Proof Of Concept
By Mitch Berg
How certain is the DFL that at least a plurality of Minnesota voters just aren’t very good at logic, civics or critical thinking?
Sure enough that they’re treating the $17 Billion “Surplus” a big win for progressive governance, and proof of some divine mandate:
What it actually is, of course, is a combination of:
- BIllions of dollars in federal Covid stimulus dollars
- The normal Minnesota DFL overtaxation…
- …with receipts driven up by inflation in the cost of the goods being taxed
- All that taxation and inflation going on over an epipandemic surge in stimulus-swollen consumer spending
Mark my words – and I have marked them myself, with “to dos” on my calendar on the first Mondays ijn December of 2024 and 2026: the following will happen:
- The DFL will turn that “$217.6 Billion in Surplus” into permanent spending
- The economy will slow into recession (as even the DFL’s cheerleaders in their bespoke press are starting to observe).
- Without the Covid stimuli, and with the economy contracting, tax receipts will crash again.
- The state will have a multibillion dollar deficit by 2026, probably 2024.
We’ll check back on this. Oh, yes we will.
December 8th, 2022 at 11:53 am
there will be a push for reparations, bet on it
excellent way to stir up black voters for democrats
after all, when lincoln attacked the states which were predominantly occupied by blacks, the war had a disparate impact on persons of color, leaving them homeless and without jobs or prospects
worse, minnesota was the first state to send volunteer soldiers to oppress black families in the south so its only just we pay the most
“we tried to pay you what you are owed but republicans . . . .”
December 8th, 2022 at 11:54 am
Too easy, Mitch. You’re shootin’ fish in a barrel!
December 8th, 2022 at 1:44 pm
One thing is clear: this is a result of the students, small businesses, and working families whose hard work make our economy
Students? Who knew!?
December 8th, 2022 at 7:18 pm
Matt Taibbi has just tweeted “Gentlemen, start your engines.” so I guess we are in for another doc drop from Twitter.
December 8th, 2022 at 10:04 pm
[…] Woke Capitalism Shark Tank: Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX) Throws Flag In Garbage Shot In The Dark: Proof Of Concept, also,Downtown’s Back Baybee! (Part II) This Ain’t Hell: Day of Infamy, The Road to […]
December 9th, 2022 at 3:59 am
And here it is: https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601007575633305600
December 9th, 2022 at 4:12 am
If you read the Bari Weiss thread, not the high level of discretion Twitter used in in managing content and the popularity of its content, and then remind yourself that Twitter enjoys immunity under section 230 of DACA because it is not a publisher but an “open platform.”
We know from what Matt Taibbi wrote last week that Twitter used its 230 power conventionally (i.e. to limit copyright violations, direct calls for violence, and pr0n) until . . . 2016. Gee, what happened in 2016 that drove liberals insane?
December 9th, 2022 at 8:04 am
Everything that Bari Weiss is currently “breaking” as part of Twitter Files 2 has been reported on and known about for two and a half years.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgxd3d/twitter-insider-access-panel-account-hacks-biden-uber-bezos
December 9th, 2022 at 8:10 am
Twitter files 1 was interesting and newsworthy, but not scandalous.
Twitter files 2 is just reporting a Twitter FAQ as if it was news.
Twitter files 3 is going to be something like conservatives are limited to 288 character tweets.
The fact that people can have their tweets reduced in search and trending topics is not new. There is a whole FAQ page about it
Bari Weiss misrepresenting stuff to fanboys to make a big conspiracy out of something that is clearly not a big conspiracy?
How… not surprising.
December 9th, 2022 at 9:34 am
The various agency heads in MN are salivating over the coming “big budgets”.
Does Emery always have an “idiot take” on the news? Yes, yes he does.
December 9th, 2022 at 10:22 am
Oh hey, here it is, with Elon using the “accepted” definition of shadow-banning and all…
“New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.
Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter.
You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet.” ~ Elon Musk
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593673339826212864?s=20&t=7DtCLSnkYV6jYtV7SToGpQ
December 9th, 2022 at 10:22 am
remember this ambitious plan to build electric vehicle charging stations across minnesota to make it easier for consumers to switch
https://www.pca.state.mn.us/air-water-land-climate/electric-vehicle-charging-stations
might be able to fund even more, even faster, with all that extra dough
and then ban people from using them because we must save energy because of the war in ukraine
December 9th, 2022 at 10:42 am
Total Western support for Ukraine in 2022, including both the financial and military support will not probably not exceed 150 billion USD. The US defense budget alone in 2022 was over 700 billion USD. Would increasing the US defense budget by an additional 150 billion USD eliminate Russia as a global threat to democracy?
We need to spend much more on arming Ukraine. The faster we arm them, the sooner this war will be over, the fewer people will die.
December 9th, 2022 at 1:18 pm
under the constitution the president has no authority to give away one thin dime not domestically for welfare and certainly not internationally for money laundering all spending bills must originate in congress
under the constitution congress has no authority to give away one thin dime internationally for money laundering
the total amount of american dollars given to ukraine constitute more than forty billion separate impeachable offenses for every congresscritter and ice cream licker who participated in the illegal give away
we need to spend less on ukraine zero in fact
the sooner we stop arming them the sooner this war will be over
the fewer people will die
December 9th, 2022 at 1:26 pm
So sweet . . . twitter crybaby censors are resigning in groups:
https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/1601264074569920512
These people were not protecting you. They were hiding things from you.
December 9th, 2022 at 1:36 pm
The problem at Twitter wasn’t Dorsey. It was Yoel Roth. Roth is a professional censor. That is what his PhD is in (seriously — his grad research was into measuring and regulating online speech).
But Yoel Roth has no legal training. You can see this in the Taibbi & Weiss twitter dumps where Roth & team are desperately trying to find ways to ban material they found politically objectionable but did not fall outside of Twitter’s policies.
Dorsey, I suppose, didn’t want to deal with this speech regulation stuff personally so he grabbed a hate speech censor (Roth), gave him a budget and a team, and turned a blind eye to what Roth was actually doing.
This explains Dorsey’s deer-in-the-headlight stair during his famous exchange with Red Cruz two years ago. He literally ad no idea how ‘his’ policies were being implemented.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3ZzLYFWRCc
December 9th, 2022 at 1:41 pm
Now, if you want to know why Twitter insisted (until Musk’s takeover) that it was discriminating on political viewpoint, although it was obviously true, recall that Twitter’s business model depends on section 230 of the CDA. Without section 230 they can’t make money. Losing GOP support puts section 230 at risk.
BTW, one of the funniest parts of the Dorsey-Cruz exchange is Dorsey telling Cruz that Twitter is not a publisher, but is instead a “distributes information.”
That is the textbook definition of what a publisher does.
December 9th, 2022 at 2:53 pm
And yet another FBI/CIA agent found working in Twitter’s censorship team: https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/09/head-of-twitters-censorship-operation-was-a-former-fbi-cia-operative/
Tsk-tsk. Having your elections decided by state security is not a good look for you, USA. That’s how they do it in Venezuela & Pakistan.
December 9th, 2022 at 3:01 pm
If it was banning churches and punishing worshippers, it would be a Zelensky deal, but that is the kind of stuff Putin would do, UMMP!
Why does Pedo Joe’s FBI love Russia?
December 9th, 2022 at 4:55 pm
They are having a great battle on Wikipedia’s article on Twitter shadow banning conservatives. When the day started the article said that Vice News reported in 2018 that Twitter was engaging in shadow banning political speech, but that this was disputed at the time by the NY Times, Guardian, and Buzzfeed. The article now starts with this nonsensical line:”Shadow banning” became popularized in 2018 as a conspiracy theory when Twitter shadow-banned Republicans.”
Lol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning#Twitter
It’s a bit like watching a bunch of felons in a jail cell trying to come up with a straight story before they are interviewed by the detectives. The purpose of the discussion usually becomes “who is going to take the fall for this?” at some point.
December 9th, 2022 at 5:22 pm
I bet that a lot, maybe 80-90 % of Biden voters are perfectly okay with the FBI steering the course of the 2020 election if it kept Trump from winning. Ditto the whole economy-wrecking covid mandates and the George Floyd riots.
December 9th, 2022 at 5:58 pm
Another Taibbi Twitter doc dump, this time with Yoel Roth humble-bragging about meeting with the FBI after January 6: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1601359872528101376?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1601359872528101376%7Ctwgr%5Ea487bb2865515a6b16197594d243e4eb9601aa39%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Falthouse.blogspot.com%2F2022%2F12%2Fmatt-taibbi-is-back-with-another-set-of.html
December 9th, 2022 at 6:03 pm
Sorry about the long link, I’ll shorten links in the future.
The next dump will be by Michael Shellenberger. Interesting to note that the three journalists Musk has used to curate his twitter censorship files are political liberals who are hostile to woke millennial nonsense & knee jerk Trump hatred. Choosing three journalists that fall into this category — no R Wing GOP journalists — can not be an accident.
December 9th, 2022 at 6:10 pm
Definitely not good.
Matt Taibbi
@mtaibbi
3. We’ll show you what hasn’t been revealed: the erosion of standards within the company in months before J6, decisions by high-ranking executives to violate their own policies, and more, against the backdrop of ongoing, documented interaction with federal agencies.
December 9th, 2022 at 6:36 pm
The excuses by left authoritarians for Twitters shadow banning is kind of like what the same people did after the Snowden revelations: for years they claim that, no, the NSA, FBI, and CIA aren’t spying on Americans. That would be against the law!.
Then when Snowden does his doc dump showing that the NSA, the FBI, and the CIA were actually spying on Americans, what you heard was “Spying on Americans? No, that wasn’t spying on Americans. It was intelligence gathering that Americans got caught up in, and besides there were warrants signed by a judge.”
December 10th, 2022 at 9:47 am
MP, libturd voters are perfectly OK with big brother and being serfs to the big goobernment. And they will do anything and everything to wring the last ounce of freedom from your being. Even if it has to come out with your last breath.
December 10th, 2022 at 10:33 am
Musk somehow thinks that by outing former employees on decisions made about highly speculative and highly politicized information is somehow going to convince all of us that he is the great arbiter of truth and fairness that we’ve all needed for some time. Fat chance. Emphasis on fat.
The whole “Twitter Files” thing reminds me of when Musk announced he’d “secured 1,000 hospital respirators” (that can cost $50,000 each) at the start of COVID … and he delivered 1,000 used CPAP machines.
What a putz.
December 10th, 2022 at 11:19 am
Guess the twitter files hit left someone with butt hurt.
For those of you keeping track, Emery, who lives in an old appliance box in an empty just called the world’s richest man, who is self made and built and own a rocket company the US government relies on to keep its astronauts in the air, as well as the first successful modern electric car company, a “putz.”
putz
1 of 2
noun
ˈpəts
1
US, informal : a stupid, foolish, or ineffectual person : jerk
Butt hurt often results in name calling.
December 10th, 2022 at 11:27 am
MP, at the speed we are spiraling down the hole, nationalization of assets is not that far off. Musk will lose Space X in 3… 2… 1…
December 10th, 2022 at 11:51 am
It is pretty interesting. They claim bias, but the discussion actually shows that the decisionmakers didn’t automatically nix conservative voices. They discussed what the potential violation might be and seemed to usually err on the side of leaving it up.
In nearly every case what Taibbi summarizes is nowhere in the screenshot he attaches to that tweet. Often it shows the exact opposite of his conclusion. He knows his intended audience (Woolly) will eat it up without skepticism.
December 10th, 2022 at 12:09 pm
Must be painful for all the innuendo hawks that Taibbi and Weiss (of which Woolly is a fanboy)
presumably have all the emails between Twitter and the FBI, are quite motivated to look for dirt, and haven’t found a single one showing an improper FBI request to screenshot and broadcast.
The two impressive things in the archive is (a) given all the slack and email messages, that *this* is really the best they have and (b) how the grievance machine just pivots to invent stuff between the lines to validating their priors despite the lack of evidence anyway.
December 10th, 2022 at 12:31 pm
Woolly claims this is the biggest scandal of the modern age.
It’s honestly shocking that a company would escalate the most significant and difficult decisions to senior leadership. If this continues to be as much of a non-issue as it has been so far, it’ll shake the world down to its core …🤣
December 10th, 2022 at 12:33 pm
havent found a single improper request
they are all improper
and everyone knew it
which is why they lied about it
and claimed it was not happening
what bothers me is this looks pretty bad
but thats an old democrat tactic
admit one bad thing now and
continue to hide
the truly
evil
December 10th, 2022 at 1:04 pm
^^ The big reveal about Twitter moderation is a classic death of expertise moment: people who didn’t know about something until now assume not knowing about it meant that it was a huge secret.
December 10th, 2022 at 1:05 pm
That’s our Emery — frequently wrong, never in doubt.
Reminds me of a mid level manager at a company that you are too embarrassed to admit you ever worked for.
My hope is that congress repeals section 230 of the CDA and that puts all the social media companies OOB.
BTW, it seems that Twitter was aware of the problem with human moderators (too expensive) and was working on an AI system to do the censoring for them. I have my doubts that it would work — human censors often fail because they are reactive to changes in what original creators produce, so that they are playing catch up (for example, an online community could devise a racial/sexual slur that is known only to them, and change it when it is discovered). Also any rule set lacks context — that’s why the low level censors at Twitter kicked high level accounts upstairs, where senior managers had the authority to recontextualize the rule set for individual accounts. That’s how libsoftiktok got banned despite not violating Twitter’s TOS.
So the problem is “can we devise a set of rules to regulate speech in the way that we desire?” The rule set is made but the capability of human speech is damn near infinite and any rule set is necessarily finite.
Then the question becomes “can we devise an AI system to create and implement a dynamic rule set to regulate speech in the way that we desire?” But that doesn’t really help because the problem hasn’t changed. Switching Roth or Agrawal for an AI that does the same thing is not a quantum leap in efficiency. For less important Twitter accounts AI censorship (call it moderation if you like) is not a quantum leap cheaper or more effective than crowdsourcing the job.
And then you have the problem where your AI is actually in an adversarial environment. People working against the Twitter AI are capable of building AIs, too.
December 10th, 2022 at 1:10 pm
From Twitter’s corporate blog, 26 July, 2018, in a blogpoat titles, ironically, “Setting the record straight on shadow banning”
We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile). And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/Setting-the-record-straight-on-shadow-banning
As I sais, frequently wrong, never in doubt.
December 10th, 2022 at 1:40 pm
The real damage is being done to the rump mainstream media. They were in step lock with TwitR the whole time, calling now confirmed facts “conspiracy theories”.
This will most likely carry over to the various election thefts that have occurred. We all know Arizona fucked with the returns; we fucking SAW leftist negro thugs refuse credentialed GOP watchers access to the counting rooms. We saw the scumbags in Detroit papering over the windows to keep people from watching them cheat.
There have been electrical substations taken down with small arms (impressive!) across the country. This is not the act of some drugged out lefty tranny army. These are the acts of men who know what they’re doing.
I wish them God’s speed. Time to take this shitshow down.
December 10th, 2022 at 2:16 pm
Sorry about all the misspellings, lately. I blame the tiny keyboard on my tablet.
December 10th, 2022 at 2:29 pm
That’s how libsoftiktok got banned despite not violating Twitter’s TOS.
This probably is a problem that crosses to other platforms. On FB, YouTube, etc., one of the big user complaints is “my post was deleted or I was banned, they say from violating TOS, but won’t tell me how what I posted violated their TOS, and there is no appeal.” They are literally making it up as they go along, there are no rules other than what the censor says today.
FYI, one of the great censorship stories happened in Central America in the 80s. It was in one of those shithole countries ruled by an alcalde, can’t remember which one.
Anyhow the government thought it came up with the perfect censorship regime. There were no rules about what info could and could not be published, but every article that appeared in every newspaper would have to be greenlit by censors loyal to the regime before it could be published.
The newspaper publishers obeyed.
But what they did was leave a blank space in the paper where the offending article would have appeared, and the length & placement in the paper gave the reader an idea of how big & important the censored stories were.
The lesson is that even when the censoring agency has perfect control over what can be published, censorship fails.
If you see Jay Bhattacharya questioning the wisdom of covid lockdowns and mandates on TV or in print, but for some reason his Twitter account never mentions covid lockdowns & mandates, you know what is going on.
December 10th, 2022 at 2:31 pm
I am preëmptively yoinking myself out of this thread mostly because I know I’d clog this one up with a lot of long-ass comments if I didn’t. 🤣
December 10th, 2022 at 3:39 pm
You can cut-n-paste with the best of the plagiarizers, Emery. That’s not what is stopping you.
December 10th, 2022 at 4:02 pm
Come on, Emery, get out in front of the MSM and tell us how of course non-binary people, transsexuals, and gays have more mental problems than straight people and that this has been the science for seventy years! You can do it, get to the head of the pack, dude! Give citations if you like, they are out there!
December 10th, 2022 at 5:44 pm
rAT is scouring TwitR for a witty response for you UMMP. He’ll come up with something.
Imagine being so vapid, you spend your days not only trolling comment threads, but using the words of others to do it.
But this nitwit is a stock market genius 🤣🤣
December 10th, 2022 at 7:38 pm
And now we have the Shellenberger doc drop on Twitter’s decision to ban Trump after Jan 6: https://bit.ly/3iH2WDF
December 10th, 2022 at 7:42 pm
The elite corruption became obvious to me about a decade ago when github put out new TOS that laid out some conditions of behavior that could be sanctioned (like intolerance for stupid people) and said that if you exhibited this behavior even off of the platform you could be banned.
This was not about policing the platform, it was about policing the personal lives of people who use the platform. It was about punishing real human beings, not moderating a shared software platform.
December 10th, 2022 at 8:04 pm
The theme of the Twitter doc drops by Taibbi, Weis, and Shellenberger is the arbitrariness of Twitter’s policy on restricting speech and banning accounts. It was all ad hoc and made up as they went along. There was no appeal to the TOS Twitter had set.
December 11th, 2022 at 7:54 am
Jack Dorsey in 2018: Following up on this with a lot more detail. We don’t shadow ban, and we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints. We do rank tweets by default to make Twitter more immediately relevant (which can be flipped off).
I expect sometimes in the next few months we will be reading comments like “Of course the FBI was violating the constitution & rigging elections! Everyone knew it at the time! The story is a nothingburger!”
December 11th, 2022 at 9:13 am
Bari Weiss’s Twitter exposé revealed that Bari Weiss is a liar.
The ‘Twitter Files’ Is What It Claims to Expose
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/12/twitter-files-explained-elon-musk-taibbi-weiss-hunter-biden-laptop.html
Guess we know (at least some of) what Bari got for doing PR for Musk this week: her newly rebranded site gets promoted into all our feeds.
The Free Press, Its like Fox News, but with bigger words.
December 11th, 2022 at 9:16 am
Granted, I’m generally not up on the latest, but I thought this was pretty good:
“Twitter’s source code is full of libs. It’s time to get rid of them”
https://twitter.com/wongmjane/status/1601151897389260800?s=20&t=UkRlnjlKowCttyp3zC7pKw
December 11th, 2022 at 10:04 am
curious to know
is there any disinformation far right wingnut conspiracy theory that emery ridiculed
which has NOT come true?