What Happened Today: October 28, 2022
Golden parachutes for Twitter execs and WaPo mea culpa; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband attacked at home; mortgage rates top 7%
The Big Story
Elon Musk is in and the chief executives at Twitter are out, with at least four of the platform’s top brass shown the door as Musk assumed control of the company on Thursday. No tears should be shed for the newly departed, however, as Bloomberg News estimates that the four will take home a collective $100 million in stocks and severance: CEO Parag Agrawal eases into unemployment with $50 million, and Vijaya Gadde, the top legal officer who signed off on former president Trump’s Twitter ban, can count on $17 million coming her way.
Musk’s takeover of the platform, which he promises to rebuild as a venue that prioritizes free speech over content moderation, could become an inflection point for the media landscape generally. In The Washington Post on Thursday, media reporter Erik Wempel wrote something of a mea culpa for not speaking out in 2020 when The New York Times axed James Bennet, then its editorial page editor, after the paper published an op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton calling for a military response to the riots breaking out in U.S. cities during several Black Lives Matter protests. Wempel writes that the Times throwing Bennet under the bus because of a fervent faction of staffers objecting to the op-ed was “one of the most consequential journalism fights in decades,” but that he and many others across the corporate media sphere “didn’t speak out then in Bennet’s defense” for one simple reason: “because we were afraid to.”
Wempel’s fear of defending the once previously uncontroversial journalistic “principle of openness to a range of opinions,” as Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger wrote of the dustup before he, too, succumbed to the backlash, had much to do with the personal attacks and professional liabilities journalists and their editors faced if they ran afoul of high-profile Twitter accounts policing a narrow band of acceptable discussion. Now, though, it seems that the fear is dissipating, and there’s a growing willingness to say what had been kept silent.
Still, Musk’s move to broaden what speech is allowed on Twitter could just incite more tedious conflict across the media sphere and elevate the type of hateful invective that will alienate Twitter advertisers obsessed about their corporate brand safety. And that’s not all Musk will have to worry about: Legislators are eager to repeal Section 230 and regulate social media content, and many foreign governments remain intolerant of free speech, particularly in China, where Musk must maintain the peace for the sake of his Tesla supply chain.
In the Back Pages: You Probably Bought That Baseball Card From Rick Probstein
The Rest
→ An intruder broke into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home in San Francisco on Friday and assaulted Pelosi’s husband, Paul, with a hammer, leaving the 82-year-old hospitalized but in stable condition and expected to make a full recovery. “Where is Nancy?” the attacker demanded, before he brought the hammer down on her husband. The Speaker was not in San Francisco at the time. The incident comes amid growing concern over the safety of elected officials on both sides of the aisle. In 2021, the Capitol Police reported 9,625 threats against elected officials, a steep uptick to the 3,939 threats reported four years prior.
→ Following increased threats from Russia over its possible use of nuclear weapons in its disastrous invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. Department of Defense shored up its National Defense Strategy on Thursday, reaffirming the possibility that it would deploy its nuclear arsenal if there was a serious risk of a foreign attack. The statement comes after President Joe Biden’s previous pledge, early in his administration, to revise the Pentagon’s nuclear policy to a “No First Use” approach, in which nukes are only used to retaliate against nukes. But such a dovish stance isn’t tenable as U.S. tensions with Russia and China are on the rise, at least according to the Defense Department, which noted that “by the 2030s the United States will, for the first time in its history, face two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries.”
→ In a terrifying reminder of the Surfside condominium collapse in June 2021, which killed 98 people, another Miami Beach building was evacuated this week when a structural review found that a major support beam is cracked. “There’s cracks in the column, cracks in the garage, in the two storage garages, there’s cracks in the beams, everywhere,” said one Port Royale resident. Since the Surfside disaster, Florida has passed more stringent requirements for the re-certification of buildings, and the city of Miami Beach now requires landlords to pay for up to three months of resident housing if their buildings are found to be unsafe due to negligent maintenance.
→ Graph of the Day:
While the automobile market craters worldwide, down 15% to 16% in Europe and North America, the electric vehicle market continues to grow, and nowhere more so than in China. BYD, a Warren Buffet-backed Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer, reported the highest number of global EV sales last year and is poised to enter and potentially dominate the European market in the coming decade. The Chinese government, much like the American one, has put its weight behind its electric vehicle industry, though Chinese manufacturers face political hurdles that American manufacturers don’t—especially with Western governments worried that Chinese manufacturers will underprice their cars in order to corner the market. “If Europe wants to maintain the competitiveness of its car industry,” said one senior executive at a European green energy group, “the E.U. must introduce a strong industrial policy of its own to match the Chinese and Americans’ muscular support for EVs.”
→ The Greenland ice sheet lost 84 gross tons of ice this past year, marking the 26th year in a row of net loss, but “under current climate conditions,” according to Carbon Brief, “2021-22 can be considered a relatively favorable year for the ice sheet.” Much of the melting came in late July, during a few days of warm weather that saw some 60% of Greenland losing ice. “Most of the loss of ice occurs along the edge of the ice sheet, where independent observations also indicate that the ice is thinning,” Carbon Brief went on to note, while “high up in central Greenland, there is a small increase in the mass of the ice,” as this year saw an unusually large amount of snowfall.
Read More: https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-the-greenland-ice-sheet-fared-in-2022/
→ Video of the Day:
Celebrity financial talking head Jim Cramer, a longtime champion of Mark Zuckerberg and his pivot into the Metaverse, got one look at the disastrous quarterly reports from Facebook’s parent, Meta, this week and decided he had enough. “I made a mistake and I was wrong. I trusted this management team and that was ill advised,” he said on CNBC on Thursday, joining the ranks of market watchers aghast at how many billions of dollars Facebook has plowed into its unprofitable virtual reality projects that have seen the company’s stock lose two-thirds of its value in 2022. “I come out here and I try to help people everyday. And I failed to help people, and I own that.”
→ The average mortgage rate in the United States is above 7% for the first time in 20 years, which helped drive an 11% decrease in new home sales this past September and a 24% decrease when compared to the same time last year. The decrease comes as no surprise as both rising mortgage rates and surging home prices have made buying a home considerably more expensive in the past year. According to Realtor.com, in the current market, 20% down on a median-priced home would leave buyers with a monthly payment of $2,300, an 80% increase compared to last year, when that monthly payment would have been $1,300.
→ Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) is under federal investigation for the second time in less than seven years, as authorities look into Menendez’s dealings with a New Jersey-based halal-meat exporter. Details are still emerging, but the broad contours of the case, which seem to revolve around the exporter allegedly paying Menendez for favors, resemble the 2017 case federal prosecutors brought against Menendez, not only charging him with conspiracy, bribery, honest services fraud, and making false statements on his Senate financial disclosure forms, but also alleging that he received gifts from a local ophthalmologist in exchange for favors. That case ended in a mistrial.
→ Number of the Day: 75 terawatt-hours
The decline in hydropower output in Europe since September 2021—more than all the power consumed by Greece annually—as the world suffers through enormous droughts that are crippling global hydropower output. In China, output dropped 30% in just the past month, and the United States’ output is at a six-year low. In the U.S. West, which is currently facing its worst drought in 1,200 years, hydropower production to California has been halved. This is especially worrisome as hydropower had previously been considered one of the most plentiful and inexpensive green energies, generating more electricity than nuclear plants and more energy than wind and solar combined. “Worsening drought conditions as part of climate change will start to limit the availability and dispatchability of hydro reservoirs and lower the capacity factor in places like Southwest China and Western U.S., ” one energy consultant told Bloomberg. “You really have to think about the possibilities of extreme events, and that perhaps what you once thought was extreme might happen more frequently,” said another.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman, and Clayton Fox
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You Probably Bought That Baseball Card From Rick Probstein
EBay’s top sports card dealer is an Orthodox Jew from Delaware, who understands that memorabilia is equal parts business and alchemy
By Armin Rosen
It turns out the best view of the New York City skyline is from a miraculously unobstructed hillside above a public soccer field across the street from a cemetery in North Arlington, New Jersey, between Jersey City and Secaucus. The entire western edge of Manhattan gleams from within a vast and lusterless frame of swampland and sky. New York is so endless that even its drab industrial backend is packed with wonders. Above a thickening labyrinth of low concrete rectangles the size of football fields floats the brushstroke corporate logo of H Mart, its empire’s-worth of frozen mandu deliveries apparently coordinated from a midrise deep in an industrial park. And nearby, on an otherwise unlabeled door on the ground floor of an immense and windowless building, a single sheet of paper instructs consigners to ring once and only once, and then wait for someone to let them in. Beyond the door lies a fever dream.
I assume the people who arrive at the headquarters of Probstein123, eBay’s largest dealer of sports cards and other hot collectibles, aren’t allowed all that far past the threshold, and thus have an incomplete sense of what the operation really is. They drop off their consignment items, pick up some paperwork, and then hope the market favors them. Maybe they see the long rack of jerseys near the entrance, and wonder how many of them are autographed or game-worn, and maybe they glimpse the backroom, where a hive of assistants prepare the human race’s recent cultural residue for shipment. The luckiest visitors make it to the inner sanctum, to Rick Probstein’s office, a unique magnetic anomaly in the global material spectrum, and a place where potential treasures crowd every possible surface, cards and photos and documents and trophies and video games stuffed into bursting rows of boxes, half-arranged on crowded shelves, occluded within a half-dozen locked safes. The 1937 Heisman Trophy is perched on a high ledge, a monument to the ancient accomplishments of Yale’s Clint Frank. By the end of the hour I’ll have gazed upon the ominously tapering squiggles of Vladimir Putin’s signature, affixed to what Probstein described as “some Russian document,” a relic of living history which you’re apparently not allowed to sell on eBay anymore.
Only Probstein himself could possibly know the room’s entire contents. An hour in there raises questions that four hours in it probably wouldn’t answer, along with questions that just aren’t meant to be answered.
Some of these questions are practical. How did it all get here? Easy enough, in the case of a basketball encrusted in emerald and silver Swarovski crystal and safely ensconced atop a roll of tape, a keepsake of the Milwaukee Bucks’ 2021 NBA championship. “It’s one of a kind. They only made one,” Probstein explained with a notable lack of animation. “There’s certain things I see that I buy because I think they’ll be good investment pieces, or I just like them.” Later, calmly defining the appeal of three hyper-rare sealed editions of the very first Madden football computer games, on whose cover the former Raiders coach has a head full of natural hair and the visage not of football’s elder statesman but of a googly-eyed lunatic: ”I like having things that other people just don’t have.” And then later on, after showing off a bank withdrawal slip from the day before the 1929 stock market crash signed by Charles Solomon, Al Capone’s Jewish right-hand man, proof the mob knew the Wall Street plunge was coming, Probstein commented: “Anything that’s really historically oriented—that, I enjoy.”
The even more beguiling questions raised within Probstein’s office are metaphysical in nature. The largest single sale in Probstein123 history, he told me, was a “Tom Brady champ ticket,” the rarest of signed and serial-numbered rookie cards issued of the future seven-time Super Bowl winner. “They’re very condition sensitive, because of how they made the card,” Probstein said. “There’s nothing graded over a 9.” The one he sold had been given an 8.5. To my mild shock, there happened to be a somewhat lower-graded one in a cardboard box right in front of me.
The Brady champ ticket that I held in my hands, suspended within a seemingly blast-proof sheet of clear plastic and glass, was worth a measly half-million dollars, which is still seven years of untaxed median American household income. The young Brady half-steps out of a monochrome silver-blue background, teeth clenched, viper eyes trained on what might have been a crossing tight end, or maybe on his near-future glories. The right half of the card, dominated by a hockey ticket-shaped info box, looks absurd compared to the awesome image of this great man of history in mid self-creation. Where did my throat-tightening sense of the uncanny come from, that strange wave of exhilaration verging on fear surging as I held a cardboard rectangle worth orders of magnitude more than its weight in gold? I wondered, and still wonder: In the sense that every inanimate object has both a monetary value and a transcendent, intrinsic value, why was the paper in my hand worth anything at all?
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/sports/articles/rick-probstein-ebay-sports-card-dealer
Nice summary, guys.
Without Section 230 to hide behind, social media just becomes another publisher. Under US law, that means pretty broad speech protection, within well-defined limits (libel, defamation, incitement). And it would apply to the users of the platforms, not just to the platform itself. It promises to end the arbitrary jumble of Woke incoherence and repression now at work. E.g., Trump is banned from Twitter, but not Hamas or ISIS or neo-Nazis.