Clothes dirty, code clean!

Sanders said that the recent, brazen push by billionaires to influence Vice President Kamala Harris to dump Khan from her hypothetical presidential cabinet is yet another show of the corrupting influence of money in politics.

“Here’s why we have to overturn Citizens United & end Big Money in politics: Billionaire Reid Hoffman donated $7 million to the Harris campaign. Now, he wants her, as president, to fire an outstanding members [sic] of the Biden Administration, FTC Chair Lina Khan,” Sanders said in a post on social media on Thursday. “Not acceptable.”

In recent days, billionaires and large Democratic donors have been speaking out against Khan, who represents a threat to corporate interests.

LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman — a venture capitalist deeply enmeshed with corporate interests — came out publicly against Khan in an interview with CNN this week, likening Khan’s efforts to rein in corporate abuses as a “war” on corporate power. Hoffman, who campaign filings show has donated $7 million to Harris’s campaign, outright said he “would hope that Vice President Harris would replace her.”

[…]

Another billionaire, Barry Diller, chairman of holding company IAC, also brazenly announced that he would mount a lobbying effort against Khan for her crackdowns in an interview with CNBC. Diller has pledged to donate the maximum amount to Harris’s campaign, called Khan a “dope” and said that he would lobby Harris to dump Khan.

[…]

Many other similar missives from donors have come anonymously, with one donor telling The New York Times that Harris is open to the idea. The Harris campaign has said that it has not had discussions about Khan’s future so far — though Wall Street donors have been pushing Democrats to drop Khan for months.

[…]

The replacement of Khan on the cabinet would be a major loss for backers of the antitrust movement; her appointment by Biden as FTC chair was lauded as a significant step forward for the administration’s purported efforts to take on increasing corporate power.

Under Khan, the FTC has taken on some of the largest corporations in America, including tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, pharmaceutical giants like Amgen, and other giants like Kroger. It also created a new rule banning employers from including noncompete clauses in worker contracts, a move that the agency said would raise worker wages by $300 billion annually.

Coming from another country, I always wonder why the two utility companies I have here in the UK, Thames Water and Octopus Energy, would calculate an amount that they think I should pay monthly, instead of just charge whatever I used last month. To me, the latter way makes much more sense and is the standard practice in the countries I lived before.

The amount they calculated seems to generate either a huge credit balance, or a huge underestimation. Thames Water changed my monthly bill from £29 to £7, and then to £17 over the course of a year and a half. Octopus Energy built up more than £200 of a credit balance (not sure if it's a result of the UK government energy gift credit last winter), then set a minimal amount of £61 monthly. They say the purpose is to make sure that the credit balance would be always be more than £100. Okay...but why? If I want to save money, I'd go to a bank.

I could see that it might make sense if the measurement is not as easy or accurate, but come on, it's the 21st century and the meter shows me my energy usage by the hour, surely they can calculate the exact amount rather than pull a random number out of nowhere?

can be used as a bunker at war