In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Via the UK Independent, Russia’s Admiral Makarov warship has been hit by Ukrainian missiles and burst into flames, according to Ukrainian officials. The frigate would be Russia’s latest high-profile naval loss in a troubled campaign, coming after reports that US intelligence helped Ukraine locate and sink the Russian warship Moskva weeks ago. The Makarov was said to have been sailing close to Snake Island in the Black Sea south of Odesa. Ukrainian presidential adviser Anton Gerashchenko reported on his Telegram page that the Admiral Makarov was hit by a Ukrainian “Neptune” anti-ship missile. He cited Russian sources. According to the UK Daily Mail, Ukraine may have shot another Russian warship overnight with an MP saying one of Putin's state-of-the-art frigates is 'in trouble' in the Black Sea. Oleksiy Goncharenko, head of the council of Odesa which houses Ukraine's largest naval base, identified the vessel on his Telegram channel this morning as the A...

On April 12, I commented on the conventional wisdom of the time that there would be an upcoming battle in Donbas that would be, in one opinion, the "biggest tank battle in Europe since 1943 Battle of Kursk". It would be a "knife fight", a grand contest of maneuver in which the Russians would try to cut off the Ukrainian army in pockets. . . . After their recent defeat in the north, Russia has made some significant changes. . . . . the Russians will have a single command staff to co-ordinate and attempt to achieve a single focused and ostensibly realistic operational objective[.] . . . the force the Russians will amass will be formidable, and with shorter and better established supply lines into Russia they may be able to avoid some of the appalling foul ups which have characterised their war so far. As of mid-April, this decisive battle of maneuver was going to take place "within the next two weeks". It didn't happen. Instead, the daily assessm...

Amid everything else in yesterday's news, my main interest was in finding whether the CDC would extend its rule requiring masks on aircraft and public transportation yet again after the latest extension expired on May 3. Indeed, they did . U.S. health officials on Tuesday restated their recommendation that Americans wear masks on planes, trains and buses, despite a court ruling last month that struck down a national mask mandate on public transportation. Americans age 2 and older should wear a well-fitting masks while on public transportation, including in airports and train stations, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended, citing the current spread of coronavirus and projections of future COVID-19 trends. For months, the Transportation Security Administration had been enforcing a requirement that passengers and workers wear masks. The government had repeatedly extended the mandate, and the latest one had been set to expire May 3. But a federal judge in F...

In yesterday's headlines: Elon Musk Puts Twitter’s $17M-Per-Year ‘Censorship Chief’ on Notice Tech mogul Elon Musk has hinted that he is planning to fire Twitter’s “censorship chief,” who earns $17 million per year at the company. Twitter’s top lawyer Vijaya Gadde is seen as the leading advocate for censoring conservatives at the social media giant. Gadde, who earned $17M last year as Twitter’s top legal counsel, has been put on notice that she is among the highly paid executives who stand to lose their job once Musk completes his takeover of the company. Musk is reportedly planning to slash jobs and reduce executive pay as part of his plan to shake up Twitter. Wikipedia confirms that Gadde is in fact Twitter's "policy, safety lead director and a chief legal officer and general counsel", which suggests she has a much more wide-ranging role than your typical SVP-legal affairs. Farther down, it notes In 2018, Gadde joined Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for meetings in...

Last week I wrote about the unique work culture in Silicon Valley, in which unproductive employees in bloated organizations are nevertheless remarkably entitled. This falls out to some extent everywhere in tech, but it's at its worst up in the San Jose area. I discovered a new manifestation of this phenomenon at Apple, where for the past two years employees have "worked from home" due to COVID, but management is now asking them to return to the office three days a week in something called the Hybrid Working pilot. From my own anecdotal experience as a cutstomer of companies claiming to have been hurt by COVID, the actual impact of lockdowns occurred in the first half of 2020 but gradually abated throughout the rest of the year. Companies that claimed to have had their ability to serve customers badly reduced by early 2021 were using it as an excuse. For Apple to be trying to get back to normal only in mid 2022 suggests that everyone had simply been coasting, not least ...

Yesterday, the Never Trump, Not Quite Zelensky Hot Air blog quoted Don Jr: According to senior officials, [Biden's Lend-Lease] proposal, which includes $20.4bn in military aid, $8.5bn in economic aid and $3bn in humanitarian aid, is needed to "enable Ukraine's success over the next five months of this war". Responding to the report, former president Donald Trump's eldest son suggested that the fund sent by the US would be "looted by corrupt politicians". "Hard pass. How about we use it to help Americans in need? Or to perhaps secure our border? Maybe get our energy sector going again? Education? No, instead we’ll give it to one of the most corrupt countries in the world, where I’m sure most will be looted by corrupt politicians," he wrote on Twitter. A little over a week ago, Tucker Carlson said, "Inflation is higher than it's been in generations, maybe than it has been ever, depending on how you measure it," Carlson sai...

There can be few better arguments for the idea that Twitter is, or had been, a de facto agency for government censorship than the Biden administration's proposal for a new Disinformation Governance Board only days after Twitter's directors accepted Elon Musk's buyout offer. But the ramifications go beyond the predictable political alignments. Witness the reaction of the Never Trump Hot Air blog: Very encouraging that the new owner thinks it was bad form to silence a guy who had just incited a riot by conspiracy theorists at the Capitol and seemed capable of inciting a lot more amidst his mania to overturn the 2020 election. Trump can rest easy now knowing that his mic won’t be cut the next time he tries a coup, I guess. This report from the WSJ makes me consider a question to which only Elon Musk himself knows the answer. Namely, to what extent is buying a Twitter a business decision for him? Does he feel pure altruism in wanting to improve an influential communicatio...