Official BBO Hijacked Thread Thread

[Winstonm]

Trump Defends Retweet Of Baseless Conspiracy Theory Implicating Clintons In Epstein’s Death

 

 

So the Unindicted Co-Conspirator in Chief is trying to deflect attention from himself. Dennison is on record as admiring the success of Epstein with "very" young women and was known to have "partied" with Epstein on more than one occasion. What does he have to worry about?

 

If there is any conspiracy to investigate, Individual-1 is in charge of the entire government, his government paid personal attorney Barr is in charge of the prison where Epstein was being held and who was recused from the Epstein case because he worked at a law firm that previously defended Epstein, unrecused himself to take over the investigation into the death of Epstein. I'm sure he will do an even better job at finding the "facts" than he did in the Mueller report :rolleyes: There have been too many scandals and unethical activities in the White House to keep track of since 2018, but this has a stink to it that probably will never go away.

 

 

Trump said he thought it was “fine” to retweet the conspiracy because it came from “a very highly respected conservative pundit.

”

 

Alex Jones? :blink:

[y66]

Neil Irwin at the NYT Upshot explains the deal with the inverted yield curve by way of a sports betting analogy and some cool graphics. Elementary no doubt for readers of this forum.

[Winstonm]

https://www.axios.com/ceos-business-roundtable-social-issues-corporate-purpose-7d6c1f35-5d07-4b35-981d-4f9c009bcef4.html

 

The Business Roundtable today made a small, symbolic but significant move: 181 of the nation’s top CEOs agreed that driving shareholder value is no longer their sole business objective.

 

Why this matters: They expanded their mission beyond mere wealth creation to include everything from taking care of employees to helping their communities.

 

A group decided this? I am shocked, shocked to find these businessmen sitting in a commies circle, making decisions for the proletariat. :P

[y66]

https://www.axios.com/ceos-business-roundtable-social-issues-corporate-purpose-7d6c1f35-5d07-4b35-981d-4f9c009bcef4.html

 

A group decided this? I am shocked, shocked to find these businessmen sitting in a commies circle, making decisions for the proletariat. :P

The Business Roundtable statement was interesting because, as David Gelles and David Yaffe-Bellany noted at NYT, it explicitly rebuked the notion put forward by Milton Friedman 50 years ago and embraced by corporate America that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits” and it explicitly recognized that corporations also have a responsibility to invest in their employees, protect the environment and deal fairly and ethically with their suppliers, yada, yada. No doubt even the ghost of Milton Friedman is rolling his eyes.

[kenberg]

As I get it Friedman said “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits” and the round table has said no that's not so.

Neither appears to address the question of whether is is even remotely realistic to think that corporations, perhaps with the occasional exception, will do anything other than try to increase its profits.

 

Possibly socially responsive behavior can become a way to increase profits, and so then they will do so, saying "well, if we have to we have to" . Or at least try to make it look that way. I would not hold my breath waiting for them do do the right thing because it's the right thing.

 

We could make a bundle by flooding the market with opioids but that would be socially wrong so we won't do it. Cue in the laugh track.

[johnu]

This is just crazy

 

Faithless elector: A court ruling just changed how we pick our president

 

A federal appeals court ruled late Tuesday that presidential electors who cast the actual ballots for president and vice president are free to vote as they wish and cannot be required to follow the results of the popular vote in their states.

 

The decision could give a single elector the power to decide the outcome of a presidential election — if the popular vote results in an apparent Electoral College tie.

The last part of the quote is incorrect. If the popular vote would have had a 270-268 result, but the single elector changes the vote to 269-269, the House would decided who wins with each state having 1 vote, taking the decision away from the popular (electoral) vote.

 

In fact, in 2016, 10 electors did not vote for the publicly elected candidate, although 3 states removed the electors and replaced them.

 

What right does a single person have to disregard the voters of an entire state (or congressional district, whether the state voted Republican or Democratic? Just one more reason to get rid of the electoral college.

 

This will obviously be appealed to the Supreme Court.

 

I wonder what legal penalties can be applied by states if the Supreme Court allows electors to vote as the choose. I would not be opposed to a $100 million dollar fine and life in prison if an elector did not vote according to the popular vote.

[Winstonm]

This is just crazy

 

Faithless elector: A court ruling just changed how we pick our president

 

 

The last part of the quote is incorrect. If the popular vote would have had a 270-268 result, but the single elector changes the vote to 269-269, the House would decided who wins with each state having 1 vote, taking the decision away from the popular (electoral) vote.

 

In fact, in 2016, 10 electors did not vote for the publicly elected candidate, although 3 states removed the electors and replaced them.

 

What right does a single person have to disregard the voters of an entire state (or congressional district, whether the state voted Republican or Democratic? Just one more reason to get rid of the electoral college.

 

This will obviously be appealed to the Supreme Court.

 

I wonder what legal penalties can be applied by states if the Supreme Court allows electors to vote as the choose. I would not be opposed to a $100 million dollar fine and life in prison if an elector did not vote according to the popular vote.

 

It wasn't so long ago that back room party bosses decided who would run. Party bossed stopped many demagogues like Henry Ford from winning a spot on the ticket. The electoral college was supposed to prevent a ridiculous popular choice from becoming president by being independent of the voters' wishes - and how did that work out. <_<

 

Too much democracy is almost as dangerous as too little.

[y66]

From Business Insiders' ongoing series on Better Capitalism (March 2018):

 

At the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland in January, Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget made the case why it's time for a "better capitalism."

 

The current state of inequality in the United States, he explained, is largely linked to a reaction to 1970s stagnation that has gone on for too long, where chasing quarterly profits has resulted in a toxic short-termism.

 

When Blodget opened the discussion to the panel he had assembled, Columbia University's Joseph Stiglitz remarked, "I want to emphasize that it was, in this period, not only activist shareholders but Milton Friedman," the late economist and fellow Nobel laureate, who was to blame for this prevailing ideology. "And he was wrong."

 

In his highly influential 1962 collection of essays, " Capitalism and Freedom," Friedman proclaimed that in a free economy, "there is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition, without deception or fraud."

 

We followed up with Stiglitz after the Davos panel, and he told us that Friedman's assertion "was not based on any economic theory." He then gave some background on the origins of this debate.

 

Friedman made his assertion as a natural extension of a defining passage in Adam Smith's definitive " The Wealth of Nations" from 1776, that of the "invisible hand." Smith wrote that an individual laboring in his own interest is "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good."

 

Stiglitz pointed out that indeed the invisible hand's existence was "proven" in 1954 by the economists Kenneth J. Arrow and Gerard Debreu. Arrow and Debreu were able to show the existence of an equilibrium between supply and demand in a free, competitive economy — but they also made clear that this could only exist if a given set of assumptions about the economy and consumer behavior were true.

 

And the latter part is essential, said Stiglitz.

 

"Then some of us, beginning in the late '60s, asked the question, 'Well what happens if those conditions aren't satisfied?'" he told Business Insider.

 

Stiglitz said that he and the economist Sandy Grossman investigated this question throughout the '70s. In 1980, they published a paper that declared that while market equilibrium can exist in theory, it was "impossible" for it to exist in a competitive economy in reality. Following this line of thinking, then, Friedman's argument falls apart. And therefore, existing solely to please shareholders will not — as Friedman argued — benefit other stakeholders, such as employees, consumers, and society as a whole.

 

Stiglitz respected Friedman (who died in 2006) for his work on consumption that won him a Nobel prize, he wrote in his 2012 book " The Price of Inequality," but the two had several arguments about this idea of the free market. "I remember long discussions with him on the consequences of imperfect information or incomplete risk markets; my own work and that of numerous colleagues had shown that in these conditions, markets typically didn't work well. Friedman simply couldn't or wouldn't grasp these results."

 

Friedman's ideas, however, would take hold in the US for the next few decades.

 

When Stiglitz cites what he considers to be the problem of Friedman, he explained, he's using him as the figurehead for a movement that took advantage of the societal trends Blodget mentioned. This movement was led by the Chicago school of economics, the free market ideology developed at the University of Chicago in the mid-20th century.

 

As Stiglitz sees it, Americans, particularly on the right, embraced the Chicago school's way of thinking because it appeared to be the efficient solution to stimulating a stagnant economy.

 

Within this free market ideology, pursuing short-term value is simultaneously a pursuit of long-term value. If you accept this, prioritizing short-term gains comes through the optimization of management and spending, which allows the company to grow, in turn supplying higher returns, more jobs and other benefits to society, and better products.

 

It is a rejection of a fundamental Keynesian belief, Stiglitz noted.

 

British economist John Maynard Keynes published his revolutionary book "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" in 1936, in the wake of the Great Depression. In it, he differentiated between short-term and long-term value, and expressed his frustration with the way the American stock market encouraged public companies to prioritize short-term gains, better for the majority of contemporary investors, over long-term gains, better for society as a whole. The basic premise of the argument Keynes had with his peers is the same as the one today.

 

"The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelop our future," Keynes warned.

 

More Americans in positions of power began gravitating toward the Chicago school's ideas in the '70s, and Friedman became an adviser to President Ronald Reagan.

 

Not only did Friedman have the ear of the leader of the free world, but the Chicago school's theories around lawmaking for the intended purpose of market efficiency also came to fruition.

 

In his 2015 book "Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy," Stiglitz said that the normalization of shareholder primacy was solidified under the Reagan administration through changes to federal income tax law and securities law, including relaxed antitrust laws. This fostered the rise of activist investors.

 

"If all of this had led to more efficient and innovative corporations, that would have been one thing," Stiglitz wrote. "But in fact, the new 'activist' investors pushed for seats on boards and pressured management into policies that were viewed as more 'shareholder-friendly' — meaning friendlier to short-term investors — including increasing dividends and buyouts."

 

The Securities and Exchange Commission continued this trend through the early 1990s.

 

And while the increasingly linked nature of CEO pay and stock performance was ostensibly to keep CEOs accountable to their shareholders, Stiglitz argued, it instead materialized as "an incentive to manipulate stock prices by using company money to buy back shares in order to drive prices higher." That's how you got from the average ratio of CEO-to-median-level-employee pay from 20-to-1 in 1965 to 295-to-1 today.

 

For Stiglitz, the moral outrage isn't that individuals are making large amounts of money, it's that it's happening at the expense of the entire economy.

 

Stiglitz told us that this decades-old debate about how to balance the creation of short-term and long-term value is recently gaining new life in the US because of the venomous class tensions and ugly politics arising out of income inequality, and because people in positions of power are looking at the big picture and realizing that something has to change.

 

And regardless of the performance of the stock market this year, the economy overall is not doing too well, Stiglitz argued, when you look at it from the perspective of GDP growth.

 

"When we were growing at 4% we might have been able to grow even faster," he said. "But we took the 4% and enjoyed it. But when we're growing at 2-2.5%, and we had been growing at 3.5%, the natural question is, 'What's happened? Is there something wrong?'"

 

What we're seeing today is largely the result of the ideas championed by the likes of Friedman that seemed so promising to those in power in the '80s, Stiglitz argued. It's contributed greatly to this combination of inequality and low growth in America.

 

Stiglitz said that while CEOs aren't going to solve inequality on their own, the reason they exist in society is to grow the economy, and more are realizing they need to make changes.

 

It's why, for example, someone like BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, as the head of the largest asset manager in the world, has felt compelled to take a stand against short-termism. In a letter to CEOs this year, Fink announced that BlackRock will only do business with companies that have clearly defined long-term strategies that benefit in society in some way.

 

"Without a sense of purpose, no company, either public or private, can achieve its full potential," Fink wrote. "It will ultimately lose the license to operate from key stakeholders. It will succumb to short-term pressures to distribute earnings, and, in the process, sacrifice investments in employee development, innovation, and capital expenditures that are necessary for long-term growth. It will remain exposed to activist campaigns that articulate a clearer goal, even if that goal serves only the shortest and narrowest of objectives."

 

For Stiglitz, Fink's letter and similar declarations from large companies like Unilever aren't calls to feel good and congratulate each other, but are arising out of a sense of urgency. It's an urgency to shed the Friedman doctrine.

 

Stiglitz said the core of this debate in the US right has been going on since the 1930s, just in a vastly different world.

 

"As they said in the Bible, 'There is nothing new under the sun,'" Stiglitz said, laughing. "But there is a new context to it today."

[Winstonm]

From Business Insiders' ongoing series on Better Capitalism (March 2018):

 

As I have long said, the beginning of the rot was the election of Ronald Reagan:

 

In his 2015 book "Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy," Stiglitz said that the normalization of shareholder primacy was solidified under the Reagan administration through changes to federal income tax law and securities law, including relaxed antitrust laws. This fostered the rise of activist investors.

[y66]

From The Monopolization of America by David Leonhardt at NYT (November 2018):

 

The popular telling of the Boston Tea Party gets something wrong. The colonists were not responding to a tax increase. They were responding to the Tea Act of 1773, which granted a tea monopoly in the colonies to the well-connected East India Company. Merchants based in the Americas would be shut out of the market.

 

Many colonists, already upset about taxation without representation and other indignities, were enraged. In response, dozens of them stormed three ships in Boston Harbor on the night of Dec. 16, 1773, and tossed chests of East India tea — “that worst of plagues, the detested tea,” as one pamphlet put it — into the water.

 

A major spark for the American Revolution, then, was a protest against monopoly.

 

A strong strain of anti-monopoly sentiment has run through our politics ever since. America was born as “a nation of farmers and small-town entrepreneurs,” the historian Richard Hofstadter once wrote, “anti-authoritarian, egalitarian and competitive.” Hostility to corporate bigness animated Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt, as well as the labor movement, Granger movement, Progressive movement and more.

 

Of course, monopolies and other corporate giants have fought back against these assaults on their power, and sometimes succeeded for years or decades at a time. It happened during the age of Rockefeller and Morgan. Over the past 40 years, it has happened again.

 

The federal government, under presidents of both parties, has largely surrendered to monopoly power. “The ‘anti’ in ‘antitrust’ has been discarded,” as the legal scholar Tim Wu puts it in his new book, “The Curse of Bigness.” Washington allows most megamergers to proceed either straight up or with only fig-leaf changes. The government has also done nothing to prevent the emergence of dominant new technology companies that mimic the old AT&T monopoly.

 

This meekness has made possible the consolidation of one industry after another. For a long time, though, it’s been hard to figure out precisely how much consolidation. The available statistics just aren’t very good, which isn’t an accident. In 1981 — around the time that the Reagan administration was launching the modern pro-monopoly era — the Federal Trade Commission suspended a program that collected data on industry concentration.

 

Fortunately, researchers in the private sector have recently begun filling in the gaps. On Monday, the Open Markets Institute — an anti-monopoly think tank — is releasing the first part of a data set showing the market share that the largest companies have in each industry. You can see the main theme in the charts here: Big companies are much more dominant than they were even 15 years ago.

 

 

Mergers are one big reason. Another is the power of so-called network effects — in which the growth of, say, Facebook makes more people want to use it. True, a few industries have become less concentrated, but they are exceptions. If anything, the chart here understates consolidation, because it doesn’t yet cover energy, telecommunications and some other areas. It also doesn’t cover local monopolies, such as hospitals that are dominant enough to drive up prices.

 

The new corporate behemoths have been very good for their executives and largest shareholders — and bad for almost everyone else. Sooner or later, the companies tend to raise prices. They hold down wages, because where else are workers going to go? They use their resources to sway government policy. Many of our economic ills — like income stagnation and a decline in entrepreneurship — stem partly from corporate gigantism.

 

So what are we going to do about it? It’s time for another political movement, one that borrows from the Boston Tea Partiers, Jefferson, T.R. and the other defenders of the economic little guy.

 

The beginnings of this movement are now visible. Top Democrats believe that anti-monopolism can be a political winner for their party. It’s a way to address voters’ anxiety over high drug prices, digital privacy and more. “The control of business over certain segments of the economy,” says Senator Amy Klobuchur of Minnesota, a potential presidential candidate, “I think it will be a much bigger thing going into 2020.”

 

Klobuchar has offered a good bill that would raise the legal standards for merger approval. But preventing future mergers won’t be enough. Eventually, the government will probably need to break up existing giants, as it did to the old AT&T and Standard Oil. One obvious candidate is Facebook, which has gobbled up Instagram, WhatsApp and other businesses.

 

And corporate bigness doesn’t need to be a partisan issue. Senator Mike Lee of Utah is among the Republicans who have expressed concern about it. Conservatives, after all, are supposed to care about the ideals that monopolies undermine — like market competition, economic dynamism and individual freedom. Ultimately, monopolies aren’t only an economic problem. They are also a political one.

 

“We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few,” Louis Brandeis, the Supreme Court justice and anti-monopoly crusader, said a century ago, “but we can’t have both.”

Conservatives, after all, are supposed to care about the ideals that monopolies undermine — like market competition, economic dynamism and individual freedom? No doubt, the members of the Business Roundtable have something in their statement saying they care about this stuff too.

[kenberg]

A random question, perhaps suitable for the hijack thread:

Do I have it right that Louis Philippe I was the son of Louis Philippe II?

 

I am reading Queen of the Night, with many allusions to French history.

 

[PeterAlan]

A random question, perhaps suitable for the hijack thread:

Do I have it right that Louis Philippe I was the son of Louis Philippe II?

 

I am reading Queen of the Night, with many allusions to French history.

Yes.

 

Wikipedia will tell you more about this than you want to know.

[kenberg]

Yes.

 

Wikipedia will tell you more about this than you want to know.

 

 

I had looked at the Wik as well as other places so it seemed that yes, this is what happened but I didn't see, maybe my eyes just glossed over it, how the son could be the first and the father the second. The father was, when written in full, Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orleans. So we have that Duke stuff added on at the end. Is that it? Meaning that if the Duke bit had been passed on to the son then the son would have been Louis Philippe III, Duke of Orleans. but since they apparently lost the Duke part of it they therefore started the numbering all over at I? That's the only guess I could make but it seemed weird.

 

 

Incidentally, I recommend the book. It starts with a Parisian opera singer in 1872 but we flash back to find that she was born in Minnesota to a poor farm family. Maybe some things strain credulity, at least a little but I am getting a real kick out of it. There is a lot of stuff about 19th century France. I knew vaguely about the various Napoleons, the various Republics, the various revolutions etc but I might actually be getting at least some of it straight as I read on. The father being II and the son being I is a minor side issue but I just thought Huh?

 

[PeterAlan]

I had looked at the Wik as well as other places so it seemed that yes, this is what happened but I didn't see, maybe my eyes just glossed over it, how the son could be the first and the father the second. The father was, when written in full, Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orleans. So we have that Duke stuff added on at the end. Is that it? Meaning that if the Duke bit had been passed on to the son then the son would have been Louis Philippe III, Duke of Orleans. but since they apparently lost the Duke part of it they therefore started the numbering all over at I? That's the only guess I could make but it seemed weird.

The Dukedom of Orléans (Wikipedia again) was a particular title derived from the immediate younger brother of the king, and the holders had ducal numbers I, II etc to distinguish those of the same name. Louis Philippe II's father was the first Louis Philippe, Duc d'Orléans, and on succession in 1793 his (Louis Philippe II's) son indeed became Louis Philippe III, Duke of Orléans. However, in 1830 he (the son) became King of the French, took the title of Louis Philippe I in that capacity, and ceased to be the Duke of Orléans. He abdicated in 1848, and died in exile in England in 1850.

[kenberg]

The Dukedom of Orléans (Wikipedia again) was a particular title derived from the immediate younger brother of the king, and the holders had ducal numbers I, II etc to distinguish those of the same name. Louis Philippe II's father was the first Louis Philippe, Duc d'Orléans, and on succession in 1793 his (Louis Philippe II's) son indeed became Louis Philippe III, Duke of Orléans. However, in 1830 he (the son) became King of the French, took the title of Louis Philippe I in that capacity, and ceased to be the Duke of Orléans. He abdicated in 1848, and died in exile in England in 1850.

 

Thanks very much.

[y66]

Roger Federer Talks with David Remnick

[Winstonm]

Meanwhile, the 2yr-10yr treasury yields remain inverted. 8/28/19: consecutive day 2. Total day 3.

[Winstonm]

Another argument for national universal healthcare for the U.S. The Atlantic reports:

 

About 43 million Americans have unpaid medical debt dinging their credit, and half of all overdue debt on Americans’ credit reports is from medical expenses, according to a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau study from 2014. The debt typically comes from out-of-network doctors who people thought were in-network, hospital stays, or ambulance rides. About one in six Americans received a surprise out-of-network medical bill in 2017 after being treated in a hospital, even though they had insurance, according to Kaiser Health News.

[Winstonm]

The yield curve remains inverted, 2yr-10yr consecutive day 3, total days 4.

[Winstonm]

I have to admit that continually pissing on a power line requires some kind of faith - but that faith is misguided:

 

An evangelical leader claimed Sunday that mass shootings are caused by “driving God from the public square,” and specifically by teaching kids about evolution.

 

Curse you, Red Barron...er Charles Darwin!

[johnu]

Harry Potter books removed from St. Edward Catholic School

 

The seven-book series depicting the magical adventures of a young wizard and his friends was removed from the library because of their content, the Rev. Dan Reehil, a pastor at the Roman Catholic parish school, wrote in an email.

 

"These books present magic as both good and evil, which is not true, but in fact a clever deception. The curses and spells used in the books are actual curses and spells; which when read by a human being risk conjuring evil spirits into the presence of the person reading the text," the email states.

 

Reehil goes on to say in the email that he consulted several exorcists in the U.S. and Rome who recommended removing the books.

Yikes :rolleyes:

[Winstonm]

Harry Potter books removed from St. Edward Catholic School

 

 

Yikes :rolleyes:

 

The Dark Ages never really ended, did they? :ph34r:

[Winstonm]

I'm sorry, but the greatest economy in...probably ever....simply cannot do this. Fake news! Fake news! :lol:

 

(Bloomberg) -- U.S. factory activity unexpectedly contracted in August for the first time in three years as shrinking orders, production and hiring pushed a widely followed measure of manufacturing to its lowest level since January 2016.

 

The Institute for Supply Management’s purchasing managers index fell to 49.1 in August, weaker than all forecasts in a Bloomberg survey of economists, data released Tuesday showed. Figures below 50 signal the manufacturing economy is generally contracting.

my emphasis

[y66]

From A Nobel-Winning Economist Goes to Burning Man by Emily Badger at The Upshot at NYT:

 

BLACK ROCK CITY, Nev. — It was dusk on the opening night of Burning Man, and the makers and misfits were touching up their art projects and orgy dens. Subwoofers oontz-oontzed as topless cyclists draped in glowing LEDs pedaled through the desert. And Paul Romer, a reigning laureate of the Nobel Prize in economics, sat on a second-story porch at the center of it all, marveling at a subtlety of the street grid.

 

The roads narrowed as they approached small plazas around the impermanent city. How clever, he thought, this way of funneling pedestrians toward gathering places. And most Burners probably didn’t even notice — what with the art projects and orgy dens.

 

“It’s just like every other city,” Mr. Romer said. “Except in this other way, it’s like no city ever.” White-haired and 63, he was dressed in black gear he’d bought at R.E.I., figuring black was the thing to wear at Burning Man. It was the first time that Mr. Romer, the former chief economist of the World Bank, had attended the annual bacchanal.

 

A week earlier, there was hardly anything here, in the remote desert of northwest Nevada. Then tens of thousands of people had just shown up, many in the middle of the night. They had formed an instant city, with a road network, and a raucous street life, and a weird make-do architecture.

 

It was an alluring sight for an economist who has talked of building cities from nothing. And Burning Man has been more and more on Mr. Romer’s mind lately, as world politics have made him gloomier. He is ill at ease behaving like a traditional academic. He’s not particularly interested in publishing papers. He doesn’t want to give speeches cheerleading his field. But he believes winning the Nobel has expanded his possibilities. More people will listen to what he has to say, if he can just decide where he wants to direct our attention.

 

Maybe it’s here.

 

Mr. Romer came to the desert imagining himself as an objective outsider: de Tocqueville among the Burners. But Black Rock City started to rub off on him. One morning, a man who called himself Coyote, who was responsible for surveying the city’s streets, took Mr. Romer around. At the far edge of town, they found a roller coaster that looked likelier than most things at Burning Man to harm you. It was designed for one fool at a time, strapped into an oversized car seat that shot down one side of a 31-foot wooden U shape and up the other.

 

Mr. Romer, surprising himself, walked up to it.

 

“Should I do this?” he asked Coyote. “If you kill a Nobel Prize winner, it’s on you.”

 

Then he climbed the stairs to the top of a contraption that had been constructed just days before, in a city with no building codes. Heavy metal was blaring. Mr. Romer was trussed into place. A guy with “PEE HERE” painted on his back took his glasses. And then someone gave him a push.

Rest of story

[Winstonm]

I can't believe John Bolton was fired - who is going to play the part of David Crosby in the Christmas play?