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Comment by ashtonkem | Hacker News Reader

There seems to be a recent trend of formerly serious people going full crank. There isn't enough consistency in demographics for me to posit a useful theory, but it seems to be happening to a lot of people.

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Too much spent time getting needled on Twitter. People think their brains are immune to trolling.

This is it. I think the viral short form fast news hot takes format of Twitter (and its related cousins like Reddit) brings out the worst in people. It’s built to amplify the loud fringes who will engage in the worst ways at the drop of a hat. It ends up depressing all the users and turning them into reactionaries who can only tolerate an echo chamber of confirmation bias.

It's a good thing that the people still employed by large media corporations rather than eking out a living on substack haven't fallen prey to this deadly malaise.

I've read this a couple times and I'm not sure what it means.

The large media corporation NYT just reported out that RH had to draw down a $600B line of credit and take a $1B round of equity funding in large part because of capital requirements from clearinghouses. Taibbi's substack, on the other hand, seems to believe that jet planes will never fly again because of COVID.

It's a short comment. Or do you mean TFA? The only reference to Robbinhood therein is a link to a perfectly cromulent Bloomberg report of their by-now-well-known selective stock purchase limitations. There is no scandalous reference to Citadel. NYT's breathless 1 AM transcription of press releases doesn't seem to add much to the discussion either.

Of course, that's not what I was talking about. I'm just giggling at the idea that alone among USA journalists, Matt Taibbi has had his mind addled by the Twitter, as discussed upthread. How is that "Russia-gate" investigation going now?

[EDIT:] As I've observed before [0], I still don't get economics advice from Taibbi.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17244242

I'm having a hard time following any of this, but the NYT did actual reporting that refuted a story that has been circulating all day about hedge fund interests halting trading in GME, and Matt Taibbi really did just write a story that said Delta is functionally worthless because nobody is ever going to fly on an airliner again.

TFA is linked at the top of this page; please assume we can all read it. There is one reference to airlines, which reference includes several links to financial sources documenting (uncontroversially, one would like to assume) that they are harmed by massive drops in demand for air travel while they benefit from the receipt of hundreds of millions of dollars from the government. Taibbi takes Sorkin's comparison of GameStop and Delta seriously, and invites attentive readers to ask themselves how different one firm facing reduced demand is from some other firm facing reduced demand.

Regurgitating a press release is not "actual reporting". We won't know what actually happened between RH and Citadel for some time, if ever. It's misleading to keep mentioning this in this context, because TFA doesn't address Citadel at all.

ISTR you have described RH as "a force for evil". I didn't disagree with you, but it's disappointing that your famous animus for one of the rare decent journalists in USA has preempted that judgment. Every time Taibbi is linked on HN you're around to slag him. You seem more opposed to Taibbi than you are to DNSSEC. When you read Taibbi you imagine things that are not in the text. What did he ever do to you? Did he cut you off in traffic? Did he steal your dog? What gives?

He's bad at his job. He's a good writer, but he isn't a decent journalist. Technical finance reporters have made a sport out of pointing out all the times he's embarrassed himself on stories, from TARP to the NYC parking meter story. This is yet another example.

Taibbi is awesome at his job and an exceptional journalist.

The intentional misreading of the latest piece (vis-a-vis Airline comments) seems very odd.

You should create some competition for him with your own writings to demonstrate how mistaken my opinion is on this matter.

A plain reading of the five sentences in which airlines are discussed, in response to Sorkin's previous comparison of GameStop with Delta, makes clear that the flaw you see is an imagined one. Your dredging up of decade-old complaints proves rather than undermines the observations above of your mysterious animus for Taibbi. NYC seems never to have sold off its parking meters at all, since everything on that topic comes from 2012. [0] That being the case, one could believe the claims of Bloomberg apologists that "it wouldn't have been like Chicago", but that isn't obviously true.

Those who don't see TARP as v1.0 and CARES as v2.0 of a giant transfer of wealth from those who can't afford lobbyists to those who can, simply aren't paying attention. One shudders to contemplate the calamity scheduled to justify v3.0.

[0] https://reason.org/commentary/new-york-parking-privatization...

> jet planes will never fly again because of COVID.

FTA:

"How much does Sorkin think his exalted Delta Airlines would be worth now, if the Fed hadn’t stopped its death plunge last March? How much would any of the airlines be worth in the Covid age, with their fleets of mothballed jets?"

I believe it is true that the Feds kept Delta and other airlines afloat. Regarding the "Covid age" — could be simply 2020-2021. Or who knows? Bill Gates and others have suggested that 50% or more of business travel will never return.

If you crank sufficiently, you achieve unserious status and critics no longer engage on detailed rebuttals. And then your fans can say, see, they just say he's unserious without providing a point by point explanation, so he must be right.

Really?

Can you define "crank" in the verb form you seem to be using it in here?

Its money and echo chambers. You just need a small audience who will fund your patreon, buy your merch, and look at your ads. Being in that environment creates an echo chamber which feeds back into selecting for a specific audience.

So like NYT but smaller?

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