Facebook is dying as the tech bubble bursts.

Facebook is collapsing right in front of us.

All you have to do is look at their stock price.

It’s “worth” less than 25% of what it was 13 months ago, even before you adjust for the fact that the money lost another 30% this year under Biden and (locally worse) Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.

Where you have to pay for three dozen eggs at 2020 prices to get only a dozen and you have to pay for two pounds of butter to get a pound, and you have to pay for 1.2 months worth of rent to get a month.

This is Illinois and this is America under the Democratic Party.

Phoronix is talking about Facebook’s code contributions to the BtrFS file system for Linux, which I admit I use personally.

Since it’s all under the GNU GPL, it will survive the collapse of the Second Tech Bubble, when Facebook is long gone. As did much Free and Open Source Software the last time, much of which is still developed and in use today.

But what will be gone when Facebook itself collapses?

Cat pictures?

Terror content that they don’t see anything wrong with (because there’s no human moderators and they try to cover it up with software that detects words)?

Anti-vaxxers? People denying that we had an election and they lost?

They don’t care what kind of an open sewer they’re running as long as people engage with advertising, but in Biden/Pritzker’s economy, ad revenue is worth very little right now and many of the ad firms themselves are shutting down and having 100% layoffs.

Meanwhile, the company is mostly being mocked for spending down all of their assets on something that looks like characters in a Nintendo 64 game where nobody has any legs, on a $600 VR headset.

Facebook truly is burning while Zuckerberg fiddles. This is priceless. I shall watch with great amusement and then laugh in “I still use IRC and lost pretty much nothing.”.

There’s nothing particularly unique about what’s happening to Facebook (“Fakebook”) in the economy of the Bay Area. Layoffs Tracker shows mostly what’s unfolding in failed blue cities and states.

Yesterday, a “self-driving” car company based in Pennsylvania called Argo AI went under, and 2,000 people lost their jobs, as their clients took possession of the company’s “intellectual property”.

Self-driving cars are a pipe dream. Tesla is now under CRIMINAL investigation by the feds for advertising that their cars are “self-driving”. (NewsWaffle proxy. Original.)

I mean, it’s technically true that “self-driving” cars can mostly manage to stay in a lane, but you can’t trust them not to run people over and say they were a shopping bag or slam into the back of a parked police car in Florida, so you still, legally, have to be paying attention to the road and ready to take over at a moment’s notice.

I linked to the ARGO AI story in Techrights IRC yesterday, highlighting Matthew J. Garrett, joking “You’re next, Bubbles.”.

(Which is what Peter Venkman told the judge in Ghostbusters II while the ghosts were flying away with his court reporter.)

He didn’t reply as far as I know. I’m not telling him anything he doesn’t already know.

The Federal Reserve may be fixing to lose all credibility.

I saw a report yesterday that says that many investors feel that the Fed will crater and stop aggressively hiking interest rates in December. The Fed hasn’t commented, but I guess we won’t have to wait long to see.

I don’t subscribe to the notion that jacking up interest rates through the roof and causing immediate and rampant destruction is the best or only way to get hyperinflation under control, but it is what’s available considering that Congress won’t quit throwing money around and bailing out Zombie Corporations like Japan did in the 90s before it gave up because the government deficits were just too large and the population wouldn’t stand for it anymore.

If true, this means that instead of just a Depression or just a hyperinflationary period, we’re going to get both as the Federal Reserve throws its hands into the air and gives up trying to deal with this using the tools it has available.

My Illinois mid-term election ballot was “challenged” and I refused to “vote” using one of those fake provisional ballots that they throw in the trash later.

My Illinois mid-term election ballot was “challenged” and I refused to “vote” using one of those fake provisional ballots that they throw in the trash later.

The County Clerk’s office of Lake County, Illinois tried to “challenge” my ballot.

I was pretty furious last night when I read this on their Web site and may have let loose with some expletives. We Americans already have almost no control over the government, and now they’re trying to steal my right to vote too!

I spent half an hour trying to fix it this morning, before I spoke to the Clerk herself, Robin M. O’Connor, and cleared the challenge with a sworn statement that I really am who I say I am.

I showed my Illinois driver’s license and my Firearm Owner’s Identification Card, and the Challenge was cleared.

Along the way, a poll worker tried to get me to use a “Provisional Ballot”.

I said, “I know what those are…” with a tinge of annoyance in my voice. I continued, “The American Civil Liberties Union warns voters about ‘Provisional Ballots’, which are essentially fake ballots that poll workers give to voters who insist on voting, when you really don’t want them to vote, and that more than half of them go into the trash on election night.

I would like to speak to the County Clerk about curing my REAL ballot, not vote using something that Congress created in 2002 to trick mostly poor and Black voters into going away.

Furthermore, I’m frankly shocked, shocked and dismayed, to find that the dirty election tricks that we were told were only going on in places like my home state of Indiana are going on in a state and county which claims that the right to vote is sacred.

I also consider this a personal insult and stand ready to prove my identity using the appropriate forms of identification as set forth in the Illinois Compiled Statutes”.

The poll worker, who was Black, looked at me for a moment (So did the Sheriff’s Deputies sitting in the box next to her, but what are they going to do? Arrest me for Orderly Conduct?), and said “Go down the hall over there into the office and ask to speak to Mary.”.

Mary got ahold of the Clerk and I made a sworn statement. O’Connor said to me that the Web site should update “sometime in the next week” showing my ballot as “accepted”.

As Boston.com reported in April 2022, almost 60% of “Provisional Ballots” in Massachusetts were thrown out on Election Night in 2020.

The ballots are fake, they’re basically totally fake.

They just sit there counting them right before the deadline to finalize the results so there’s no challenging them, as a voter, at that point.

So if yours is one of the 60% that get thrown in the trash, there’s no way to cure it!

But the election officials at the Lake County, Illinois Clerk’s Office swore up and down that “they all get counted 14 days after they election”.

Also, they’ll probably sell you the Brooklyn Bridge for two dollars if you let them.

Some might even say that the poll workers throw them out to reach the final results that they are trying to get to in that County Clerk’s office.

Since we don’t know why they throw them out and can’t ask them to come up with a solid explanation for why some count and others don’t, we just don’t know why they do it, but there’s motivations for a stolen election no matter who is doing the stealing, aren’t there?

It’s not hard to imagine that if they have 10,000 “Provisional” votes, then they just say “This one good, this one bad. Because reasons….”, until “the right” candidate has enough votes.

“It is immensely frustrating that, in communities with the largest Black and brown, low income, and immigrant communities, thousands of individuals tried to vote, but did not have their votes counted,” Cheryl Clyburn Crawford, Executive Director at MassVOTE, said in the release.

I’m a White man and I was trying to vote for a split ballot with some Republicans, some Democrats.

I voted Republican for Governor, the Illinois Supreme Court, the Illinois Treasurer and Comptroller, and Lake County Treasurer, Sheriff and Appellate Court Second District.

Democrat for US Senate, US House, Secretary of State and Attorney General, as well as State House and State Senate, Lake County Regional School Superintendent, and Lake County Clerk.

YES on the Worker’s Rights Amendment.

I suppose that the “problem” might have been that the Lake County Clerk changed parties and I voted for her Democratic Party competitor.

But who knows?

I thought that they didn’t open those ballots until Election Day, so how do they know who I voted for yet?

Nevertheless, it’s wrong to say that Election officials only target racial minorities. This is Democrat bullshit, you know. “You’re only doing this because I’m Black!”. Clearly, they don’t “only” do it to Black people. They do it to White people as well.

I got challenged in Indiana at the polling booth one year because there was another voter with a similar name in the same county, and the poll worker tried to threaten calling the police if I tried to vote “again”, so I went and talked to the Allen County Clerk and sorted it out.

I’ve had it happen twice, in two different states, and I’m only 38. It’s troubling that this happens so frequently.

But, before this turns into much more of a meandering mess wondering who these folks target and why, let me just say with 100% sincerity….

Don’t ever let them give you a Provisional Ballot and then walk out thinking you’ve voted, because you probably haven’t!

I promised them that I would be keeping an eye on the status of my ballot and “I’ll be back if it doesn’t update correctly.”.

Next Democrat Exelon “Communist Edison” bailout forces Illinois taxpayers to rebate rich people $4,000 on their Tesla.

Surprise, surprise! Illinois Democrats are at it again.

Former “Vladimir Putin of Illinois”, Speaker Mike Madigan, might be gone, but you’d be forgiven for not noticing.

Now that Democrats have gerrymandered total control over Illinois for the next decade no matter what kind of a hell they turn it into, they decided to turn the screws on working class taxpayers again, to give bailouts to government mandated lemons that nobody wants.

Electric vehicles.

If they were worth what they cost, the market would pay it, but on top of the federal subsidies, Illinois wants to create a $4,000 rebate. In other words, if you live in Illinois, and you work, and all you can afford is a clunker, you now pay taxes to buy some six or seven figure income household a new Tesla.

On top of this new theft to subsidize EVs for rich people, the state is also giving your money to the electric company again and then bragging about how much they saved you on electricity.

ComEd* recently paid $200 million in fines to the federal government for bribing Illinois politicians, but Illinois taxpayers are on the hook for a total of $1.2 _billion_ in bailouts. Six times what the fine for bribery cost them.

“It’s a big club. And you and I are not in it.” -George Carlin

Be sure to thank Governor Pritzker for that.

*(A former neighbor referred to Commonwealth Edision as “Communist Edison” when I mentioned that, at one point, they suckered me into hourly pricing and my bill went up despite following their advice about when to “shift usage” and their assurances that almost everyone would save money on that plan.)