges surrounding the collapse of the crypto currency firm. Worse, SBF’s PAC, Protect our Futures, spent over $150,000 on glossy mailers sent to Chuy’s remapped and gerrymandered 4th congressional district to introduce him to new voters for the 2022 Democratic primary. Only Garcia was running unopposed in that race. Chuy is a member of the House Financial Services Committee, which oversees cryptocurrency. The $2,900 Bankman-Fried contribution to Garcia has since been donated to charity.

And Lighfoot’s attack appears to be a solid blow against Garcia in a TV spot where she connects Garcia not only to SBF, but also to former Illinois Democratic Party chairman and state House speaker, Boss Michael Madigan, who was indicted last year, as well as Chicago’s deservedly unpopular red-light cameras. 

Most of the Lightfoot attack ad against Garcia begins at the 1:22 mark in this Fox Chicago video.

The upshot? In the two most recent polls, one that you should look at with suspicion comes from an internal survey from the Lightfoot campaign, and the other one from a suburban Republican pollster, Garcia has dropped to third place. Lighfoot’s poll has her on in the lead, the other poll has Vallas in the lead with Lighfoot close behind–but both surveys have the top two in a statistical tie. 

Garcia, although he did force Rahm Emanuel into a runoff in the 2015 mayoral race, is accustomed to comfortable elections, so it might be a struggle for Chuy to fight back.

Back to the GOP.  

Republicans, you know, or should know, what to do. Target every Democrat who has taken Sam Bankman-Fried cash so hard that voters will believe that these Dems have SBF as a running mate.

Even if it means following Lori Lightfoot’s lead.

John Ruberry regularly blogs just north off Chicago at Marathon Pundit.

Five #Twitterfiles thoughts Under the Fedora Paid For, Friday Dump Differences, Traffic lost to Advertisers, Now it makes sense and Consequences

Posted: December 3, 2022 by datechguy in Uncategorized, tech, internet/free speech, business, election 2020, News/opinion
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One might be amazed how many reporters on the left spent yesterday on twitter attacking Musk and Matt Taibbi for releasing these documents, at least one would if you didn’t realize that these folks paychecks depend on them objecting.

This goes to show the difference between social media and standard media. For standard media a Friday night dump would be all about burring a story. However for a story that will spread via social media a Friday night weekend dump means more regular people will be free to read and spread it around, which is the whole point.

All that Musk has done has been about raising the profile of twitter. This document dump will do the same. That’s good news for all those advertisers who didn’t heed the left’s call to leave the platform but bad news to all who played along and lost their exposure to all those eyeballs.

This combined with the under oath testimony of an FBI agent being deposed is Missouri on their attempts to use big tech to swing the last election goes a long way in explaining why they went all in on stealing that election. If they fail and Trump wins then it’s bound to have been leaked to someone in the admin which might have resulted in a special prosecutor and/or investigation that would have been damning.

It’s very much worth noting that there were Democrat members of congress worried about this but their primary worry was what it would mean to section 230 defanging the friendly tech folks elsewhere at Facebook and Google and Youtube. In other words they were worried about not the acts but the Consequences they might lead to. A real test of the new GOP congress will be how deep they investigate this. If I’m McCarthy worried about getting the speakers chair I’d put out a statement at once saying I would name a committee at once and promise to load it with fire-eaters on the right.

Then let the consequences flow.

Reality Doesn’t Care What Twitter Employees Think or Nobody has Repealed the Laws of Supply and Demand

Posted: November 18, 2022 by datechguy in business, education, Uncategorized
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Back when I learned to code in the early 1980’s people who knew how to code were, in terms of the general population, kinda rare.

About 70% of the class who tried a Computer Science Major washed out because of the math and science involved and ending up with a job that was worth about $24K (the equivalent of $66K today) was par or even below par for the course. We were considered a BFD and had a pretty high opinion of ourselves.

Well after a while I decided I’d rather do other things than code and so I did but while I stepped away from my college major people poured into the industry, computers shrank in size and increased in power exponentially.

When I was looking to get back in the industry it seemed that everyone and their mother knew how to code and had been doing it in languages I had never seen before to the point where old Fortran coders like me in their late 40’s or early 50’s weren’t worth the investment when you could get a kid with now wife and family attachments for less money right out of college with all the new stuff fresh in their heads.

And that in a round about way brings us to the current nonsense at Twitter.

All these kids at Twitter seem to have a really inflated sense of self, not all that surprising given the way public education took a turn in the last few decades but they have in effect forgotten the reality of things which is namely this:

The pool of competent programmers has grown even faster than the processing power of computers over the last 40 years and you don’t have to be one of the richest men in the world to be able to tap into that pool and find a few thousand programmers if you need them.

Furthermore when you are one of the world’s richest men you can easily tap into a pool that extends far beyond America, let alone the blue areas of America.

Put simply while the supposedly bright people at Twitter who are considering leaving may have forgotten the laws of supply and demand Elon Musk hasn’t and if they think Twitter is suddenly going to go black because a bunch of them, even the majority of them choose to leave, then frankly their too stupid to be working at any company Musk owns.

I suspect those who choose to come aboard Twitter to replace these narcissists will be well rewarded for working hard and I suspect those who stay and choose to work hard will be even better rewarded.

This is the chance of a lifetime for a young programmer and if I was younger I’d consider it myself.

As for those leaving given the layoffs going on around the nation in the Biden economy I wish you the best of luck, you’ll need it.

Instalanche: Thanks Stephen, welcome folks take a look around. Same old blogging team but on a .blog account on WordPress. Check out some thoughts under the fedora, acceptable terms concerning abortion , some thoughts on election theft and of course if you like what you see here, consider hitting DaTipJar or subscribing to keep our writers paid as things have been quieter since our .com site has gone and our youtube channel banned though you can find my stuff on Rumble here

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Democrats’ inflation attacks ordinary Americans as Washington insiders are unaffected

Posted: October 16, 2022 by John Ruberry in business, economy, elections, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics, trade
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By John Ruberry

Every time Americans shop at a supermarket, they are reminded of a de facto tax on their spending power–inflation. The classic definition of inflation is too many dollars chasing too few goods, which, President Joe Biden and his apologists, jumped on last year when they deemed inflation as “transitory,” pointing at the supply-chain crisis and the backlog of freighters at America’s major seaports. Left out of Biden and Company’s explanation was his $1.9 trillion stimulus package, which the president signed into law in early 2021, when the economy was clearly already recovering from the COVID lockdown.

But the supply-chain crisis was in fact a couple-months long hiccup. After all, if the supply-chain crisis was such a concern, why did we only find out after the media began asking questions on the whereabouts of the person in charge of our ports, secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg? Only then was it revealed that Buttigieg was on paternity leave. 

The semiconductor chip shortage has driven up the price of new automobiles. The lack of chips is tied to the worldwide COVID lockdown. I’ll discuss cars in a bit. 

Over the past 12 months, according to the September figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, inflation soared, again, to a level not seen in four decades, at a rate of 8.2 percent. Despite what appears to be, for real, a transitory drop in gasoline prices. But fuel prices are dramatically higher than when Donald Trump was president because of the Biden administration’s anti-fossil fuel polices. Food and housing prices are way up. Agriculture is a major user of energy, and many fertilizers are derived from fossil fuels. And those increasingly expensive loaves of bread you see on the shelves of your local supermarket don’t arrive there by way of osmosis, nor by electric trucks.

But don’t worry, Biden recently signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law. Insert The Simpsons’ Nelson Muntz “haw-haw” here.

The new car shortage has led to a used car shortage. All vehicles are more expensive. To fight inflation, the Federal Reserve, continues to hike its key interest rate, which drives up all lending. Most people don’t pay cash for cars, they finance. 

Then there is housing. Maria Bartiromo, on Fox and Friends this morning, laid the truth on the line when she said, “People who are going to buy a home are realizing that their mortgage payment now going to be going to be hundreds and hundreds of dollars more than they thought every month.”

Okay, no big deal, you might say, “I can always rent a place to live.” But rents are up too.

Now, if you are a Beltway insider, then you need not worry. Washington is recession proof. And the capital’s response, particularly when Democrats are in charge, is always more government. If you are a DC insider, you are well paid. You’re not sweating about food prices going up and you can afford an electric vehicle and the expense of installing a car charger in your garage.

The only known cure for high inflation is a recession. Despite Democrats’ creative denials, we are in one already.

Expect our economy to get even worse.  

But to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, “Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Joe Biden loses his.”

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

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