I’ll have a review later, but the theater concession stand food gets a thumbs down.
Feeling very queasy.
Month: June 2013
OK, I’m Impressed With this Vid of the PAK-FA
Here is a video of the Russian PAK-FA in flight test.
It appears to be in a flat spin that it recovers from fairly easily.
It looks like the “stinger” between the engines has been slightly modified, probably to accommodate an anti-spin chute.
I think that this video highlights a difference between Russian and US philosophies on stealthy airframes.
Specifically, the US focuses a lot more on the stealth aspects, while the Russians are more focused on outright aerodynamic performance.
An example of this is the cooling arrangements.
The US F-22 and F-35 are constructed much like thermos bottles, with the cooling being accomplished by dumping heat the fuel before it is burnt.
It makes for an airframe free of radar reflectors that might be created by cooling scoops, but it also means that about 10% of the fuel on an aircraft is unusable, because it needs to stay on the aircraft as a heat sink.
By the comparison, the PAK-FA prototypes (This may change with the final model) seem to have a fair numbers of inlets and exhausts.
I am not sure how this will all play out, though I think that the Russian aircraft will be easier for a low tech military to maintain, though that has been the case since WWII.
H/t The DEW Line
Here is No Surprise
In a lawsuit, Bank of America* has been accused of giving bonuses to staff for foreclosing on people:
Bank of America Corp. (BAC), the second-biggest U.S. lender, rewarded staff with cash bonuses and gift cards for meeting quotas tied to sending distressed homeowners into foreclosure, former employees said in court documents.
Mortgage workers falsified records and were told to delay U.S. loan-assistance applications by requesting paperwork that the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank had already received, according to statements from ex-employees filed last week in federal court in Boston. The lender improperly disqualified applicants to the Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, according to a May 23 statement from Simone Gordon, a loss-mitigation specialist who left the company in 2012.
“We were regularly drilled that it was our job to maximize fees for the bank by fostering and extending delay of the HAMP modification process by any means we could,” Gordon said. Managers instructed staff to “delay modifications by telling homeowners who called in that their documents were ‘under review,’ when in fact, there had been no review,” she said.Bank of America, which has spent more than $45 billion to settle claims tied to its 2008 takeover of Countrywide Financial Corp., is being sued by homeowners who didn’t receive permanent loan modifications after making payments under trial programs, according to court papers. Statements from seven former loan employees were included in a filing last week as part of plaintiffs’ attempt to gain class-action status. The lender has denied the allegations.
(Emphasis mine)
Seriously, why we haven’t put banksters in jail, particularly, the former CEO of Countrywide, Angelo Mozilo, who created the mess that BoA is trying to sweep under the carpet?
Also, why did the Obama administration set up HAMP as a Petri dish for mortgage servicer abuses?†
*Full disclosure, it is my bank.
†Actually, we know why. Geithner‡ wanted to let the banksters to cheat homeowners so as to protect the bank.
‡Laying it all at Geithner’s feet is not completely fair, because as I often say, the Cossacks work for the Czar.
Limited Disclosure of FISA Warrants to Internet Firms Approved
Facebook and Microsoft have gotten permission to release total numbers of government requests for data, which both Facebook and Twitter have lambasted as inadequate.
It’s clear to me that this permission is intended more to conceal than reveal:
Facebook and Microsoft announced Friday that the U.S. government is allowing them to disclose U.S. national security-related requests they received, but lumped together with other law enforcement requests. Google pushed back against those conditions.
“Since this story was first reported, we’ve been in discussions with U.S. national security authorities urging them to allow more transparency and flexibility around national security-related orders we are required to comply with,” Ted Ullyot, Facebook’s general counsel, wrote in a blog post.
“We’re pleased that as a result of our discussions, we can now include in a transparency report all U.S. national security-related requests (including FISA as well as National Security Letters) — which until now no company has been permitted to do.”
The social-networking company reported that for the six months ending December 31, it had received between 9,000 and 10,000 user data requests from U.S. local, state and federal governments, including national security-related requests, Ullyot said. Between 18,000 and 19,000 Facebook user accounts were affected by the requests, he said.
This is quite literally the least the state security apparatus could approve, something which Google notes:
We have always believed that it’s important to differentiate between different types of government requests,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “We already publish criminal requests separately from National Security Letters. Lumping the two categories together would be a step back for users. Our request to the government is clear: to be able to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, separately.
It’s clear that this is an attempt to forestall transparency, and instead create the appearance of transparency, by the intelligence agencies and the Department of Justice.
It’s good news, because it’s clear that they, and the Obama administration, is in damage control mode, which would indicate that Google and Twitter will eventually be allowed greater disclosure.
At least, that is what I hope.
This Comes as No Surprise
Utilities are discovering that nuclear power plants are not economically viable:
The nuclear industry is wrestling with that question as it tries to determine whether problems at reactors, all designed in the 1960s and 1970s, are middle-aged aches and pains or end-of-life crises.
This year, utilities have announced the retirement of four reactors, bringing the number remaining in the United States to 100. Three had expensive mechanical problems but one, Kewaunee in Wisconsin, was running well, and its owner, Dominion, had secured permission to run it an additional 20 years. But it was losing money, because of the low wholesale price of electricity.
“That’s the one that’s probably most ominous,” said Peter A. Bradford, a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and a former head of the Public Service Commission in New York. “It’s as much a function of the cost of the alternatives as it is the reactor itself.”
While the other three, San Onofre 2 and 3 near San Diego and Crystal River 3 in Florida, faced expensive repair bills because of botched maintenance projects, “Kewaunee not only didn’t have a major screw-up in repair work, it didn’t even seem to be confronting a major capital investment,” he said.
This is a turnaround because until recently, the life expectancy of reactors was growing. When the Nuclear Regulatory Commission began routinely authorizing reactors to run 20 years beyond their initial 40-year licenses, people in the electricity business began thinking that 60 was the new 40. But after the last few weeks, 40 is looking old again, at least in reactor years, with implications for the power plants still running, and for several new ones being built.
………
Even if the economics do not result in retirements, they do mean setbacks. Exelon, the nation’s largest nuclear operator, set out a few years ago to invest $2.3 billion in its existing reactors and raise their generating capacity by 1,300 megawatts, a little more than one new reactor would generate. But after completing about a quarter of the plan, it dropped the rest, and said it would pay its suppliers $100 million in penalties for the cancellation, because the economics were no longer favorable.
The economics of nuclear power were never favorable.
When you look at the subsidies involved in mining, fuel processing, shipping, and in the disposal of the waste, nuclear power is arguably the only industry in the United States more heavily subsidized than agriculture, and it’s still not viable.
I Have Got to Read the Works Of Iain Banks
If this line from one of his last interviews is any indication of his mastery of the English language:
He learned of Thatcher’s death – which would have kept his own news off the front pages had it been the same day, he mused – on his honeymoon after inviting his partner, Adele Hartley, “to do me the honour of becoming my widow”.
“Then I realised I was celebrating the death of a human being, no matter how vile she was. And there was nothing symbolic about her death, because her baleful influence on British politics remains undiminished. Squeeze practically any Tory, any Blairite, and any Lib Dem of the Orange Book persuasion, and it’s the same poisonous Thatcherite pus that comes oozing out of all of them.”
(Emphasis mine)
I have to check out his work.
When the Spys Have Lost John le Carré………
He actually makes a point that has been missed in the whole NSA revelations controversy,
Carré gets to the heart of the matter when he notes that much of the problem is that our government is increasingly serving the state security apparatus when it should be the other way around:
In my recent novel A Delicate Truth, a retired and patently decent British foreign servant accuses his old employers of being party to a Whitehall coverup, and for his pains is promptly threatened with the secret courts. Yet amid all the comment that my novel briefly provoked, this particular episode attracted no attention.
What are secret courts? Why do we need them? To protect Britain’s special relationship with the United States, we are officially told; to protect the credibility and integrity of our intelligence services. Never mind that for decades we have handled security-sensitive cases by clearing the court whenever necessary, and allowing our secret servants to withhold their names and testify from behind screens, real or virtual: now, all of a sudden, the credibility and integrity of our intelligence services are at stake, and need urgent and draconian protection.
Never mind the credibility and integrity of parliament and centuries of British justice: our spies come first. And remember, these aren’t criminal courts. These are civil courts where anyone attempting to obtain redress for a real or perceived injustice perpetrated against him by British or American secret agencies must have his claims heard and dealt with in secret.
This is the core of the problem.
Our intelligence agencies are driving national policy on the basis of their own self interests, and the interests of the rest of society suffer as a result.
Tekeli Li!!!
Obama 2013 vs. Biden 2006
Biden debunks every single one of Obama’s talking points:
It’s a Week for Good Court Rulings
This one is a ruling that an unpaid internship must be an educational experience for the benefit of the intern, not an unpaid job:
Yesterday, a federal judge issued the first major ruling on the illegality of unpaid internships in recent years, challenging a rise in corporate reliance on uncompensated workers.
Judge William H. Pauley III ruled that Fox Searchlight Pictures violated U.S. and New York minimum wage laws by not paying two production interns for work done on the set of the movie “Black Swan.”
Pauley ruled that the interns had essentially completed the work of paid employees – organizing filing cabinets, making photocopies, taking lunch orders, answering phones – and derived little educational benefit from the program, one of the criteria for unpaid internships under federal law. Pauley also ruled that the plaintiffs were employees and thus protected by minimum wage laws.
“I hope this sends a shockwave through employers who think, ‘If I call someone an intern, I don’t have to pay them,’” Eric Glatt, one of the plaintiffs, told ProPublica. “Secondarily, it should send a signal to colleges and universities who are rubber-stamping this flow of free labor into the marketplace.”
It should also be noted that unpaid internships serve to keep poor people out numerous professions, because they cannot afford to work for free.
Quote of the Day
From the always informative Charlie Savage:
You think any of these guys looked at what happened in 2008 and thought, “Boy, those guys really were crooks and bought the country a helluva catastrophe. We should learn from them and not do that ourselves.” Nope, I guarantee you the first thoughts among the people who thought up this scam for the insurance companies was, “Holy crap, look at the dough those guys made!” And I guarantee you those same people all got raises. The upper levels of American capitalism is so rotten with amorality, so utterly devoid of any conventional sense of ethics, let alone social responsibility, that it hardly seems worth pointing it out any more. Congratulations to America’s graduate schools of business. You have bred three generations of vampires to feed on the rest of us. It’s as though every medical school in the country adopted the basic approach to thoracic surgery of Sweeney Todd and married it to the economic philosophy of Bialystock And Bloom.
He is talking about the insurance industry, which has recently been discovered to have been using complex accounting tricks to boost their apparent assets and revenue.
If the Banksters had been sent to a “federal pound me in the ass prison,” these insurance executives would have thought twice before engaging in accounting fraud.
Won the Election and Should Have Been President
The National Security Agency’s blanket collection of US citizens’ phone records was “not really the American way”, Al Gore said on Friday, declaring that he believed the practice to be unlawful.
In his most expansive comments to date on the NSA revelations, the former vice-president was unsparing in his criticism of the surveillance apparatus, telling the Guardian security considerations should never overwhelm the basic rights of American citizens.
He also urged Barack Obama and Congress to review and amend the laws under which the NSA operated.
“I quite understand the viewpoint that many have expressed that they are fine with it and they just want to be safe but that is not really the American way,” Gore said in a telephone interview. “Benjamin Franklin famously wrote that those who would give up essential liberty to try to gain some temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
There are some people who leave politics, and just cash in as a lobbyist (Evan Bayh comes to mind), and there are those who find freedom and grow.
Al Gore is one of the latter.
Let me offer a hearty f%$# you to the corrupt Supreme Court justices who mad the Bush administration happen.
Would You Cut Someone’s Throat for Money
The hed is instructive, “Chicago Hospital Accused of Cutting Throats for $160,000.”
When people talk about how the private sector solves everything, just remember this story:
A surgeon at Chicago’s Sacred Heart Hospital cut a hole in Earl Nattee’s throat on Jan. 3, the day before he died. It’s not clear why.
The medical file contained no explanation of the need for the procedure, called a tracheotomy, according to a state and federal inspection report that quotes Sacred Heart’s chief nursing officer as saying it happened “out of the blue.” Tracheotomies are typically used to open an air passage directly to the windpipe for patients who can’t breathe otherwise.
Now, amid a federal investigation into allegations of unneeded tracheotomies at the hospital, Nattee’s daughter, Antoinette Hayes, wonders whether her father was a pawn in what an FBI agent called a scheme to defraud Medicare and Medicaid.
“My daddy said, ‘They’re killing me,’” Hayes recalled, in reference to the care he received at the hospital.
Based in part on surreptitious tape recordings, an FBI affidavit lays out allegations that a Sacred Heart pulmonologist kept patients too sedated to breathe on their own, then ordered unneeded tracheotomies for them — enabling the for-profit hospital to reap revenue of as much as $160,000 per case.
They have witnesses who wore wires, and a number of doctors, as well as the CEO of the for profit (notwithstanding the Catholic hospital sounding name) hospital.
There is a reason why governments need to aggressively regulate, or operate, critical services, because incentives to produce good behavior are either ineffective, or more expensive than explicit regulation.
H/t JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
The Word for This is Desperation………
Yes, the NSA is now saying that it will provide information about how it’s rapacious thirst for our personal data stopped some terrorists at some point:
The National Security Agency (NSA) plans to release details of terrorist attacks thwarted by its controversial bulk surveillance of Americans’ communications data, a senior US senator said on Thursday.
Senator Dianne Feinstein (Democrat, California), the chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, said the NSA director, General Keith Alexander, would provide “the cases where this [surveillance] has stopped a terrorist attack, both here and in other places” as early as Monday.
Here is the important quote:
But the FBI director, Robert Mueller, forcefully defended the programs on Thursday to the House judiciary committee by saying the broad surveillance could have foiled the 9/11 attacks and averted “another Boston”.
But this program has been going on for years, and Boston happened. Why didn’t it do it then?
They are trying to blow smoke up our ass.
SCOTUS Strikes Down Human Gene Patents
In yet another smack down to the increasingly patent crazy United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Patent Court), the Supreme Court has ruled that the contents of the human genome are a discovery, not an invention, and so they cannot be patented:
Pronouncing what may seem like a patent truism, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Thursday that biotech researchers have to create something to get monopoly protection to study and apply the phenomenon. Because Myriad Genetics, Inc., “did not create anything,” the Court struck down its patent on isolating human genes from the bloodstream, unchanged from their natural form. Because Myriad did create a synthetic form of the genes, however, that could be eligible for a patent, the Court concluded.
The decision was a major blow to a company that believed it had a right to be the sole user and analyst of two human genes, mutations in which show a high risk, for women found to have them in their blood, of breast and ovarian cancer. But the ruling will give medical and scientific researchers, and family doctors, greater opportunity to help women patients discover their potential vulnerability to those types of cancer.
………
The scientific and legal key to the Court’s denial of patent protection to isolated, natural forms of DNA were these sentences: “It is undisputed that Myriad did not create or alter any of the genetic information encoded in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. The location and order of the nucleotides existed in nature before Myriad found them. Nor did Myriad create or alter the genetic structure of DNA.”
While that was not disputed, because the legal controversy focused rather on what Myriad claimed it did to locate and then isolate the forms of genetic DNA, those agreed-upon factors were enough to convince the Court that “Myriad did not create anything.” As Justice Thomas commented further: “To be sure, it found an important and useful gene, but separating that gene from its surrounding genetic material is not an act of invention. Groundbreaking, innovative, or even brilliant discovery does not by itself satisfy the [patent law] inquiry.”
I think that one of the reasons that this was a unanimous ruling was that it was a very narrow ruling, hence the caveats about their explicitly saying nothing about synthesized genetic material.
Still, it is a good ruling, and yet another much needed bitch slap to the Patent Court.
I F%$#ed Up At Work Today
Click for full size
I used my phone to take some pictures at work yesterday afternoon.
I needed to share the packing arrangement for a kit with the rest of my team.
So I downloaded the pix from my phone, and sent them around.
Unfortunately, I had forgotten that after I took those pictures, I took some pictures of our cats having a cute-gasm.
When I sent the photos around, I inadvertently sent the cat photos as well.
D’oh!!!!!
Our IP Regulatory Regime Does Not Work
Case in point, Internet music streaming service Pandora has bought an FM radio station in South Dakota to reduce its royalty payments:
Pandora is angry about the royalties it’s paying to music publishers, so the company is making a bold move: It’s buying a terrestrial radio station in South Dakota mainly to score lower rates.
The radio station buy is the latest salvo in Pandora’s ongoing legal fight with the performance-rights group American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). Pandora says ASCAP discriminates against the company by charging it higher royalty rates, as well as letting publishers pull their song catalogs from Pandora while keeping them available for competitors.
“Certain powerful music incumbents see Internet radio as a threat to the status quo,” Christopher Harrison, Pandora’s assistant general counsel, wrote in a blog post published on The Hill.
To combat that alleged discrimination, Pandora bought the Rapid City, South Dakota, station KXMZ-FM for an undisclosed amount.
Terrestrial radio stations and the Internet properties that own them “were given preferential treatment” through an ASCAP agreement with the Radio Licensing Marketing Committee (RMLC) last year, according Harrison’s blog post.
Pandora says the KXMZ acquisition will let the company qualify for the lower-fee RMLC license. According to Pandora, ClearChannel-owned rival iHeartRadio has such a license because it also owns a terrestrial station.
I’m on Pandora’s side in all this.
Our current IP regime encourages this sort of regulatory arbitrage, and this does little to encourage the production or more music.
All it does is keep record company executives’ brothers-in-law in cocaine.
My Favorite Christian Theologian
Retired Bishop Shelby Spong.
I’ve been posting about him for a while, and I really like this interview.
I would note that what he is describing is rather close to the concept of Tikkun Olam (mending the world).
H/t Hedgie at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
And While We Are On the Subject of Obama and Subverting Regulation………
Gary Gensler surprised everyone when, as head of the CFTC, he actually enforced sensible rules.
So it it comes no surprise that Obama is firing him and replacing him with a corporate drone from the Vampire Squid:
Obama is no longer bothering to pretend that he is anything other than a stooge for banks and other big money interests.
The president is effectively dismissing Gary Gensler, the ex-Goldman partner who headed the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. Gensler used his post at a secondary financial regulator to push for reforms. It was his office that blew the Libor scandal wide open by taking referrals from British regulators seriously (by contrast, Geithner, who heard about widespread, deliberate mismarking in 2008, passed the buck to the Bank of England). Gensler has also been making himself unpopular by taking the view that swap dealers, which includes foreign branches of US banks and parties that conduct business with US parties, must comply with Dodd Frank. ………
Shahien Nasiripour at the Huffington Post describes how Gensler is being ousted for his position on swaps regulation, which was coming to a head in international meetings starting June 20, with a July 12 deadline looming. The industry was pushing for the usual “race to the bottom” approach, since the Dodd Frank provisions are more stringent than overseas requirments (the spin, of course, was that Gensler was acting unilaterally, as opposed to implementing what Congress mandated). Gensler faces varying degrees of resistance from three of his four fellow commissioners. International regulators were apparently also unhappy with Gensler’s tough stand, to the point where they were complaining to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.
Even if Obama fails in fast-tracking his chosen replacement, Amanda Renteria, Gensler’s lame-duck status will considerably weaken his ability to arm-twist the fence-sitters among his colleagues.
And Renteria is a simply pathetic choice. Oh, she’s got a very appealing personal story, having worked her way up from a very disadvantaged background, a child of migrant workers who made her way to Stanford and later Harvard Business School. But there’s nothing in her background that qualifies her to act either as a senior regulator or as the head of a large operation (the CFTC has over 400 employees). This leap in responsibilities is tantamount to taking a promising law firm associate and making them the head of a large law practice. You’d never do that if you cared about the health of the firm. A move like this looks an awful lot like an effort not just to sideline Gensler’s push on swaps regulation, but to render the CFTC incompetent over time.
Renteria’s knowledge of finance appears to consist of having worked right after college for a few years at Goldman. ………
And to this we add the bonus story that Barack Obama has nominated Walmart’s biggest fan to head his council of economic advisors:
On June 10, 2013, President Obama announced his intention to nominate Jason Furman to become the next chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. This is a big-time, highly influential post. So what kind of economist is Furman?
One who thinks Walmart is the best thing since sliced bread.
For Furman, Walmart is nothing short of a miracle for America’s poor and working-class folks. For him, progressives should be cheering the firm: he even wrote a 16-page paper titled, “Wal-Mart: A Progressive Success Story,” which was posted on the Center for American Progress website. ………
In Furman’s view, “the US productivity miracle and the emergence of Wal-Mart-style retailing are virtually synonymous.”
For the man who will have President Obama’s ear on vital matters like jobs, the evidence of whether Walmart’s wages and benefits are substandard is “murky.” And he doesn’t much care for those who question Walmart’s approach: In the 2006 dialogue with Ehrenreich on Slate, he upbraided activists who had pushed the firm to increase wages and offer better benefits:………
To complete the finger in the eye, the American Enterprise Institute has issued effusive praise on the choice.
I’m not surprised. I’m disappointed, but not surprised.
Obama loves hippie punching.
What a Surprise ……… No MBAs Equals Business Success
Costco does not hire MBAs:
Costco Wholesale (COST), the second-largest retailer in the U.S. behind Walmart, is an anomaly in an age marked by turmoil and downsizing. Known for its $55-a-year membership fee and its massive, austere warehouses stocked floor to ceiling with indulgent portions of everything from tilapia to toilet paper, Costco has thrived over the last five years. While competitors lost customers to the Internet and weathered a wave of investor pessimism, Costco’s sales have grown 39 percent and its stock price has doubled since 2009. The hot streak continued through last year’s retirement of widely admired co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jim Sinegal. The share price is up 30 percent under the leadership of its new, plain-spoken CEO, Craig Jelinek.
Costco Wholesale (COST), the second-largest retailer in the U.S. behind Walmart, is an anomaly in an age marked by turmoil and downsizing. Known for its $55-a-year membership fee and its massive, austere warehouses stocked floor to ceiling with indulgent portions of everything from tilapia to toilet paper, Costco has thrived over the last five years. While competitors lost customers to the Internet and weathered a wave of investor pessimism, Costco’s sales have grown 39 percent and its stock price has doubled since 2009. The hot streak continued through last year’s retirement of widely admired co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jim Sinegal. The share price is up 30 percent under the leadership of its new, plain-spoken CEO, Craig Jelinek.
………
Jelinek earned $650,000 in 2012, plus a $200,000 bonus and stock options worth about $4 million, based on the company’s performance. That’s more than Sinegal, who made $325,000 a year. By contrast, Walmart CEO Mike Duke’s 2012 base salary was $1.3 million; he was also awarded a $4.4 million cash bonus and $13.6 million in stock grants.
These are some of the reasons why Costco is successful, but I think that the most important bit is this:
It will have to look inside, since Costco does not hire business school graduates—thanks to another idiosyncrasy meant to preserve its distinct company culture. It cultivates employees who work the floor in its warehouses and sponsors them through graduate school. Seventy percent of its warehouse managers started at the company by pushing carts and ringing cash registers. Employees rarely leave: The company turnover rate is 5 percent among employees who have been there over a year, and less than 1 percent among the executive ranks. That’s impressive, but it also suggests the company does not have a regular influx of outside views. Even John Matthews, vice president in charge of human resources, calls the company “awfully inbred.”
I believe that much of their success is from the fact that they do not hire pampered self important people who do not understand the finer points of the business.
“Business school graduate,” and, “Pampered self important people who do not understand the finer points of the business,” are pretty much synonymous, and the fact that they have gained much in the way of currency in contemporary American business, is one of the reason that we are so completely f%$#ed.