Scripting News: Tuesday, October 29, 2024
"When your house is on fire there aren't two sides." A few people misunderstood. In this analogy there are no arsonists. There is the house and there is fire. If you were reporting on this situation, you don't need to find out what motivates the fire, the only important thing is that if not checked it will destroy the house.#
My op-ed for the Washington Post, if there was such a thing..#
I didn't imagine that Bezos cared what subscribers to the Washington Post thought about his decision to cancel their endorsement of VP Harris in the election one week from today. #
But 200K people unsubscribed, and I guess that message got through to him, so he wrote an op-ed that ran in the Post yesterday, explaining that this was a principled thing. #
If it was really a matter of principle, they wouldn't have chosen this election, and one where his own personal interest was so involved. It doesn't look principled, and when you're trying to do something principled, it pretty much has to look that way or you have to conclude that it's bullshit, which it obviously is. #
It's surprising that he cares. The Post was worth $250M when he bought it in 2013, maybe it's worth more than that now, but it's a very small part of his current $205B net worth. If owning the Post would interfere with his other businesses in a negative way, and if the problem could be solved by dropping it, I don't doubt that he would do that. Then why this op-ed? It could be that someone in his family objected, sometimes people react to that in ways that could cost money. It's possible. It's also possible that he's not sure that Trump will win, and being a calculating person, he realizes now that he's created a similar problem for himself if the Democrats win. The Trumps won't care if he lies about the reason, so lying about the reason was the obvious path for him. #I think what we're really seeing is that owning a high profile news org like the Post isn't something for Mr Bezos. He would probably be better off selling the Post, so he doesn't have to make these kinds of principled bullshit choices, when clearly the only principled thing to do is not abandon American democracy in its hour of greatest need.#
Linkblog items for the day.
GitHub Copilot moves beyond OpenAI models to support Claude 3.5, Gemini. arstechnica.com
Phil Windley knows how elections work, and explains why consequential election fraud would be very difficult to cover up, therefore not likely to work. windley.com
The only principled thing to do was to not abandon American democracy in its hour of greatest need. scripting.com
The Newspapers Were Never Going to Save Us. slate.com
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