Odds 'n Ends: 10/19/25
A long shitty week at work didn't derail my reading a lot of different things. These are observations and my takes
It has been a wild and woolly week at work. We did our quarterly planning and the budgets for our development effort are tight. That kept me pretty darned busy, but I still had time to feed my insatiable need to read the news.
And boy-howdy was there a lot of news.
Tech news
The CRM and platform juggernaut SalesForce (I will call it SFDC for "Sales Force dot com") gets a two-fer this week. Early this week, SFDC made news for its overt jockeying to provide aid and comfort to those fuckers at ICE and DHS. From the NY Times:
The Tech Bro-ligarchs have pivoted 100% all in on Trumpism. There are plenty of data points, but one that is stark is the apostasy of Marc Benihoff, the CEO of SalesForce. SalesForce (SFDC) was one of the first of a new generation of enterprise software companies. They weren't the first to sell a Software as a Service (SaaS) product, but they were the first to turn it into a wildly successful business.
This made Marc Benihoff fabulously wealthy, and being a true tycoon in San Francisco, he was a solid contributor and benefactor to the city, and its quirky Liberal politics. Hell, its headquarters is the tallest skyscraper in the city:
Anyhow, like many of his tech-bro peers, Covid seems to have broken Marc, and that caused him to go all in on Trumpism, and MAGA in general.
The latest fuckery is Sales Force pitching the Department of Homeland Security their AI tools to help them staff up ICE, the goons that whilst hiding behind their masks beat up on anyone who looks like they might be undocumented, where the Congress in their infinite wisdom decided to give ICE more money than the IDF to achieve their mission of being the biggest fuckers in the world.
Mr. Benioff’s support of the National Guard ran counter to the city’s famously liberal underpinnings and to his own reputation as a benefactor of progressive causes. San Francisco leaders, already outraged by those remarks, were upset to learn on Thursday that the homegrown company was trying to help Mr. Trump with his immigration crackdown.
The internal documents include a five-page memo sent on Aug. 26 that explained how Salesforce is best suited to help the agency with “talent acquisition” to achieve its goal “to nearly triple its work force by hiring 10,000 new officers and agents expeditiously.”
Fuck ICE, fuck Marc Benihoff, and fuck Salesforce! Read the article (click on the headline image above to get a gifted link)
Marc Benihoff is in this section twice this week, as the weekly Dealbook newsletter chornicles the pushback on Benihoff.
Seems that SFDC's glee to snarf up that ICE money hasn't been as well received as Benihoff expected...
For years, Marc Benioff, the C.E.O. of Salesforce, loomed over San Francisco as the city’s most generous donor, and a decidedly progressive one.
But Benioff’s growing embrace of President Trump underscores how some tech leaders have shifted to the right, a turn that is increasingly alienating some allies.
Ya think? I mean, have you tried to listen to the "All-In" podcast that is just these fucking guys (David Sacks and others) ball-fondle founders like Marc Andreesen (note to self: anyone names Mark who spells it with a 'c' is sketchy as fuck) who are all-in on building their billionaire compounds, and bitching about Democrats.
And then there's this fuckery:
A man who once was a paragon of the community in San Francisco, donating to just about any and all charitable causes, but who now mostly lives in his bunker in Hawaii, is now asking for Trump to send the National Guard to patrol the streets.
For years, San Franciscans considered him their benevolent, big-hearted billionaire.
While other tech titans built private rocket ships and scooped up super yachts, the Salesforce founder and chief executive Marc Benioff was known for spreading large sums of money around San Francisco, his hometown. He tended toward the liberal side of Silicon Valley politics. He lectured other business leaders about the importance of helping homeless people instead of complaining about them.
Yeah, that seems good, but then something happened. And while Benihoff is not unique, he is particularly galling.
Mr. Benioff’s shift serves as another example of a prominent Bay Area tech executive acceding to the Republican president’s view of the world. Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, gave Mr. Trump a 24-karat gold gift and heaped praise upon the president in an August visit to the Oval Office. Last month, at a White House dinner for tech barons, the OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman told Mr. Trump he was “a very refreshing change.”
To many Silicon Valley observers, such attempts to accommodate Mr. Trump are simply a matter of protecting tech businesses, especially after watching Mr. Trump threaten companies, individuals and institutions that have run afoul of him. And Salesforce has hundreds of software contracts with the federal government.
So, Trump is a "refreshing change". Fuck all of them, sideways with a rusty chainsaw.
Mr. Benioff said he liked that idea and thought that Guard soldiers could help reduce crime in the city.
“We don’t have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,” he said.
Uh, you know what can help hire more cops? Taxing these fucking guys a LOT more.
Crypto Corner
I was gonna toss this into the Tech segment, but it deserves it's own call out.
Last Friday (October 10th) über-fürher Trump bleated on his Temu social media site that he was going to raise tariffs on China an additional 100%. This is insane, but the cause was China throttling the export of rare earth metals and products[1].
Someone timed their entry and exit from the Crypto market eerily well. As Michel de Cryptadamus posted in the aftermath:
someone put in a huge bitcoin short position 30 minutes before trump announced his new china tariffs and made almost $200 million in under an hour.
see my post below for more on what is going to be an incredibly common new strategy for trading off insider government info.
Yes, you read that right. someone timed this so perfect that they created an account, bet $80M against the two major cryptocurrencies, and then moments after the second message by the government, exited their positions, pocketing a cool $192M dollars.
And that was perfectly legal in this Trump regime.
Then there's the general chaos of the meltdown in the Crypto exchanges in this episode of Trumpian pique. Molly White is the grand master of documenting the insanity around the crypto world, and her post this week is no exception:
Molly does her usual extremely well written and thoroughly researched posting.
At 4:50 pm on October 10, when traditional markets were closed, Donald Trump launched a new salvo in the simmering US–China trade war. Likely referring to China’s dramatically expanded restrictions on the rare earth minerals it almost singlehandedly controls, Trump posted that he would retaliate with an imminent 100% tariff increase on the country and new export controls on software. The timing muted the announcement’s impact on US equities markets and left Asian markets largely untouched, but crypto absorbed the full shock of the Trump-induced panic. The episode compressed a global liquidity crisis into less than an hour — a sign that the market most eager to be taken seriously may also be the one least equipped to handle real-world shocks.
Bitcoin shed more than $10,000 in a matter of minutes, with the flash crash wiping out at least 10% of its value instantly and pushing prices 15% below their morning levels. Traders holding $19 billion in leveraged positions were liquidated in a blink, and complaints erupted on social media as crypto platform glitches exacerbated losses.
She goes on to explain why this crash happened, but basically, unlike the regulated stock markets, there are no circuit breakers to halt trading to allow the players to regroup and think. No, the crypto exchanges are almost entirely automated, so when a run happens, well bummer.
But a major contributing factor is how much leverage is across the players. In the stock world, a risky trader may have 2-3x leverage. But in crypto, it is not uncommon for leverage to be between 10 and 100X their holdings. And when leverage is that high, well, the trigger happens, and your position is liquidated, and that can cause a death spiral. In a way, this is what caused FTX to unwind in 2022.
But the one other thing I will pull from this outstanding piece:
Some have accused centralized exchanges of minimizing their own losses at their customers’ expense by intentionally halting trading or withdrawals under the guise of “technical difficulties”. Indeed, it is suspiciously common for supposedly highly sophisticated centralized exchanges to suddenly experience glitches or announce urgent “maintenance” under far less volatile circumstances. Kris Marszalek, founder of the Crypto.com centralized exchange, was among the most prominent to repeat this allegation, tweeting that regulators should investigate rival exchanges to determine if any “slow[ed] down to a halt, effectively not allowing people to trade”.
Hmm, "regulators" should " ...investigate to determine if any slow[ed] down to a halt..." That's rich. Regulators? You fuckers lobbied hard to install Trump, and you explicitly didn't want any of those pesky regulations.
Go fuck yourselves you wankers.
Anyhow, just say no to Crypto, and do read Molly. She's outstanding!
Politics
It was a rich week of fuckery, from the Young Republicans basically confirming that they are doughy racist and antisemitic fuckwads, the Dem's holding firm on the shutdown (I am truly surprised they haven't caved yet).
But what I want to talk about is something that is really fucking bad. It looks like Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is going to fall. Let us recall that a prior ruling gutted the "pre-clearance" essentially a check on the racist fuckers in the south from fucking their black residents with rules meant to keep districts competitive.
But the latest case, brought in Louisiana, where 56% of the population is White, and 31% of the population is black. Louisiana has 6 congressional districts, 5 of their representatives are white, and only one is black.
This case actually was argued last year, but the justices couldn't come up with a rationale to do what they wanted, so they punted.
This time, they are ready to make it OK to Gerrymander to preserve white districts.
Anyhow, virtually 100% of the court observers who followed these arguments are certain that section 2 (and thus the entire VRA) will be reversed.
This ruling when it comes down will lead to a race in the southern states to redistrict, and will hand Republicans 19 seats. It should be known that in Louisiana, that White Democrats will not vote for a Black Democrat candidate, but will instead vote for a white Republican. How fucked up is that?
If the justices gut a key provision of the law, there could be a potential windfall for Republicans in Congress. An analysis by The New York Times estimated that the loss of those protections, found in Section 2 of the law, could open the way for redistricting that could net Republicans as many as a dozen seats. A study by two left-leaning voting rights groups — Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matters Fund — set the potential Republican gains at 19 seats. Either result could place the House in Republican control for a generation.
After the oral arguments concluded on Wednesday, Republicans kept their public comments to a minimum. The National Republican Congressional Committee and the Republican National Committee declined to weigh in on the political possibilities of a weakened Voting Rights Act, and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Yeah, you bet the R's are keeping mum. They know that gloating isn't gonna be helpful. No, I fear that this will allow the Republicans to halt the expected Democratic wave in 2026, and to retain control of the House.
No need to cheat, the Supreme's will make it clean and above board.
Fuck.
Music
Alas, I want to take a moment to mention the passing of Ace Frehley, the original guitarist from the mega-band Kiss. I was never a huge Kiss fan. I always felt that their early work was trite and simplistic. But Ace was a gifted guitar player (when he could put the bottle and the drugs down). His solo album titled: Origins Vol 1 is an outstanding collection of covers. This highlights his influences, and really some of his chops. Click that link to a playlist on Youtube of the album. It is worth listening to.
Just 74 years old, Ace leaves us too soon, but there exists a mountain of music he leaves behind.
That's it for this episode!
1 - Rare Earth elements sounds scary, but they are not particularly rare, but the processes and processing to them to make them useful for industrial applications (like batteries and magnets) are expensive, and non-trivial to scale. Starting in the 1990's we "let" China to start coralling this industry, in an effort to be more cost effective. Oopsies!
