Cup of Coffee: February 29, 2024

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Let’s get on with it, shall we?

 The Daily Briefing

Dave Kaval: hubris and cowardliness

The hubris is demonstrated by his tweeting this after he was part of the negotiating team which took a bad faith approach toward the City of Oakland and sabotaged any hope for a deal to keep the A’s in the city while simultaneously working behind the scenes to help them move to Las Vegas:

The cowardliness is demonstrated by the fact that he turned off the replies to it so thousands of people cannot directly tell him to shut the hell up because no one wants to hear from his pathetic ass:

Too bad they can’t leave now, Seattle Pilots style, and start up in Vegas in a month.

Stacy Wakefield dies less than 5 months after husband Tim Wakefield's passing

Longtime Red Sox knuckleballer Tim Wakefield died in October at the age of 57. Yesterday we learned that his widow, Stacey Wakefield, has died of pancreatic cancer. The Wakefields left two teenaged children.

What an unimaginable horror for those kids.

Urge to kill . . . rising

This came across my Facebook timeline the other day and I was yelling — absolutely screaming — at my screen. And not just because they misspelled Cal Ripken’s name:

I was pretty busy so I didn’t have time to make a similar graphic showing a “career singles on otherwise playable balls hit to one’s left” leaderboard, but when I get a moment . . .

The bleakest thing you’ll read today

From the Wall Street Journal: “With the resumption of student-loan payments, young adults are now turning to sports betting as a Hail Mary pass to tackle their debts . . “

It doesn’t get much better either after that.

Other Stuff

The Most Predictable Thing Ever

• Presale for tickets for the upcoming The National/The War on Drugs tour went on sale yesterday;

• I am a white man between the ages of 40 and 55 who finds himself grappling with self doubt and way too deep in his own feelings much of the time;

• I purchased tickets to see The National/The War on Drugs tour yesterday.

The Second Most Predictable Thing Ever

A day after the Internet mocked Wendy’s for its surge pricing gambit Wendy’s announced that it is abandoning its surge pricing gambit.

Bullying and mockery works, kids. Just make sure you’re punching up, not down.

Richard Lewis: 1947-2024

The comedian and actor Richard Lewis died yesterday at the age of 76. He had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease last year. The cause of death, however, was a heart attack.

Lewis is probably most famous for the semi-fictionalized version of himself which he played for years and years opposite his lifelong friend Larry David on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” If you’re a bit older, however, you knew him first from his 1980s and 1990s standup comedy specials “I’m in Pain,” “I’m Exhausted,” “I’m Doomed,” and “Richard Lewis: The Magical Misery Tour.” His standup routine, while first and foremost hilarious, was built almost entirely around his very real struggles with anxiety, depression, and addiction. Such a thing is practically ubiquitous among comedians today but it was uncommonly confessional for its time.

Lewis also acted, co-starring with Jamie Lee Curtis in the 1989-92 sitcom “Anything but Love,” which was surprisingly sweet and earnest given Lewis’ prickly and nervous onstage persona. He took a rare dramatic turn in the 1995 Showtime movie “Drunks,” in which he drew from his own addictions for what I remember as a pretty affecting performance, though I’ll admit I haven’t seen it since it first aired. My memory of it was good, though. The deeply personal stuff Lewis talked about in his standup definitely helped give his role in “Drunks” some extra heft.

Lewis was part of the standup comedy boom of the 1970s and 1980s which produced so, so many big stars of stage and screen. So many of them have passed on by now. Lewis would be the first one to tell us that we all gotta go sometime — he communed with death more than any of his peers — but we’re definitely approaching the end of an era.

What a shame

Mitch McConnell announced yesterday that he will step down in November as the Republican Senate leader.

I do not subscribe to any religion, but I will note that many religions believe in Hell and many that do believe that Hell is beneath us, so I suppose McConnell stepping “down” is the logical geographic progression for him given his life’s work and example.

More on enshittification

I don’t subscribe to Ed Zitron’s newsletter, but one of you pointed me to his latest post and it’s pretty insightful. It’s about one of my favorite topics of late: enshittification.

In this case it’s about enshittification of the media. Specifically, how how tech and business executives are killing both media and social media by transforming once-reliable platforms from information and news dissemination or social networking concerns into high-growth startups that, in his words, “make content for algorithms rather than readers” and which prioritize growth-at-all-costs economics which serves investors rather than human beings who, you know, might want or need to use said platforms.

After detailing some of the many ways in which software, media, and social media products have lost the plot, he winds up here:

I realize that all of this relates to drums I’ve been beating around here for years, but since no one really listens to the drum-beating of people who don’t provide capital or political cover for corporations, it’s still getting worse.

Keeping with media problems . . .

Over at TechDirt Karl Bode writes about the collapse of Vice — and other online media entities — and its causes. Which is weird because, as he notes, we don’t usually hear about the causes of online news failure. Not the real ones anyway, because the people who report on these collapses don’t want to displease the sorts of folks who fund media companies and might have the reporters’ careers in their hands one day.

Typically, we get the transcribed boilerplate of CEO press releases with references to “the challenging online media environment” and “the difficulty of achieving profitability in an ever-changing media landscape” blah, blah, blah. What we don’t hear anywhere near enough about is how companies like Vice invariably turn into comically top-heavy concerns in which executives who don’t do much more than cheerlead — and change the mission and philosophy of the outlet every six months in a desperate effort to chase trends — while taking home scandalously high salaries and bonuses.

At Vice, for example, Bode notes that “[n]umerous Vice editors and staff writers were paid salaries as little as $35,000 a year” while expected to live and work in New York. Meanwhile, its chief communications officer took home $640,000 in salary and bonuses in the 12 months prior to Vice’s bankruptcy filing, its chief operating officer took home $726,000, its executive vice president was paid $779,000, and its chief marketing officer made $835,000.

Such enterprises are necessarily doomed because, as the previous item illustrates, they are being viewed, implicitly or explicitly, as wealth-creation machines for their investors and executives as opposed to news-gathering and reporting concerns. Almost every new media venture of the Internet Age has been fueled by people whose first priority seems to be becoming rich media moguls rather than to put out a reliable and sustainable product. The damage that has caused has been immense. There has to be a better way.

And there probably is one, even if hardly anyone has pursued it yet:

There are, thankfully, some small-scale operations which have seen some modest success doing things differently. Independent, non-profit news operations dedicated to solid work. Most of these so far surround local and state government beats (I regularly read two of them, one dedicated to Ohio politics, one to West Virginia politics). I’d love to see more sites like that, especially ones that cover different sorts of beats, but it seems like a hell of a lot of work, discipline, and self-sacrifice on the part of those who run them to get them going.

In the meantime, we watch the collapse. And wonder if a society can truly function without a healthy, independent, and uncompromised press, engaging in the sort of work in which a healthy, independent, and uncompromised press has historically engaged. I’m not super optimistic.

Great Moments in Whining

This made the rounds yesterday morning:

For one thing, this is private equity/hedge fund guy J. Kyle Bass, who is worth something like $4 billion, so cry me a river.

For a second thing, no one made him order an $8 Coke and a $14 OJ, among other things, via room service. When I go to New York I get a bagel or an egg sandwich from a corner store or I go to one of the diners that are on almost every block, but I suppose I’m weird like that.

For a third thing, some pretty basic Googling reveals that this bill is almost certainly from the Carlyle Hotel on the Upper East Side, where, at least on its website, midweek single rooms cannot be found for under $944 a night for the next several weeks. Shocker that the room service there is expensive.

For a fourth thing, it’d be a really good idea for the media to start making a distinction between “inflation” and “price gouging.” They are different things. This is one of those things, but it’s not the one this chucklehead wants us to believe it is.

For a fifth thing, I’d normally just think it’s a weird sense of entitlement that would make one tag the President and the Treasury Secretary on one’s breakfast bill complaint, but when you discover that Bass is linked to shady Trump insiders, you can get a pretty good idea of what he’s really on about.

Other than that, though, this Comrade has my support in his fight against The Man.

Have a great day everyone.