Democrats take control of the Senate, reduce gap in the House

So much for the red wave. Democrats have already won 50 seats in the US Senate even before the Georgia runoff to be held on December 6th, meaning that they retain control.

Nevada announced the results of their election for US senate and incumbent Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto was declared the winner over Republican Adam Laxalt Jr by 48.8% to 48.1%. When this is coupled with yesterday’s result in Arizona where Democrat Mark Kelly retained his seat, defeating Blake Masters fairly easily by the margin of 52% to 46%, that gives Democrats 50 seats, the same number that they had before the elections, and thus will retain control of the senate.
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In US elections, a draw can become a win

One of the most encouraging results of Tuesday’e elections have been the ballot measures in the various states that resulted in expanded access to abortion (even in deep-red Kentucky), voting, and legalized marijuana and increases in the minimum wage. Oregon also seems likely to pass measures to establish a right to health care and to require a permit to buy firearms and high-capacity magazines.

When it comes to elections for offices, in objective terms, the results of the mid-terms has been a draw. The results are so close that at this point, the final outcome of which party controls the House of Representative and the Senate is still up in the air though it seems likely that the Republicans will have a tiny majority in the former. Right now, there are four undecided senate races. Of those, the one in Alaska is guaranteed to return a Republican since the top two candidates Lisa Murkowski and Kelly Tshibaka are both from that party. It will take some time to get the results since Alaska has a system where the top four people in the open primary go on to the general election and the winner there is decided by ranked choice voting, which takes longer to tabulate.
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No red wave for Republicans

At the time of this writing, it looks like the big issue of the election, which party get majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate, remains up in the air. Republicans had been hoping for a ‘red wave’ that would easily give them control but that has not materialized. The typical situation where the party that holds the presidency loses big in the mid-term elections, did not pan out, despite Joe Biden’s low approval ratings.

Another provisional interpretation is that Joe Biden has defied the odds again. Just some years ago he was written off as a 2020 presidential candidate after a poor showing in Iowa and New Hampshire only to rally and win the party nomination.

Now the president looks set to best his Democratic predecessors Bill Clinton, who lost 54 House seats in his first term in 1994, and Barack Obama, who lost 63 seats in his first term in 2010. With the congresswomen Abigail Spanberger and Jennifer Wexton having survived in Virginia, it seems there will be no “shellacking” this time.

This is not just a Democratic phenomenon. The Republicans lost 40 seats in. 2018, the mid-terms held during the Trump presidency.
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What I will be looking for in today’s election results

Election day has finally arrived, which I am sure is a relief to all those who have been plagued for the last few weeks, if not months, with TV ads, mailings, and online fundraising pitches that describe in apocalyptic terms the disasters that will inevitably unfold if the opponents win, something that can only be averted if you send money immediately. In the past, the fear was that Republicans would implement policies that were anti-choice, xenophobic, anti-poor, anti-minorities, and anti-LGBTQ. Now the fear is that they will actually subvert future elections, an even more ominous prospect.

For me, the main item of interest is to see how many people will vote for candidates who have signed on to the insane idea that the last election was rigged and that Trump won, along with all the other accompanying QAnon conspiracies. These people have got a lot of attention and this election will be a good measure of how far this mass delusion has actually spread. There are undoubtedly many traditional Republican voters who do not believe all that nonsense. The question is whether they are disgusted enough by this attempt to subvert democracy that they abandon their party loyalty and vote against such candidates or whether their party loyalty is so strong that they are willing to overlook the very real danger of electing such dangerous people to high office.
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What’s the point of prices marked as $X.99 cents?

Elon Musk has to somehow find ways to make his purchase of Twitter for $44 billion work as a business deal as opposed to an ego trip. He has borrowed $13 billion from banks, and analysts are saying that he and the banks are going to take a financial bath on this deal because Twitter is simply not worth the price he paid unless it can drastically cut costs and greatly increase revenues. This article lists the revenues and expenses from 2012 until 2021, and since Musk has taken it private, this may be the last chance we’ll get to look at the books.

The company, launched in 2006, has shown a loss for every year since 2012 except for 2018 and 2019, with 2021 having a $221 million loss. Its revenue has grown over the years and was $5 billion for 2021, with $4.5 billion coming from advertising and 0.5 billion from other sources such as data licensing. About half of its revenue comes from outside the US.
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Changing times

Today at 2:00 am is when the US changed from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time which required shifting clocks back by one hour. It is also the cue for many (including me) to grumble once again about this clock adjusting process that takes place twice a year. I went around changing all eight clocks last evening and then a few minutes later, there was a brief power cut, which meant that I had to again set the time on four clocks that are plugged in.

Not every part of the US changes times like this, with some staying on Standard Time all year round.

Exceptions include Arizona (except for the Navajo, who do observe daylight saving time in Navajo Nation), Hawaii, and the overseas territories of American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the United States Virgin Islands.

I grew up near the equator where the amount of daylight stays pretty much the same throughout the year. and thus does not require fiddling around with clocks twice a year. But irritation with the practice is growing in the US and arguments for keeping one time throughout the year seem to becoming more frequent.
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The counter-intuitive appeal of the lottery

Every day I read reports of how the jackpot for the Powerball lottery, one of the many lotteries run by states in the US, keeps increasing in size. Under the system, if a drawing does not produce a winner, the jackpot rolls over with the value of the new bets added to the old. Currently the prize is about 1.2 billion dollars.

In an interesting article, Kathryn Schulz discusses the history of how the lottery became a ubiquitous presence in American life.

How this came to be is the subject of an excellent new book, “For a Dollar and a Dream: State Lotteries in Modern America,” by the historian Jonathan D. Cohen. At the heart of Cohen’s book is a peculiar contradiction: on the one hand, the lottery is vastly less profitable than its proponents make it out to be, a deception that has come at the expense of public coffers and public services. On the other hand, it is so popular that it is both extremely lucrative for the private companies that make and sell tickets and financially crippling for its most dedicated players.

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John Oliver on the need for bail reform

On the most recent episode of his always excellent show Last Week Tonight, he focuses on the abuses of the cash bail system where people can be held in jail for a long time before trial simply because they do not have the money to post bail. This hurts poor people the most. One of the worst abuses is to use the system to coerce people who have been held in jail for a long time before trial to confess to crimes they did not commit with the promise that the time they have already spent in prison will be sufficient punishment.

I think that people should be released on their personal recognizance unless they are a risk to society or have the means to flee. Most poor people who commit petty offenses can easily be caught if they do not show up for their trial. Bail in such cases is punitive.