Charles Campisi

Ted Cruz, 10 years ago today: “I want to tell you what I really think of Donald Trump. This man is a pathological liar...He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth…The man cannot tell the truth, but he combines it with being a narcissist at a level I don't think this country has ever seen”

Today in 1982: Jim Eisenreich, a rookie outfielder for the Twins hitting .309, left the game at Fenway in the middle of an inning. He suffered from twitching and it became uncontrollable when Boston fans continuously taunted him. When the team returned to Minnesota, Jim checked into a hospital for treatment. Doctors diagnosed him with Tourette's Syndrome. He tried several comebacks the next few years, but could never control his symptoms. He retired from baseball in 1984. Over the next two years, doctors found a way to treat his Tourette’s, and Jim returned to baseball in 1987 with Kansas City. He was named the MVP of the 1989 Royals, a team that featured Bo Jackson and George Brett. After his comeback, he went on to play 12 more years in the big leagues, and batted over .300 in 5 of those seasons. He now has a foundation that helps children with Tourette’s Syndrome. #MLB #baseball #Royals @TouretteAssn

One of the nastiest cases of “f*ck around and find out” just went down in Korean MMA Straight out of a movie 😳

My man @FlavorFlav out here dropping facts and bodies 🤣🎯💪

University of Maryland is freezing hiring and cutting at least 150 jobs while paying its football coach $6.1M, its men's basketball coach $3.4M, and still writing $1.2M checks to a coach who hasn't worked there in five years. The easy take is that coaches make too much, and the easy take is wrong IMO. Locksley's salary isn't the problem, Buzz Williams' salary isn't the problem, and Brenda Frese being one of the best coaches in women's basketball isn't the problem. In a market where the top rosters now cost $30 to $40M+ a year, those numbers are the cost of competing, and you need the right coaches to position you for long term success. The real problem is that athletic departments at flagship publics are operating on a revenue model built for decades ago, leaning on the same streams they have always relied on where most schools are operating at a deficit. Then they hit a 10% state funding cut and the only lever left is headcount in the academic buildings. This is the seam every athletic director in the country is sitting on right now, where the cost side has gone fully professional and the revenue side has not. The real answer isn't cutting custodians or capping coach pay, it's treating the athletic department like the commercial enterprise it already is, with the alumni base, the corporate relationships, and the brand inventory monetized at it's true value. Maryland has 400,000+ living alumni, one of the most valuable commercial assets the university owns. At most flagship publics, that base gets touched once a year for an annual giving ask and otherwise sits dormant. The athletic brand is the front door to all of it, and almost no school is monetizing it at anything close to its actual value. The coaches aren't bankrupting these schools, the missing revenue infrastructure is. Article link: foxbaltimore.com/news/local/uni…

What would a typical worker earn today if their wages had grown as fast as CEO pay over the past 50 years? Take a guess and watch this video to find out.

Just in case you thought people voted based on actual policy results: 77.7% of farmers voted for Trump in 2024.

This kid had 25 seconds to make 4 shots for $10,000… and he became a legend.

If you use TikTok, you should read this once. In October 2024, a court clerk in Kentucky uploaded the lawsuit against TikTok with the confidential sections still visible. NPR downloaded it before anyone caught the mistake. By the time the court resealed it, the internet had a copy. What was inside was TikTok's own engineers, in their own words, describing what their app does to a human brain. Not a critic's brain. Yours. Here is what they wrote down. — TikTok ran the math on how long it takes to develop "compulsive use" of the app. The number is 260 videos. With 8-second videos played in rapid-fire succession, that works out to roughly 35 minutes. The company's internal documents call this the compulsive-use threshold. — TikTok's own research describes what compulsive use causes: "diminished analytical ability, impaired memory, contextual reasoning, conversational depth, empathy, and heightened anxiety." That is not a quote from a critic. That is TikTok's own language, in its own internal documents. — A team inside the company called "TikTank" wrote in an internal report that compulsive use on the platform was "rampant." — After 30 minutes of continuous use in one sitting, the company's own documents state that users are placed into "filter bubbles" — algorithmic loops the user did not choose and cannot easily escape. Then there is the screen-time tool — the one TikTok publicly markets as proof it cares. — TikTok ran an experiment on the 60-minute screen-time prompt. Daily teen usage dropped from 108.5 minutes to 107. A reduction of 1.5 minutes. — Internally, the screen-time tool was not measured by whether it reduced screen time. Its top success metric, in writing, was "improving public trust in the TikTok platform via media coverage." — A project manager wrote in internal chat: "Our goal is not to reduce the time spent." Another employee added that the goal was "to contribute to daily active users and retention." — A TikTok executive approved the screen-time feature only on the condition that its impact on the company's "core metrics" was minimal. The lawsuit alleges the company planned to "revisit the design" if the tool ever reduced usage by more than 10%. The "Are you still scrolling?" break videos? An executive admitted in an internal meeting they were "useful talking points" for lawmakers, but "not altogether effective." Then there is the algorithm itself. — An internal report flagged that the For You feed was showing what the company called "a high volume of not attractive subjects." TikTok then retooled the algorithm to suppress those users. Kentucky authorities wrote: "By changing the TikTok algorithm to show fewer 'not attractive subjects' in the For You feed, [TikTok] took active steps to promote a narrow beauty norm even though it could negatively impact their Young Users." That sentence is the entire pitch of the platform, said out loud. — Internally, TikTok also acknowledged that its publicly reported content moderation metrics were "mostly misleading," because they only measured the content the company successfully moderated — never the content it missed. Now read those bullet points again as one continuous case. The company knows the addiction threshold. The company measured it. The company ranked engagement over mental health in writing. The company built a screen-time tool whose internal success metric was PR. The company suppressed people it deemed unattractive to keep you scrolling. The company called its own moderation numbers misleading. None of this is a leaked rumor. None of this is a journalist's interpretation. This is a court filing. The documents are TikTok's. The words are TikTok's. The math is TikTok's. The 14 state attorneys general who signed onto this lawsuit aren't fringe activists. They're a bipartisan coalition. Sources at the bottom: NPR, CNN, AP, Mashable, OPB, The Independent. All citing the same accidentally-unsealed Kentucky filing from October 11, 2024. The next time the company tells you it cares about your wellbeing — the screen-time prompts, the break videos, the safety features, the careful PR statements — remember that its own engineers wrote down, in court-admissible language, that the safeguards were never meant to work. The app is not broken. It is performing exactly as designed. You were the spec.

A history of the top marginal tax rates on the wealthiest Americans: 1940: 81% 1950: 84% 1960: 91% 1970: 72% 1980: 70% 1990: 28% 2000: 40% 2010: 35% For 50 years, corporate backed politicians in Congress have slashed taxes to line the pockets of their wealthy donors.

🇺🇸🚨BREAKING: MAGA influencer Craig Long — “MAGA to the core,” 560K TikTok followers, photographed with Trump — was just arrested in a human trafficking sting. He’s married. He frequently posted videos praising the sheriff who just arrested him. Sheriff Judd’s response at the press conference: “Well, there you go. You got arrested in a human trafficking sting. Influence that for a while.” Never stop connecting the dots.

Gas prices are at crazy levels--fire Obama!

Carvana made about $6,800 in profit on every car they sold last quarter. The typical used car dealer makes around $1,500. Carvana makes four times as much because the car is just the start of what they sell you. About 85 out of every 100 Carvana buyers finance the car through Carvana. At CarMax, their biggest competitor, the same number is closer to 40. When you click "finance" on Carvana's website, they write the loan at one interest rate, then sell that loan to a bank or pension fund within days. They keep the gap between what you pay and what the bank pays them. That gap, multiplied across hundreds of thousands of buyers, is how they print money. Then come the add-ons. An extended warranty. Coverage that pays off your loan if the car gets totaled. An insurance referral to Root, a digital car insurance company Carvana owns a piece of. Each one stacks on top of the same checkout. The car is the bait. The loan is the meal. Everything else is dessert. This is why selling them your car at a price that felt too generous still works for them. The money they make on that trade-in shows up later, after the next buyer signs. They clean it up, sell it to someone else, and that someone else signs another Carvana loan. This is also why they aren't going anywhere. In May 2022 they bought ADESA, a used car auction company, for $2.2 billion. ADESA came with 56 auction yards across the US. Now Carvana owns the auction yard, the body shop that fixes the car up, the trucks that deliver it, and the lender that funds the next buyer. Every step of that car's journey happens inside something Carvana owns. Three years ago none of this looked like it would survive. Carvana's stock hit $3.55 in December 2022. They had over $5.7 billion in debt. The market thought they were going bankrupt. Then Apollo, a giant private equity firm, led a deal with their lenders that cut $1.2 billion of debt and pushed the deadlines out to 2028. Last quarter they sold 187,000 cars and made $405 million in profit in 90 days. They joined the S&P 500 in December. Their market cap sits near $84 billion. Bigger than Ford. The whole business looks confusing if you think of Carvana as a car company. The math gets simple once you see them as a lender that happens to deliver cars.

You can save on the Apple TV subscription by just watching the Miami Grand Prix on a turnpike traffic cam

It’s 330am on July 5th, 1985, 18th inning of a game between the Mets/Braves. The Braves are down 11-10 and down to their last hitter. They send reliever Rick Camp, who had a batting average of .062. Beautiful call by legendary broadcaster, John Sterling. Rest easy, John

This is the best explanation of gerrymandering you will ever see: washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2…

France made this wastefulness illegal cause it’s cruel and only causes more waste issues. Any food market or restaurant over 400 square meters has to donate all their good unsold food to charities and are fined if they do anything like this. That law should be applied everywhere

John Marck refused to answer Senator @ChrisCoons's question of whether President Trump is eligible to run for president in 2028. This isn’t a trick question – it's in the Constitution. If you can’t say a president can’t serve a third term, you shouldn’t be a federal judge. 🚩

The Trump family is taking ownership stakes in multiple companies receiving government contracts. This is what a corrupt oligarchy looks like.

This exchange between @SenBlumenthal and Trump’s judicial nominees is utterly astounding. If you can watch this and still think this country isn’t falling into authoritarianism and fascism under Donald Trump, then you are not being honest with yourself.