Friday Potpourri: 14 March 2025
Things making me smile....
Happy Friday to all who celebrate!
The first thing making me smile BROADLY today is that a team of “public health professionals, experienced web developers, experienced Python coders, and others” has gotten together to launch “Restored CDC”, a website that is restoring the original information from the banished CDC website. This is a critical undertaking, where we can all see the great information CDC was famous for over decades. It’s a work in progress and will grow. I, for one, am thrilled that a group of people have taken on this project. It will save lives. The screen shot above is from their entry page.
Also in science news, the Society for Science handed out its Regeneron (Pharma) awards this week. Below are the three top winners, from the press release:
Matteo Paz, 18, of Pasadena, California, won first place and $250,000 for designing machine-learning algorithms to efficiently comb through 200 billion entries of raw NEOWISE infrared full-sky data. By analyzing tiny changes in infrared radiation, the AI sorted the objects into 10 classes. He found 1.5 million new potential objects.
Second place and $175,000 went to Ava Grace Cummings, 18, of Smithfield, North Carolina, for creating a fruit fly model of STAC3 disorder, or Native American myopathy (a rare genetic muscle disease). She found that the common nettle herb, alone or combined with the experimental drug Tirasemtiv, improved movement in both adult flies and larvae.
Third place and $150,000 went to Owen Jianwen Zhang, 18, of Bellevue, Washington, who solved a long-standing math problem about objects called 3-uniform hypergraphs. He proved a maximum value for how many 3-uniform hypergraphs can have similar structures but differing connections. Owen’s results have applications in computer science.
The Rehtuglicans can try to dumb down America, discount education, and turn against science, but here are three youngsters who did amazing things. Imagine what they’ll be able to do once they get out of high school!
But as for stupid Rethuglicans…over at the tariff wars, the Orange Menace is talking about retaliatory tariffs on wine, champagne and other alcohols coming from the EU. He said specifically:
This will be great for the Wine and Champagne businesses in the U.S.
There is no “US champagne business”. Champagne comes exclusively from grapes grown and processed in the Champagne region of France. Other places can make sparkling wine, but IT IS NOT CHAMPAGNE. Moron.
The next thing making me smile is that the fascist regime has withdrawn Dave Weldon from consideration to head the CDC. Source. This is due to his “vaccines cause autism” stance.
And on to Philadelphia, where the GOP was unable to find a single candidate to run in the Rethuglican primary for District Attorney. The Democratic primary will be an interesting race between Larry Krasner, and Patrick Dugan.
Another happy event is the potential implosion of Elmo Muskrat’s financial empire. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m pretty much a financial idiot, and so I don’t understand a lot about “leveraging assets”, associated debt loads and “margin calls”. If you do understand such things, read this article, which has a level of detail that just hurts my brain. I’m going to tell you what I think the article says, and then I’m hoping someone who understands investments can read the article and correct me. So here goes:
Elmo’s wealth is largely dependent on the value of his Tesla stock.
While he owns a lot of Tesla stock, it was bought at different times for different amounts of dollars-per-share.
He used Tesla stock as collateral for buying other things, like Twitter.
If the value of Tesla stock falls enough, his whole house of cards implodes because his debt load has not changed and they will call in what he owes.
From the article cited above:
If the value of your leveraged assets falls to where your debt equals 80 percent of the asset’s value, your debt can be called in by the bank who loaned it to you. If you don’t have the cash to pay your debts, or the additional collateral to post to get you a healthier loan to value ratio under 80 percent (LTV), you have to crater your ownership in the asset by selling it to cover your debts (and if you are a large holder of an asset, simply selling it in bulk can crash the price, forcing you to sell even more of the asset to cover your debt).
Like I said, I don’t understand the details, but I think the Tesla Chainsaw Massacre could be REALLY BAD for the wunderkind. I mean, his biggest buyers were liberal Democrats who believed in the value of electric cars in fighting climate change, and now he’s going to have to sell exclusively to the MAGA-faithful, who believe in gas and oil, and probably will be denied tax offsets. Boggles the mind.
I love when government works. This article from the Post is really long, and when you start reading it, you’ll have no idea where it’s going, as if the title was for a different article. But please stick with it and you’ll see how one remarkable woman, who shouldn’t have had a chance, made government work in unexpected ways. Really, get a beverage, and 20 minutes of uninterrupted time, sit back, and be thrilled.
Finally, I’m grinning from ear to ear about Judge William Alsup, who ordered the fascist regime to offer jobs back to the tens of thousands of probationary employees who were fired last month from the departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior, Treasury and Veterans Affairs. Not to mention Judge James K. Bredar, who followed hours later and ordered 18 agencies (some overlap) to reinstate all fired probationary workers by 1 pm on Monday for 14 days, as his court considers further relief. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but every time the evil ones lose in court, I’m happy.
I do understand financial stuff. Wrote and reviewed loan documents for multi-million dollar projects (mostly in the municipal and nonprofit arenas). We aren’t privy to the actual terms of the loans Musk took to buy Twitter but I guess it’s known that they are secured by Tesla stock. That acquisition was finalized in October 2022. The value of Tesla today has dropped a lot from its recent highs but is still above its value at that time-but not by much. It is pretty likely that Musk will be asked to provide additional collateral if the value of the shares dips under 200 - right now it’s about 250. They have the “power” to call the loans but that won’t happen. When you owe the banks a little they own you, when you owe the banks a lot, you own them. He’s got cash streams from government contacts to play with too. But campaigning for the position of “most hated man in the universe” could take Tesla much lower. That plus an unchecked Ketamine addiction could take him out. One can only hope.
Still don't know how you can read all that stuff and still have time to write about it, have to do your job, and have a few minutes to breathe. Boggles the mind. But however you do it please keep doing it.