Trump Media and Technology Group, which owns Truth Social, said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that the company generated just over $4 million in revenue last year, including less than $1 million in the last quarter.
....The company has declined to share performance indicators like those common across the tech industry, such as its number of active users, and said it may continue to withhold such figures. Focusing on those numbers, the company said, “might not align with the best interests” of Trump Media or its shareholders.
Oh come on. It's true that revenue in Q4 declined to $750 thousand (yes, thousand):
But Truth Social revenue has always been minuscule and that didn't really change in any significant way. Either you believe that Trump will become president and cause Truth Social to skyrocket or you don't. Financial results hardly enter the picture.
Of course, maybe investors were reacting to the statement that Truth Social won't release user numbers because it "might not align with the best interests" of the shareholders. I'll just bet it wouldn't. This is basically an admission that even the crazy people who are buying into this scam would be taken aback if they learned just how few active users Truth Social has.
POSTSCRIPT: All the folks behind Truth Social's public offering knew weeks ago that their latest results were lousy. But they carefully chose to complete the offering a few days before they had to tell anyone. Whether that's clever or illegal is something for the SEC to decide, I suppose.
This is a meerket peering out from its hidey hole at the LA Zoo. They're cute little things, but I suppose they'd rip your arms off if you tried to touch one, wouldn't they?
March 3, 2024 — Los Angeles Zoo, Los Angeles, California
Every month I get a big pile of blood tests. Here's one of them:
This result happens to be from May 26, 2020. A year later the "Non Black" designation suddenly disappeared.
Why? Well, there's now a note that says "GFR estimate is by the CKD-EPI 2021 equation." I never noticed that before, but today Atrios points to an AP article that explains a change to the standard measurement of GFR:
At issue is a once widely used test that overestimated how well Black people’s kidneys were functioning, making them look healthier than they really were — all because of an automated formula that calculated results for Black and non-Black patients differently. That race-based equation could delay diagnosis of organ failure and evaluation for a transplant, exacerbating other disparities that already make Black patients more at risk of needing a new kidney but less likely to get one.
A few years ago, the National Kidney Foundation and American Society of Nephrology prodded laboratories to switch to race-free equations in calculating kidney function. Then the U.S. organ transplant network ordered hospitals to use only race-neutral test results in adding new patients to the kidney waiting list.
This story leaves out a few things. First, it's true that an old GFR test used a racial adjustment that increased Black scores by 21% compared to whites. In 2009 some researchers reported on a new GFR test called CKD-EPI, but they didn't conclude that the old racial adjustment was wrong. They simply found that it should be reduced slightly from 1.21 to 1.16.
A later study with a larger sample concluded that CKD-EPI was a better predictor for practically everything compared to the old test, including kidney disease in Black patients.
But the race adjustment was still there, so a 2021 study looked at what would happen if it was removed entirely. After all, as the study authors said, "race in eGFR equations is a social and not a biologic construct." They set out to prove this, and found, unsurprisingly, that if you choose a single adjustment value in the middle for both Black and white patients, you'll end up pulling the Black results down and the white results up. This was said to be "more accurate" even though it actually performed slightly worse overall.
A 2021 study in Europe that had a large Black cohort agreed. It found that "the accuracy of the 2021 CKD-EPI equation was the lowest" of the ones tested. The authors concluded that a good argument for adopting the new test was to align Europe with the US. However, a good argument for not adopting it was that "the new equation does not perform better, but worse."
But the National Kidney Foundation had already forged ahead with a fresh look at GFR testing. Initially they were cautious:
When announcing the establishment of the task force eight months ago, NKF and ASN affirmed that race is a social, not a biological, construct, but recognized that simply dropping the race modifier could introduce different biases and disparities.
We recommend immediate implementation of the CKD-EPI creatinine equation refit without the race variable in all laboratories in the United States because (1) it does not include race in the calculation and reporting, (2) included diversity in its development, (3) is immediately available to all laboratories in the United States, (4) and has acceptable performance characteristics and potential consequences that do not disproportionately affect any one group of individuals.
It's notable that nothing in this statement suggests the race-free version of the test is actually more accurate. However, the new test does accomplish what it set out to do: it now overestimates kidney disease in Black people and underestimates it in white people. This means Black patients will get more kidneys and white patients will get fewer. It's very hard to conclude from the evidence that anything else was ever the goal here.
Do you see the cheat? This is year-by-year growth, not overall growth since the NSC started collecting data. Here's the real growth:
There was a spike in 2023, but it was only a recovery from the huge decline during the pandemic. Enrollment today is 3% higher than it was before the pandemic—which is fine, but hardly evidence of Gen Z becoming the "toolbelt generation."
We need a new rule: you have to wait for at least two or three years of data before you declare something a trend. Come on.
Why does Easter move around? The short answer is that the Bible suggests Jesus was resurrected on the third day after Passover, and since Passover moves around, so does Easter.
Slightly longer answer: In 325 AD, the Council of Nicaea decided that the leap months in the Hebrew calendar made it unreliable, so they decreed a new calculation that placed Easter at the same general time but without any reference to Passover: the first full moon of spring. Christians had already decided Easter should be on Sunday, which gives us the modern dating: Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox.
Fine. But still: why? Wouldn't it make more sense to calculate the date of Passover in the year of the crucifixion, add two days, and then use that going forward? This date is a matter of disputation, but surely some ancient council could have ordered a scholarly investigation and then just decreed something? April 5th seems most likely, and if you insist on Sunday it would be the first Sunday on or after April 5. Easter would still move around a bit, but no more than a holiday affected by the Monday Holiday Bill.
I'm unable to find an explanation for this historical oddity. And odd it is, since calculating the date of Easter and proclaiming it throughout the Roman Empire every year was a real problem for the early church. A fixed date would have saved everyone a lot of trouble.
The origins of the Easter Bunny and Easter eggs are similarly fuzzy. Eggs are part of the Seder plate in Jewish tradition, and the early Christian church may have adopted them thanks to the link between Passover and the resurrection. Alternatively, they originated for unknown reasons in the Middle East and then migrated to Europe. Then again, it might be only that eggs are a sign of spring and fertility and became associated with Easter that way. There's also a theory that they became associated with Easter because they were forbidden during Lent. Take your pick.
The bunny came later. Back in the Dark Ages the Saxons worshipped a fertility goddess named Eostre and called April Eosturmonath. Linguistically, this is where the English word Easter originates. Eoster may have been symbolized by a hare, which then became associated with Easter itself. Or maybe not. In any case, by the Renaissance German Lutherans had adopted a story told to children that the hare laid the eggs, and a nest was needed for them. Thus was born the Easter basket filled with nesting material and colorful eggs. Over time the hare became a rabbit and that's where we are today.
This is not Eostre. It is "Madonna of the Rabbit" by Titian from 1530. Maybe that's where the Easter Bunny comes from?
There's an ancient online controversy about how best to respond to manufactured outrage like this. One camp says we should ignore it. The folks who produce this stuff just want attention, so by responding we're taking the bait. The other camp says that it's not enough for only political junkies to see this stuff. The broad public needs to see it in its raw form, and by burying it we let the lunatic right off the hook.
I've gone back and forth about this, but these days I lean toward engaging with it. An awful lot of non-MAGA voters seem to believe that Trump has moderated over the past few years, which just isn't true. Not in policy and not in rhetoric. It's hard to get people excited about policy, but what if Trump's tirades were read every day on the evening news? Would swing voters start to get the message?
More generally, lefty Twitter has lately been discussing the state of conservative opinion chatterers. The current shape of things is that mainstream TV and print outlets feature plenty of "Never Trump" Republicans but not many MAGA Republicans. But MAGA Republicans represent a big chunk of the country. Shouldn't they be represented?
The problem with this is obvious: mainstream outlets don't want people who are going to yell and scream and spout endless lies. They want sober, intelligent analysts. But it's hard to find MAGA partisans who fit this description.
Is it time to give up on this? Maybe middle America needs to be exposed to raw, violent, dimwitted MAGA sewage, if that represents the real world. Or would this just give the lunatics the attention they crave?
It's an endless debate and there's still no good answer.
The incarceration rate of the Black male community has dropped in half since 2001, from 3.3% to 1.6%. That's substantial, but even the 2022 number is largely the result of a lot of inertia: men who were imprisoned years ago with long sentences remain in prison today.
But as Rick Nevin reports, the story is far better among young Black men, who are mostly incarcerated because they were admitted recently. Among the youngest Black men, the incarceration rate has plummeted by nearly 90%, from 2.9% to 0.3%:
Incarceration rates are higher for men in their 20s, but the decline in their incarceration rate has been nearly has impressive: about 70% since 2001.
As older men age out of their sentences and are released, we should expect the incarceration rate of Black men overall to continue dropping, probably to well under 1%.
The reason for the steep drop in incarceration is twofold. First, crime rates have fallen dramatically since their peak in 1991, leading to lower arrest and incarceration rates. Second, less punitive treatment of nonviolent drug offenses has produced a lower overall incarceration rate. In 2001, about 21% of all prisoners were being held on drug convictions. By 2022 that had dropped to 12%.
POSTSCRIPT: The total prison population in the US has dropped by nearly a quarter in just the past decade:
This decrease comes in the face of a still rising overall population. The incarceration rate in the US has dropped by more than a quarter.
What's really going on with aid deliveries into Gaza? Let's start with two numbers that everyone seems to agree on:
Before the war, about 500 trucks entered Gaza daily. Those weren't all food and medicine, of course, but that much capacity existed.
After the war started, the number of aid trucks started very low and has increased gradually but erratically since then. In March, about 150 aid trucks entered daily. .
So about 150 trucks get in each day, but here's the question that prompted me to look into this: How many trucks try to enter Gaza? From NBC News:
“They limit the number of trucks that can pass,” Mohamed Nossair, head of operations at the Egyptian Red Crescent, said of Israeli officials.... Unclear restrictions imposed by Israel have resulted in an average of 20 to 25 trucks turned away every day, about a fifth of the number that end up crossing into Gaza, he said.
This suggests that only 170 trucks are available for Gaza even if Israel lets everything through. But then there's this from Reuters:
In mid-March, a line of trucks stretched for 3 kilometers along a desert road near a crossing point from Israel into the Gaza Strip.... About 50 kilometers from Gaza, more aid trucks — some 2,400 in total — were sitting idle this month in the Egyptian city of Al Arish, according to an Egyptian Red Crescent official.
Three kilometers is not as much as it sounds like. Maybe 400 trucks? Still, it suggests that more than 170 trucks are ready and waiting if Israel would let them in. Maybe.
We need to start with a serious number of trucks going in and we need to build up to 100 trucks a day," the UN's Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths told CNN Europe.
We've been over 100 trucks per day for months, but apparently that's nowhere near enough. Recent estimates put Gaza's needs at about 300 trucks per day. Why? Did the UN simply miscalculate? Or, as Israel alleges, is it because Hamas steals huge amounts of food and medical aid?
In any case, are 300 truckfuls of aid even available? This is what I'm most curious about but I can't find anything reliable about it. Transit capacity is a little easier: On a few occasions as many as 240 trucks have entered Gaza in a single day, which means that Israel is capable of inspecting and approving that many. This is pretty close to what's needed.
In southern Gaza, at least, this means that if the aid is available and Hamas doesn't steal it and Israel bestirs itself to perform at a level it's proven it can maintain, there should be roughly enough aid to go around. Certainly enough to stay far away from famine.
It's a different story in the north. Southern Gaza is dangerous, but if aid is available and Israel lets it through, it can reach refugees in Rafah and elsewhere. The route into northern Gaza, by contrast, is so dangerous that very few aid agencies are willing to risk making deliveries. This is a far more difficult problem, and probably requires Israeli military escorts to solve it. This might be in the works, but time will tell.
I guess if these words start showing up on my blog you'll know that I've died and been replaced by a robot. Sort of like all those books that Tom Clancy keeps writing.
I guess all's fair in love and politics, but the Trump campaign blasted Joe Biden today for his "years-long assault on the Christian faith." Why? Because he "formally proclaimed Easter Sunday as 'Trans Day of Visibility.'" The page with the proclamation even has an Easter bunny logo at the top, proving that they're deliberately targeting Easter.
FFS:
Every page on the White House site has an Easter bunny logo right now.
Trans Day of Visibility, whatever you think of it, is an international celebration created 15 years ago. It's always on March 31, and it's just a coincidence that Easter happens to be on the same day this year. It happened last in 2013 and will happen again in 2086.¹
Tomorrow also happens to be César Chávez Day, Freedom Day (Malta), King Nangklao Memorial Day (Thailand), Thomas Mundy Peterson Day (New Jersey), Transfer Day (US Virgin Islands), and World Backup Day.²
Naturally Fox News is all over this. Brian Stelter has the whole nauseating story here.
¹Oddly, my source for this is the US Census Bureau. I don't know why the Census Bureau was given the job of keeping track of Easter.
²Seriously: "World Backup Day is a commemorative date celebrated annually by the backup industry and tech industry all over the world.... Every year on March 31, companies tweet and have podcasts about the importance of backing up data to prevent data loss. On the website WorldBackupDay.com people can make a pledge in ten languages on various social media channels about the importance of backing up their data."
Why the big decline? The Washington Post explains:
But Truth Social revenue has always been minuscule and that didn't really change in any significant way. Either you believe that Trump will become president and cause Truth Social to skyrocket or you don't. Financial results hardly enter the picture.
