2:00PM Water Cooler 7/25/2024 | naked capitalism

By Lambert Strether of Corrente

Patient readers, there is a lot of political material to process today, some of which* I still need to sit and think about, so please check back. –lambert

Bird Song of the Day

Northern Mockingbird, Santa Fe Dam Rec. Area, Los Angeles, California, United States. Only forty seconds but there’s a lot going on!

In Case You Might Miss…

(1) Biden’s post-defenestration speech.

(2) Litmus tests for Kamala (Palestine, anti-trust).

(3) Kamala’s campaign, including the donor-gasm, the 100 days, and the bait and switch.

(4) Trad wives.

(5) Employee ownership.

Politics

“So many of the social reactions that strike us as psychological are in fact a rational management of symbolic capital.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles

2024

Less than four months to go!

Friday’s RCP Poll Averages:

Virginia and North Carolina added to the list. NC was never going for Biden Harris, but Virginia? Yikes!

* * *

Biden Defenestration:

“Transcript: Biden’s speech explaining why he withdrew from the 2024 presidential race” [Associated Press]. Biden: “You know, in recent weeks it’s become clear to me that I needed to unite my party in this critical endeavor. I believe my record as president, my leadership in the world, my vision for America’s future all merited a second term, but nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy, and that includes personal ambition. So I’ve decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation. That’s the best way to unite our nation. I know there is a time and a place for long years of experience in public life, but there’s also a time and a place for new voices, fresh voices, yes, younger voices, and that time and place is now.” • So this is all the explanation we’re going to get. “Recent weeks” contradicts the narrative that Biden’s decision was made quickly over the weekend when aides Ricchetti and Donilon showed him polling data. Given that Biden’s defenestration was carried out by Tweet without informing staff, I’m not buying “in recent weeks.” I think Biden’s decision was made quickly under pressure. Oh, and Kamala is younger only notionally; she doesn’t code as 59, surely. And she’s neither a new nor fresh voice. Assuming one leaves the sound up.

“July 24, 2024” [Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American]. I’ve never been able to bring myself to read Richardson, and now I see why. Endless exposition of Biden’s words without value add, but concluding piously but “without evidence,” as we say: “Like [Washington and Adams], Biden gave up the pursuit of power for himself in order to demonstrate the importance of democracy.” And a teensy bit if reporting, albeit unsourced: “After the speech, the White House served ice cream to the Bidens and hundreds of White House staffers in the Rose Garden.” • I wonder if the ice cream came from Pelosi’s fridge.

* * *

Kamala’s Rollout:

The Donor-Gasm:

“How Kamala Harris Took Command of the Democratic Party in 48 Hours” [Shane Goldmacher, New York Times]. “The story of how Ms. Harris so efficiently and effectively locked down the nomination — ‘a perfect 48 hours,’ Robby Mook, who managed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, has called it — was told through interviews with more than two dozen people who are supporting Ms. Harris, involved with her campaign or who interacted with it. Many of those people requested anonymity to speak candidly about matters they were not authorized to discuss.” Shorter: “The Inner Party: This is their story.” This caught my eye: “Within 48 hours, Ms. Harris had functionally cleared the Democratic field of every serious rival, clinched the support of more delegates than needed to secure the party nomination, raised more than $100 million and delivered a crisper message against former President Donald J. Trump than Mr. Biden had mustered in months. It amounted to a remarkable display of early dominance for Ms. Harris and an organic outpouring of enthusiasm.” • Using the experience-based heuristic — expanded on below — that anything a public-facing Democrat says is a lie until proven otherwise, we naturally ask what was “organic” about the “outpouring.” Clicking through to the link, we find the answer: fundraising (as one might expect). “More than $100 million” is vague — and if we were scholars, we’d wait for the reports to the FEC — but Harris campaign claims (“without evidence,” as we say) “888,000 donors had contributed in her first day,” and ActBlue says they took in $90 million in the same 24-hour period.

Call me cynical, but I find it very hard to believe that there was a pent-up demand amounting to 880,000 people, randomly distributed across the Democrat electorate, just waiting to donate to Kamala; the polls certainly haven’t shown that, for example; nor have any anecdotes I have seen. Nor has Kamala’s performance in any other campaign. So how “organic” was the donor-gasm, really? Speculating very freely, I can think of two reasons it might not be, one more or less legitimate, the other not legitimate at all.

Taking the legitimate explanation first: Kamala is a valued member of AKA (Alpha Kappa Alpha), “the first intercollegiate historically African American sorority.” “The AKAs will not officially endorse any political candidate, but along with fellow Black Greek-letter organizations — known as the ‘Divine Nine’ — they have launched a massive voter mobilization campaign.” An actual political advocacy group, “Win With Black Women,” organized a 40,000 member virtual call that raised $1.5 million, so these institutions have form. (Note that I am not entirely in sympathy with this important identity vertical in the Democrat Party, since they gave us Obama, Clinton, and Biden, and nobbled Sanders. Obama was a disaster for the working class, and Biden even worse, since he slaughtered around 700,000 people, disproportionately working class, through his policy of Covid infection without mitigation. The destruction and erasure of the possibilities that Sanders opened was another disaster for the working class. The AKAs are also about as PMC as you can get.) AKA has 360,000 members. So you can see how a totally unofficial and entirely spontaneous outpouring of support from AKA would go a long way towards 880,000. But not entirely. Leading us to–

The illegitimate explanation: A squillionaire “smurf.” From Investopedia, “What Is a Smurf and How Does Smurfing Work“: “A smurf is a colloquial term for a money launderer who seeks to evade scrutiny from government agencies by that are each below the reporting threshold.” In this case, the squillionaire would take a very large sum and distribute it through a large number of small donor accounts through, say, ActBlue, conveniently online. (As of 2023: “Unlike nearly every other individual political campaign and political action committee, ActBlue does not require a card verification value (CVV) number as a requirement for donating.”) A discussion of the 2012 election, when Obama was on the ballot, contains the following intriguing passage: “The major sources of data on political money are the Federal Election Commission and the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. . . . both agencies routinely accept seriously incomplete reports and obviously inaccurate or misleading reports. . . . As a result, the true influence that large donors wield in American elections is chronically underestimated. . . . Existing data management tools that try to match these up commonly fail to recognize [i.e., smurfing] In turn that nourishes illusions that small donors play bigger roles in campaigns than they really do. Especially where Democrats are concerned, the myth of small donors is a powerful instrument of miseducation.” Akerlof and Shiller’s notion of phishing equilibria lends credence to this speculation. In my paraphrase: “If a system enables fraud, fraud will already have happened,” the fraud in this case being smurfing. (I ran into the smurfing concept in right-wing Twitter, but the whole discussion was a rats’ nest of self-reference and didn’t seem well-evidenced, so I never included any of it.)

888,000 = legitimate (AKA) + illegitimate (smurfing) is perfectly possible, too.

As I note, patient readers, these are both speculations, albeit intriguing and plausble ones. If you have evidence to confirm or disconfirm either explanation, please leave your thoughts (and links) in comments.

The “Bait and Switch”:

I think “coup” isn’t the proper descriptive, so I’ll use “bait and switch” until we can come up with a better term.

The timeline that led to Kamala’s coronation is interesting in that it’s not really clear when it could be said to have begun (alert reader Rolf began an interesting discussion here, with contributions from readers Acacia, Sam, and Tom). To a Martian looking down on the whole process over time and from 30,000 feet, Kamala’s coronation looks like an enormous bait and switch operation. After all, the Inner Party cleared the primary ballots for Biden, Biden himself declared many times that he was “all in,” as we say, hundreds of millions were raised in Biden’s name (and it’s no good saying that it was the Biden/Harris ticket, everybody knows the Vice Presidency is the proverbial container of warm [subtance].) And suddenly, after about three weeks of Inner Party leaks and pressure, Biden was off the ticket, Kamala was in, and all the money was hers (and yes, Biden’s debate performance was horrid, but are we really to believe that Inner Party propaganda could not have minimized it, when it has minimized so much else? Or, more precisely, that they thought “This time, we can’t get away with it”?).

But if Kamala’s coronation was in fact a “bait and switch” operation — I’ve looked at Wikipedia’s “scam” entry, and can’t find anything else that matches the pattern; readers? — then when did it begin? In 2020, when she was put on the ballot for no apparent reason, and when Biden promised to serve a single term? In (say) 2022, when the “Red Wave” did not materialize, and many electeds beat Biden’s 2020 numbers? As late as George Clooney’s enormously successful fundraiser, the one where Obama led him gently off the stage? Or a little under a month later, after the debate? Did the Inner Party always have Biden’s defenestration in mind? Or did they defenestrate him only at the last possible minute, making as certain as they could that no alternative to Kamala would materialize?

I don’t think we know; and I don’t think we can know. That says something about how Democrats define “our democracy” operationally. Because we now have a candidate at the top of the ticket who never faced the voters and won a single primary, neither in 2020 nor in 2024; a candidate who took power only through a campaign of leaks orchestrated by a small group of Inner Party figures, in which neither voters nor Democrats at the precinct or even the State Party level had any say; a candidate installed on the ticket by a single person, her superior in the Executive branch, without discussion or advance notice of any kind; a candidate who swapped in her ActBlue donation’s page before she even had a campaign site of her own for the office she seeks; and a candidate who, in 48 hours of phone work, became the de facto nominee of the entire Party; and whose candidacy will shortly be ratified by Zoom call, rendering the actual, physical Convention mere window-dressing (“Democratic leaders say they’ll still have a ceremonial roll call at the Chicago convention the week of Aug. 19, and the delegates will vote in person on the party platform,” lol). Clearly, this is not a small-d democratic process, and it’s impossible to rid oneself of the suspicion that this is the Inner Party’s model for selecting candiates, going forward. Pesky voters!

Where the timeline begins matters, because it matters how long the Inner Party and its assets in the press have been lying to donors (and, to be fair, themselves) about Biden’s deteriorating cognitive abilities. Since 2020 is a long time (although issues were clearly visible at that time, as NC readers — and most dull normals — know). However, the universal and vehement dogpiling that occured when anyone suggested Biden might slip a cog easily predated George Clooney fundraiser and the debate. So it’s fair to say that the lying continued for a minimum of months, and a week is a long time in politics. That suggests the heuristic that, going forward, any public-facing Democrat should be assumed to be lying until proven otherwise. It was possbible, for awhile, to imagine that public-facing Democrats would lie for given operations or campaigns (RussiaGate; Ukraine). But now we need to regard lying as their default setting. It’s the only way to be sure.

* * *

The Campaign Trail:

The Hundred Days. As you can see, Kamala has 100 days (well, 103) to win the Presidency (note again the dominance of the calendar). Does this help her, or hurt her?

“Could a short campaign be exactly what Kamala Harris needs?” [Vox]. “Vice President Kamala Harris has 103 days to convince the American public to vote for her for president. It’s not a lot of time — especially considering former President Donald Trump launched his campaign in November 2022 — but it’s a timeline not too different from that of other countries, many of which have short campaign cycles…. Harris may, to an extent, have the best of both worlds: She already has the benefit of being in national leadership positions. She has the Democratic machinery behind her, including Biden and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and she will have access to Biden’s fundraising dollars. But voters haven’t been seeing her campaigning everywhere for months now, which means she’ll seem new…. However, the shorter campaign cycle may mean less opportunity for errors like the debate performance that ultimately caused Biden to step down. And there will be less time for Trump and the Republican Party to create damaging narratives about Harris that overshadow her policy and performance — provided she creates a narrative about herself first.”

“James Carville Warns of ‘Realism’ Facing Kamala Harris Campaign: ‘Tough Sledding Ahead’” [Mediaite]. Carville: “[T]hey’re having to put a campaign together right away. They were obviously thinking about this ahead of time, but they got they got to accomplish between now and the convention, they got accomplish what most campaigns have eight months to do.” And: ” It’s going to be very close, and I understand that people are feeling a lot better and excited. But that excitement has got to be tempered with realism, and the realism is she has a tough campaign on, and as you say, she’s got several things she’s got to accomplish at the same time. But having said that, there’s been real growth in Vice President Harris. I mean, you can just see the difference. And she just looked so confident to me yesterday. I didn’t put the sound on. I just left the video, and I liked what I saw, I’ll be honest with you.” • I personally also recommend watching Kamala with the sound off, but not, I think, for the same reasons Carville does.

“Kamala Harris’s Michael Dukakis moment” [The New Criterion]. “Americans over the age of fifty may remember the 1988 presidential election campaign, when Governor Michael Dukakis surged to a seventeen-point lead over Vice President George H. W. Bush following the Democratic National Convention in mid-July. … Kamala Harris is now enjoying this kind of moment as she racks up endorsements in anticipation of the Democratic National Convention in August. Democrats and media allies are busy portraying her as a fresh face (she is not) and a youthful candidate (also doubtful) who will electrify the nation, galvanize women and minority voters, and trounce Donald Trump in the fall campaign. Some polls show her running more or less even with Trump, though, in truth, Biden was not doing all that badly in the same polls when he decided to drop out. Harris’s honeymoon will continue until and through the Democratic convention, at which time delegates will put on a show of unity and strength, thereby covering up the large cracks in their coalition that Trump will soon exploit. She and her running mate may come out of the convention even with, or perhaps even slightly ahead of, the Trump-Vance ticket. The honeymoon will not last very long.” • The honeymoon will, however, consume an appreciably larger percentage of the campaign than it usually does.

* * *

Harris (D), litmus test: Palestine:

Read my full statement on the protests in Washington, D.C. yesterday. pic.twitter.com/zJpZvdQDt9

— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) July 25, 2024

Harris (D), litmus test: Anti-trust:

Donor or owner? LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman thinks he owns Kamala Harris. Imagine giving $7 million and then publicly demanding a total reversal of tough on corporate crime policies. Harris took the money, she needs to repudiate this. https://t.co/dqPldxMH4R

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) July 25, 2024

I don’t say Harris can’t be bought, but I don’t think Hoffman quite understands where the decimal point would need to be.

More:

One hopes, anyhow!

— Basel Musharbash (@musharbash_b) July 25, 2024

Indeed one does.

Our Famously Free Press

“AP Declares That ‘JD Vance Did Not Have Sex With A Couch’ In Fact Check” [HuffPost]. “At one point, the AP appeared to have another headline ― ‘Posts spread baseless rumors about GOP vice presidential pick JD Vance having sex with a couch’ ― but all versions of the article were scrubbed from the internet less than 24 hours after publication. Why waste all that journalistic effort? According to Mediate, the AP did a PDF search of the book that yielded 10 mentions of ‘couch’ or ‘couches,’ but none of them described Vance performing the act in question. The words ‘sofa’ and ‘glove’ did not appear anywhere in the memoir, AP wrote. The Cut did its own investigation and reported that the pages supposedly recounting Vance’s alleged furniture tryst actually mention no such thing.” • Same heuristic: Assume any public-facing Democrat is lying until proven otherwise.

“The Associated Press removes a fact-check claiming JD Vance has not had sex with a couch” [The Verge]. The Associated Press has apparently retracted a fact-check published yesterday with the headline, ‘No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch.’ As of Thursday morning, the article page displayed a ‘page unavailable’ error message. The fact-check references a few joke social media posts that have been circulating that claim the Republican vice presidential nominee wrote in his book Hillbilly Elegy about having sex with a couch…. ‘The story, which did not go out on the wire to our customers, didn’t go through our standard editing process. We are looking into how that happened,’ AP spokesperson Nicole Meir told The Verge in an email. News reports (and fact-checks specifically) are often worded in a way that carefully threads a needle — there’s a difference between saying something definitively didn’t happen versus saying there’s no evidence of it. My guess is that the AP headline was the problem here because it claims to debunk something that is unknowable. A headline like, ‘No, JD Vance didn’t write about fucking a couch’ perhaps would have been more accurate.” • That’s a silly argument; you fix the headline, you don’t take the page down. Sounds to me like AP got whipped into line. The Snopes debunking is still online.

Democrats en Déshabillé

“Newsom To Order Dismantling Of CA Homeless Encampments” [Banning-Beaumont Patch]. “Gov. Gavin Newsom will order state officials on Thursday to dismantle homeless encampments with a sweeping executive order, affecting hundreds of thousands of people, the New York Times reported. The order comes in response to the June Supreme Court ruling allowing cities to enforce bans on sleeping outside in public spaces…. According to the Times, the executive order represents the nation’s most sweeping response to the ruling. Roughly 180,000 people are unhoused in California…. LA County is the nation’s most populous, with about 10 million people. More than 1 in 5 of all homeless people in the U.S. live in the county, according to The Associated Press.” • You can bet Newsom checked with Kamala first, too. Cleaning up California’s image, and all.

Syndemics

“I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” –William Lloyd Garrison

Covid Resources, United States (National): Transmission (CDC); Wastewater (CDC, Biobot; includes many counties; Wastewater Scan, includes drilldown by zip); Variants (CDC; Walgreens); “Iowa COVID-19 Tracker” (in IA, but national data). “Infection Control, Emergency Management, Safety, and General Thoughts” (especially on hospitalization by city).

Lambert here: Readers, thanks for the collective effort. To update any entry, do feel free to contact me at the address given with the plants. Please put “COVID” in the subject line. Thank you!

Resources, United States (Local): AK (dashboard); AL (dashboard); AR (dashboard); AZ (dashboard); CA (dashboard; Marin, dashboard; Stanford, wastewater; Oakland, wastewater); CO (dashboard; wastewater); CT (dashboard); DE (dashboard); FL (wastewater); GA (wastewater); HI (dashboard); IA (wastewater reports); ID (dashboard, Boise; dashboard, wastewater, Central Idaho; wastewater, Coeur d’Alene; dashboard, Spokane County); IL (wastewater); IN (dashboard); KS (dashboard; wastewater, Lawrence); KY (dashboard, Louisville); LA (dashboard); MA (wastewater); MD (dashboard); ME (dashboard); MI (wastewater; wastewater); MN (dashboard); MO (wastewater); MS (dashboard); MT (dashboard); NC (dashboard); ND (dashboard; wastewater); NE (dashboard); NH (wastewater); NJ (dashboard); NM (dashboard); NV (dashboard; wastewater, Southern NV); NY (dashboard); OH (dashboard); OK (dashboard); OR (dashboard); PA (dashboard); RI (dashboard); SC (dashboard); SD (dashboard); TN (dashboard); TX (dashboard); UT (wastewater); VA (dashboard); VT (dashboard); WA (dashboard; dashboard); WI (wastewater); WV (wastewater); WY (wastewater).

Resources, Canada (National): Wastewater (Government of Canada).

Resources, Canada (Provincial): ON (wastewater); QC (les eaux usées); BC (wastewater); BC, Vancouver (wastewater).

Hat tips to helpful readers: Alexis, anon (2), Art_DogCT, B24S, CanCyn, ChiGal, Chuck L, Festoonic, FM, FreeMarketApologist (4), Gumbo, hop2it, JB, JEHR, JF, JL Joe, John, JM (10), JustAnotherVolunteer, JW, KatieBird, KF, LL, Michael King, KF, LaRuse, mrsyk, MT, MT_Wild, otisyves, Petal (6), RK (2), RL, RM, Rod, square coats (11), tennesseewaltzer, Tom B., Utah, Bob White (3).

Stay safe out there!

Celebrity Watch

Tedros sends Olympians to illness and death:

No, @DrTedros, these @WHO recommendations will NOT “make sure these Games are healthy and safe for everyone involved”.

They will not prevent superspreading events, as measures against airborne transmission (ventilation, respirators) are only recommended for people with symptoms. https://t.co/OOaWPhtQMm pic.twitter.com/eMyCeHHdjs

— Maarten De Cock (@mdc_martinus) July 25, 2024

Masking and ventilation recommended only after symptoms appear. But handwashing is always appropriate!

Lambert here: Looks like the holiday travel dumped accelerant on the pre-existing surge; see especially the growth in wastewater “hot spots.” Stay safe out there!

Employment Situation: “United States Initial Jobless Claims” [Trading Economics]. “The number of people claiming unemployment benefits in the US fell by 10,000 to 235,000 on the period ending July 20th, below market expectations of 238,000. Despite this decline, the claim count remained significantly above this year’s average, indicating that although the US labor market is still historically tight, it has softened since its post-pandemic [sic] peak.”

GDP: “United States GDP Growth Rate” [Trading Economics]. “The US economy expanded an annualized 2.8% in Q2, up from 1.4% in Q1, and above forecasts of 2%, the advance estimate showed.”

Manufacturing: “United States Durable Goods Orders” [Trading Economics]. “New orders for manufactured durable goods in the US slumped 6.6% month-over-month in June 2024, after four consecutive monthly increases and missing market expectations of a 0.3% increase.”

Tech: “Alexa Is in Millions of Households—and Amazon Is Losing Billions” [Wall Street Journal]. “Amazon.com’s Echo speakers are the type of business success companies don’t want: a widely purchased product that is also a giant money loser. Chief Executive Andy Jassy is trying to plug that hole—and move away from the Amazon accounting tactic that helped create it. When Amazon launched the Echo smart home devices with its Alexa voice assistant in 2014, it pulled a page from shaving giant Gillette’s classic playbook: sell the razors for a pittance in the hope of making heaps of money on purchases of the refill blades. A decade later, the payoff for Echo hasn’t arrived. While hundreds of millions of customers have Alexa-enabled devices, the idea that people would spend meaningful amounts of money to buy goods on Amazon by talking to the iconic voice assistant on the underpriced speakers didn’t take off. Customers actually used Echo mostly for free apps such as setting alarms and checking the weather. ‘We worried we’ve hired 10,000 people and we’ve built a smart timer,’ said a former senior employee. As a result, Amazon has lost tens of billions of dollars on its devices business, which includes Echos and other products such as Kindles, Fire TV Sticks and video doorbells, according to internal documents and people familiar with the business. Between 2017 and 2021, Amazon had more than $25 billion in losses from its devices business, according to the documents. The losses for the years before and after that period couldn’t be determined.” • That’s a damn shame.

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 45 Neutral (previous close: 41 Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 53 (Neutral). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Jul 24 at 12:37:17 PM ET.

Zeitgeist Watch

“Meet the queen of the ‘trad wives’ (and her eight children)” [The Times]. “Trad wives are an internet phenomenon; women who have rejected modern gender roles for the more traditional existence of wife, mother and homemaker — and who then promote that life online, some to millions of followers. Their lifestyle is often, though not always, bound to Christianity. They film themselves cooking mad things from scratch (chewing gum from corn syrup, waffles from a sourdough starter), their faces glowing in beams of sunlight, their voices soft and breathy, their children free range.” • Worth reading in full.

“Fossil Hints That Jurassic Mammals Lived Slow and Died Old” [New York Times]. “The extended time frame for tooth replacement, along with the older Krusatodon’s age, led the team to conclude that these ancient mammals enjoyed surprisingly long life spans. This most likely extended their growth period. Most modern mammals experience rapid growth early in life before plateauing as they approach adult size. Krusatodon and other early Mesozoic mammals may have slowly grown throughout their long lives…. Determining when the mammalian growth process sped up is difficult. Dr. Panciroli thinks development was most likely turbocharged as mammals’ metabolism increased, and as they became warm-blooded. These traits would emerge later in the Mesozoic Era and help early mammals adopt more energetically demanding lifestyles that included swimming and gliding.” • Sounds like I’d prefer to be a Jurassic Mammal; I don’t glide, and the closest I’ve gotten to swimming is buying a bathing suit (and maybe I should reconsider).

Class Warfare

The Elysian]. “There are 47 millionaires working for Central States Manufacturing, and they’re not all in the C-Suite. Many of them are drivers or machinists—blue-collar workers for the company. How? The company is owned by its employees. Every worker gets a salary but also a percentage of their salary in stock ownership. When the company does well, so do the employees—all of them, not just the ones at the top. And the company is doing well. ‘When we sat down eight years ago, we said we want to be a billion-dollar company and have 1,500 people, we are on track to be both of those this year,’ Tim Ruger, president of Central States, tells me. That’s right, this manufacturing company will become a unicorn this year—one of only 6,000 companies in the world earning more than $1 billion in revenue. But unlike Walmart, Amazon, and Apple, it’s not just the executives getting paid out. ‘It’s not like 80 percent of the company is owned by management and the rest is owned by employees, it’s really well spread across all functions,’ Ruger tells me. ‘We’ve got a number of people that have been here 15, 20 years and they have $1 million plus balances, which is really cool for a person that came out of high school and runs our rollformer. You can’t do that everywhere.’” • Do we have any readers who are familiar with Central States Manufacturing? The name sounds so generic, like “The Great Lakes Paperclip Company”:

“Microsoft’s ‘World of Warcraft’ Gaming Staff Votes to Unionize” [Bloomberg].

“It turns out a lot of return-to-office mandates were meant to make workers quit” [Quartz]. “A quarter of bosses admitted that they hoped return-to-office (RTO) mandates would lead to employees quitting, according to a new survey…. That expectation isn’t totally unfounded. Twenty-eight percent of remote employees said they’d consider quitting their jobs if RTO policies occurred at their companies. But it appears fewer quit than the bosses wanted. Some executives even blamed layoffs on employees who didn’t quit after RTO policies were put in place, Bamboo said. Almost two in five (37%) of managers, directors, and executives said their companies had layoffs in the last 12 months because they anticipated that more employees would quit after enacting RTO policies.”

News of the Wired

“Scientists Recreate Neanderthal Cooking Methods and the Results Are Eye-Opening” [ZME Science]. “To learn more about how our extinct relatives prepared bird-based meals, researchers in Spain tried cooking like Neanderthals using only tools and methods that would have been available in prehistoric times…. ‘Using a flint flake for butchering required significant precision and effort, which we had not fully valued before this experiment,’ said Mariana Nabais of the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social in Spain, lead author of the new study. ‘The flakes were sharper than we initially thought, requiring careful handling to make precise cuts without injuring our own fingers. These hands-on experiments emphasized the practical challenges involved in Neanderthal food processing and cooking, providing a tangible connection to their daily life and survival strategies.’”

Yum:

Contact information for plants: Readers, feel free to contact me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, to (a) find out how to send me a check if you are allergic to PayPal and (b) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi, lichen, and coral are deemed to be honorary plants! If you want your handle to appear as a credit, please place it at the start of your mail in parentheses: (thus). Otherwise, I will anonymize by using your initials. See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. From Desert Dog:

Desert Dog writes: “Always wonderful to come across these hiding out on the range and welcoming spring weather.”

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