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.

Second Walker accuser speaks on camera

The second woman who accused Georgia Republican senate candidate Herschel Walker of pressurizing her to get an abortion in 1993 when they were having along affair has revealed herself on camera, though she has kept her name secret and wants to be known as just Jane Doe. You can see the interview in the above link. It is an explosive interview full of details that substantiate her charges against Walker.

Responding to the ABC News interview, Walker issued a statement Tuesday saying, “This was a lie a week ago and it is a lie today. Seven days before an election, the Democrats trot out Gloria Allred and some woman I do not know. My opponents will do and say anything to win this election. The entire Democrat machine is coming after me and the people of Georgia. I am not intimidated. Once again, they messed with the wrong Georgian.”

But the woman has produced copious documentation including photographs of them together as recently as in 2019 that clearly show that he is lying about not knowing her at all.
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Will Bolsonaro go quietly?

Jair Bolsonaro has still not conceded the election, more than 12 hours after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. was declared the winner of Brazil’s presidential election. While the election was fairly close, with Lula getting 50.9% of the vote (60.3 million) to Bolsonaro’s 49.10% (58.2 million), the margin is large enough to be conclusive. Bolsonaro had earlier vowed not to concede and he and his three sons remained silent in the presidential residence.

Meanwhile, many of his prominent supporters have conceded that he lost and many world leaders (including Joe Biden) were quick to congratulate Lula on his victory, suggesting that they were trying to send a message discouraging Bolsonaro from harboring any hopes of staying in power using the military. Biden’s words are especially important given that Brazil’s military in 1946 staged a US-backed coup and then ruled the country until 1985. Bolsonaro is a former member of the military and has close ties to them.

Another factor is how quickly the results were known, by close to midnight on election night, giving little time for conspiracy theories about the election being stolen to grow, the way that they did in the US where the final results were declared after some days.

Lula beats Bolsonaro in Brazil’s run-off election

In a close election, Lula defeated the right-wing extremist Trump ally by a margin of 50.8% to 49.1% with 99% of the votes counted.

Ecstatic and tearful supporters of Lula – who secured more than 59m votes to Bolsonaro’s 57m – hugged and threw cans of beer in the air.

“This means we are going to have someone in power who cares about those at the bottom. Right now we have a person who doesn’t care about the majority, about us, about LGBT people,” Soares said. “Bolsonaro … is a bad person. He doesn’t show a drop of empathy or solidarity for others. There is no way he can continue as president.”

There was celebration around the region too as leftist allies tweeted their congratulations. “Viva Lula,” said Colombia’s leader, Gustavo Petro.

Argentina’s president Alberto Fernández celebrated “a new era in Latin American history”. “An era of hope and of a future that starts right now.”

Mexico’s president Andrés Manuel López Obrador commemorated what he called a victory for “equality and humanism.”.

There is no word as yet if Bolsonaro has accepted the result and conceded. Like Trump, he had been warning that he might not accept a loss because the election was ‘stolen’. Some of his followers are indeed making that claim in ways that should sound familiar to us in the US.

Outside Bolsonaro’s home in west Rio there was dejection and anger as the news sunk in. “I’m angry,” said Monique Almeido, a 36-year-old beautician. “I don’t even know what to say.”

João Reis, a 50-year-old electrician, said he was convinced the vote had been rigged.

“It’s fraud without a doubt, they manipulated the count. The Armed Forces must intervene,” demanded

And if they didn’t? “The population must take to the streets to demand military intervention so that we don’t hand power over to the communists.”

Things are going to be quite tense in the days to come.

Elon Musk and Twitter

I try to avoid reading anything about Elon Musk, even though my news sources constantly bombard me with headlines about something he has said or done. I find people who constantly promote themselves, and Musk is a particularly extreme example of this, to be really annoying. For some reason, the media seem to think that his pronouncements on anything, even world affairs, are to be taken seriously enough as to be relayed to us. Such is the power of money to bestow credibility to people on topics on which they have no expertise whatsoever.

But I was vaguely interested in the saga of his on-again, off-again effort to buy Twitter and the deal was finally completed on Friday. Musk uses Twitter as his main vehicle for drawing attention to himself and may have thought that owning Twitter would enable him to get even more exposure by being his own personal platform. He has plans to take the company private by buying up all its shares.
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Liz Truss and Jacob Rees-Mogg: Two useless people in high places

Liz Truss gave her farewell speech and seemed as clueless as ever. She advised her replacement Rishi Sunak of the need to ‘be bold’ although it was her very own boldness that led to one of the most spectacular downfalls in recent UK political history. She is is most likely to be remembered as the answer to two future trivia questions: Who had the shortest tenure as UK prime minister? And who was prime minister when Elizabeth Windsor died?

It is unlikely that Sunak will take her advice to be bold. He has probably learned that he needs to take things slow and at least give the appearance of being deliberative so as to remove the image that the Conservatives have now acquired for being reckless, even as he pushes the same right-wing policies that the Conservatives always push. Although he is cut from the same cloth as other Conservative leaders, coming from a wealthy and privileged background and went to the ‘right’ schools, I am sure that he is mindful that he is different in being an ethnic South Asian and Hindu. Being the first in any major category (gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion) to occupy a high position means that people are closely watching you. Failure will cause many to whisper that ‘people like them’ are simply not cut out to hold such positions. So Sunak’s first goal will be to not mess things up as much as Truss did and thus cautions is called for.
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