Month: October 2017

Well, They Would Say That, Wouldn’t They*

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It appears that Oracle Corporation has gone to war against the “evils” of open source software.

Seeing as how it cost them money, and open source software had to be used fix disastrous issues with some of their recent projects, (**cough** failed healthecare exchanges **cough**) it should surprise no one that they have chosen to go full jihad against this:

Even though Oracle is based in the heart of Silicon Valley (I can see its offices from my own office window as I type this), the company has become sort of anti-Silicon Valley. It tends to represent the opposite of nearly everything that is accepted wisdom around here. And its latest crusade is against open source technology being used by the federal government — and against the government hiring people out of Silicon Valley to help create more modern systems. Instead, Oracle would apparently prefer the government just give it lots of money.

First, some background: over the past few years, one of the most positive things involving the federal government and technology has been the success of two similar (but also very different) organizations in the US government: US Digital Service (USDS) and 18F. If you’re completely unfamiliar with them there are plenty of articles describing both projects, but this one is a good overview. But the really short version is that both projects were an attempt to convince internet savvy engineers to help out in the federal government, and to bring a better understanding of modern technology into government. And it’s been a huge success in a variety of ways — such as creating federal government websites that are modern, secure and actually work. And even though both programs are associated with President Obama, the Trump administration has been adamant that it supports both organizations as well, and they’re important to continuing to modernize the federal government. The offices are not politicized, and they have been some of the best proof we’ve got that government done right involves smart, dedicated technologists.

………

A little more background: if it weren’t for Oracle’s failures, there might not even be a USDS. USDS really grew out of the emergency hiring of some top notch internet engineers in response to the Healthcare.gov rollout debacle. And if you don’t recall, a big part of that debacle was blamed on Oracle’s technology. So, perhaps it’s not surprising that Oracle might hold a bit of a grudge against USDS. Similarly, while Oracle likes to claim that it’s supportive of open source technologies, most recognize that open source has been eating Oracle’s lunch for a while now. 

Even with all that background, the sheer contempt found in Oracle’s submission on IT modernization is pretty stunning. The letter complains about three “false narratives” that “have taken the [US government] off track”:

False Narrative: Government should attempt to emulate the fast-paced innovation of Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is comprised of IT vendors most of which fail. The USG is not a technology vendor nor is it a start-up. Under no circumstance should the USG attempt to become a technology vendor. The USG can never develop, support or secure products economically or at scale. Government developed products are not subject to the extensive testing in the commercial market. Instead, the Government should attempt to emulate the best-practices of large private-sector Fortune 50 customers, which have competed, evaluated, procured and secured commercial technology successfully.

There’s even more nuttiness in the filing, but you can go through it yourself and count how frequently you gasp at just how wrong it is. This is an old, legacy company trying to cling desperately to old, obsolete, legacy ways. Oracle’s entire business was originally created to serve the US government as a customer, and it clearly doesn’t want to give that up. But, once again, things like this just make it clear why the top engineers coming out of school today don’t have much interest in going to work for a company with views like Oracle’s. 

As Upton Sinclair was wont to say, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

*It’s a Mandy Rice-Davies/Profumo Affair reference.  Learn your modern British sex scandal history.

This Story Is Not What You Think It Is

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For the past few days, there has been a story making the rounds about how a mother has been sent to jail for refusing to vaccinate her child.

You could think of this as a story of overreach by public health authorities, but it’s not.

You could also think of it as long overdue action by public health authorities against the clear and present dangers of the loss of herd immunity, but it’s not that either.

It’s a child custody dispute.

Both parents have joint custody, and they ended up in court to adjudicate their disagreement over whether or not their child should be immunized.

They judge ruled, the wife disobeyed, and he sent her to jail for contempt of court.

This is a remarkably ordinary dispute between two divorced parents over a medical decision, and that is all.

I Have Got to Admire the Ingenuity Here

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In response to the Teutonic sado-monetarism Italy has taken to using tax credits to allow the government to pay for some of the services that it needs.

The interesting point here is that they are a very short distance from actually creating money without coming hat in hand to the European Central Bank (ECB)

If the Italians take their program one more step forward, and they are creating money:

Italy is experimenting with giving tax-cuts to its citizens in exchange for public services―such as pulling weeds and cutting grass. Wow. What an amazing idea! The government issues a tax credit, and uses it to pay a citizen in exchange for the citizen’s services to the government. The government could even make this arrangement more formal by printing the tax credits on pieces of paper called “LIRIES” (or something like that) and paying for the weed-whacking services with this “cash.” That way the citizen who’s earned the “LIRIES” has the option of using them as payment to another citizen (who’d also like a tax-cut) for, say, a bag of potatoes. So, the first citizen pulls some weeds, gets paid in “cash” and then uses the “cash” to buy her dinner. If you thought about it, you could possibly run an entire economy in this fashion. The only thing you’d have to worry about, of course, is that the government might run out of the tax-credits it needs to pay the citizens to do the work! If that happened, where could the government possibly get more tax-credits? Could it collect tax-credits as “taxes”? Could it borrow them from all the street-sweepers and weed-whackers who’ve earned them? (In which case it would have to pay “tax-credit interest”―which just seems to exacerbate the problem!) Hmmm. I’m going to have to think about that one. But in the meantime, doesn’t this mean that any Eurozone country has the option to stay IN the Eurozone while at the same time operating its own local economy using its own local “sovereign” currency?

In a followup, it is explained how this can be used to essentially create money:

As I said, Italy, is now experimenting with paying for public services with tax credits. Presumably, this is happening because Italy doesn’t possess enough Euros to pay its citizens to provide all the goods and services needed to maintain and run the public sector of its social economy. And Italy can’t “create” the additional Euros it needs because that prerogative is the exclusive right of the EU Central Bank which Italy, even as a sovereign member of the EU, has no control over. But, as the news article explains, Italy still needs to have the grass mowed and the weeds pulled in its public gardens. So it has decided (out of desperation, the article implies) to pay the gardeners with tax-credits. The gardeners are willing to do the work in exchange for the government’s tax-credits, because it means the Euros they earn (in other ways) can then be used to purchase goods and services rather than for paying their taxes. So, in practical terms, it is “just like” getting paid in Euros.

 This, in fact, is way more interesting than it seems. In fact, it might even be mind-expanding! Here’s why:

 Presumably, the tax-credit payments described take the form of notations on the gardeners’ tax account. An hour’s worth of weeding is noted as 15 Euros worth of extinguished taxes. If the gardener has a tax liability of, say, €3750, her taxes would be completely paid after providing 250 hours of weeding and pruning. After that, obviously, she’d have no more incentive to provide any services in exchange for the tax-credits. So the amount of services Italy can obtain in this fashion is directly limited by the amount of tax liabilities it can impose on its citizens.

 It would be possible, however, to structure the tax-credit payments in another way which would have a very different outcome. Instead of making the payment as a credit notation on a citizen’s tax account, the Italian government could issue paper tax-credits and pay them to the citizens for their gardening services. To be specific, this would be a piece of “official” paper, signed with an important signature, on which was printed something like the following:

 The Sovereign Italian Government promises the bearer of this paper ONE EURO of credit on taxes owed to the Sovereign Italian Government.

………

 Now we have to ask an important question: Is the amount of services Italy can obtain by issuing and “spending” its paper tax-credits still directly limited by the amount of tax liabilities it can impose on its citizens? In other words, if every Italian citizen theoretically has received enough PTCs to pay their taxes with—either having received them directly from the government for providing public services, or having received them from other citizens in exchange for lasagna dinners—will the citizens’ willingness to exchange real goods and services in exchange for the PTCs come to a halt?

 Crucially, the answer is No. This is because the act of “embodying” the tax-credits in exchangeable pieces of paper has given the PTCs a usefulness in addition to their usefulness as tax payments: This additional usefulness, of course, is the ability to use them to buy goods and services from other Italian citizens and businesses. Thus, the number of paper tax-credits in “circulation” could vastly exceed, at any given time, the total actual tax liabilities of the Italian citizenry. The PTCs would continue to be accepted for lasagna dinners, because the Trattoria owners know they can use the PTCs they receive to subsequently buy Italian shoes and motorcycles— in addition to using them to pay their taxes.

 It will no doubt have dawned on most every reader that what we’ve just created is “money.” Specifically, we’ve created what is called “fiat money”—which happens to be the kind of money the world has been using now for the past half century (ever since the U.S. formally abandoned the gold-standard in 1971). Having thus conjured a rudimentary image of fiat-money to life we should quickly make some important (and perhaps startling) observations about it.

 ………

 Having made these observations, it appears the Italian government has stumbled on an actual solution to the “austerity” it has been forced to impose on itself by the European Union. Except we must now confront the fact that the rules of the EU do not ALLOW Italy to issue and spend its own sovereign fiat currency! The only “money” Italy is allowed to use is the Euro—and the only way the Italian government can obtain Euros is either by collecting them as taxes from its citizens, or by borrowing them from the European Central Bank, which has the exclusive prerogative of issuing them. And these methods of obtaining Euros to spend are falling short of what Italy needs to pay its citizens to do. So…. Italy has decided to pay its citizens with tax-credits, and then (why not?) with paper tax-credits. And then, presumably, the EU says, “Whoa, hold on here! It looks like you are printing your own money, which is not allowed by our rules!”

While I don’t think that the Italians would have the guts to take this to the next level right now, but this would a good way to deal with the current problems with the Euro.  (Not as good as getting the Germans out of the Euro, but a pretty close 2nd)

If you are paying attention, going the full Magilla on this is actually an application of MMT, and the British city of Bristol has been trying something rather similar with the Bristol Pound, which in accordance with Modern Monetary Theory, can be used to pay local taxes.

It really is fascinating.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

Arbeit Macht Frei

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Oklahoma and surrounding judges are sending accused criminals to slave labor camps, in particular, they get sent to Christian Alcoholics & Addicts in Recovery (CAAIR):

The worst day of Brad McGahey’s life was the day a judge decided to spare him from prison.

McGahey was 23 with dreams of making it big in rodeo, maybe starring in his own reality TV show. With a 1.5 GPA, he’d barely graduated from high school. He had two kids and mounting child support debt. Then he got busted for buying a stolen horse trailer, fell behind on court fines and blew off his probation officer.

Standing in a tiny wood-paneled courtroom in rural Oklahoma in 2010, he faced one year in state prison. The judge had another plan.

“You need to learn a work ethic,” the judge told him. “I’m sending you to CAAIR.”

McGahey had heard of Christian Alcoholics & Addicts in Recovery. People called it “the Chicken Farm,” a rural retreat where defendants stayed for a year, got addiction treatment and learned to live more productive lives. Most were sent there by courts from across Oklahoma and neighboring states, part of the nationwide push to keep nonviolent offenders out of prison.

………

There wasn’t much substance abuse treatment at CAAIR. It was mostly factory work for one of America’s top poultry companies. If McGahey got hurt or worked too slowly, his bosses threatened him with prison.

And he worked for free. CAAIR pocketed the pay.

“It was a slave camp,” McGahey said. “I can’t believe the court sent me there.”

………

But in the rush to spare people from prison, some judges are steering defendants into rehabs that are little more than lucrative work camps for private industry, an investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has found.
The programs promise freedom from addiction. Instead, they’ve turned thousands of men and women into indentured servants.

The beneficiaries of these programs span the country, from Fortune 500 companies to factories and local businesses. The defendants work at a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Oklahoma, a construction firm in Alabama, a nursing home in North Carolina.
Perhaps no rehab better exemplifies this allegiance to big business than CAAIR. It was started in 2007 by chicken company executives struggling to find workers. By forming a Christian rehab, they could supply plants with a cheap and captive labor force while helping men overcome their addictions.

………

Chicken processing plants are notoriously dangerous and understaffed. The hours are long, the pay is low and the conditions are brutal.

………

Those who were hurt and could no longer work often were kicked out of CAAIR and sent to prison, court records show. Most men worked through the pain, fearing the same fate.

………

Legal experts said forcing defendants to work for free might violate their constitutional rights. The 13th Amendment bans slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States, except as punishment for convicts. That’s why prison labor programs are legal. But many defendants sent to programs such as CAAIR have not yet been convicted of crimes, and some later have their cases dismissed.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Noah Zatz, a professor specializing in labor law at UCLA, said when presented with Reveal’s findings. “That’s a very strong 13th Amendment violation case.”

CAAIR has become indispensable to the criminal justice system, even though judges appear to be violating Oklahoma’s drug court law by using it in some cases, according to the law’s authors.

Drug courts in Oklahoma are required to send defendants for treatment at certified programs with trained counselors and state oversight. CAAIR is uncertified. Only one of its three counselors is licensed, and no state agency regulates it.

………

Men who were injured while at CAAIR rarely receive long-term help for their injuries. That’s because the program requires all men to sign a form stating that they are clients, not employees, and therefore have no right to workers’ comp. Reveal found that when men got hurt, CAAIR filed workers’ comp claims and kept the payouts. Injured men and their families never saw a dime.

………

“That’s fraudulent behavior,” said Eddie Walker, a former judge with the Arkansas Workers’ Compensation Commission. He said workers’ comp payments are required to go to the injured worker. “What’s being done is clearly inappropriate.” 

Everyone involved in this atrocity should be prosecuted to the fullest extant of the law:  The people who run CAAIR, the judges who illegally send them there, the senior executives at poultry and pet food companies who knowingly used slave labor.

This is just f%$#ing evil.

Once Again, Let Me Say, “Do Not Give to the American Red Cross”

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The Red Cross’ anemic response to Hurricane Harvey left officials in several Texas counties seething, emails obtained by ProPublica show. In some cases, the Red Cross simply failed to show up as it promised it would.

In DeWitt, a county of 20,000 where Harvey ripped apart the roof of a hotel, Emergency Management Coordinator Cyndi Smith upbraided a Red Cross official in a Sept. 9 email:

“Red Cross was not there as they were suppose[d] to be with the shelter and again no communication to what this is actually about and that you have been in DeWitt County doing anything.”

With fewer than 24 hours’ notice, Micah Dyer, a school superintendent in DeWitt County, was forced to run a shelter on his own in an unused district building that would eventually house 400 people. For the first three days the shelter was opened, only two Red Cross volunteers were there — neither had any experience running a shelter, Dyer said in an interview.

“Every hot meal came from us,” Dyer said. “[School district employees] had to go to our pantries and walk-in coolers and get whatever we could get so people would have food.” Dyer says the Red Cross didn’t appear with supplies until the fourth day of the storm, and didn’t bring enough cots or food for those housed in the shelter, he said. A significant portion of the Meals-Ready-to-Eat the charity did bring had gone bad, he said.

The charity contested his account, saying in a statement that it maintained two shelters in DeWitt County — including the one Dyer ran — “and recorded a total of 1,599 overnight stays.”

We have only a partial picture of the Red Cross’ response to the massive storm. ProPublica received emails through public records requests from several counties, large and small. But they don’t cover the full swath of the state affected by the storm.

Still, the frustration many authorities felt with the Red Cross was striking. Officials in Jefferson County, which contains Beaumont, were so fed up with the Red Cross that they kicked out a charity employee assigned to work with government officials from the headquarters for the storm response.
………

Many others singled out the Red Cross for criticism. At a public meeting earlier this month, Houston City Councilman Dave Martin let loose on the charity for being the “most inept, unorganized organization I’ve ever experienced.”

………

In an interview with ProPublica, Martin said he ran into Gail McGovern, the charity’s CEO, in a parking lot several days after Harvey hit. When he raised his concerns to her, Martin said she responded: “Do you know how much we raised with Katrina? $2 billion. We won’t even raise hundreds of millions here.’ I just thought, ‘Really, Gail? That’s your response to me?’”

It’s clear that Ms. McGovern, a former senior executive at AT&T and Fidelity, wants to run the charity like a business.

She wants to burn it down for the insurance money.

Buh Bye

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Anti-abortion firebrand Tim Murphy (R-PA) was caught pressuring his mistress to get an abortion.

First, he announced that he would not be running for reelection, and now he has resigned from Congress

Rep. Tim Murphy said Thursday that he will resign from Congress this month, a day after the eight-term Pennsylvania Republican announced that he would not seek reelection amid a personal scandal.

“Upon further discussion with my family, I have made the decision to resign my position” effective Oct. 21, Murphy wrote in a letter to House Speaker Paul D. Ryan. “I am grateful for the opportunity to have served the people of southwestern Pennsylvania and to have worked with the talented and dedicated men and women of the United States Congress.”

………

The resignation of Murphy, a clinical psychologist, comes after a news report claimed that the married Republican had asked a woman with whom he had an extramarital affair to get an abortion.

Alpha Mike Foxtrot, Mr. Murphy, Alpha Mike Foxtrot.

This is the Most Disasterous Performance in Tory Politics Since………*

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Highlights (Lowlights?) of the speech

At the 2017 Conservative Party conference in the UK, Prime Minister Theresa May delivered an absolute train wreck.

First, was a comedian pranking by delivering a “P-45” form (pink slip to Yanks) from Boris Johnson, then she spent something like 15 minutes largely unsuccessfully battling a cough and a frog in her throat, and finally, the theme logo for the conference began to drop letters off the backdrop.

It’s hard to imagine a more excruciating hour. One that was meant to re-establish the prime minister’s authority over her party ended in pity from an audience who could scarcely bring themselves to look her in the eye. Open ridicule would almost have been a kinder reaction.

Theresa May had always intended her speech to be personal; she just had no idea it was going to get this personal. She began by trying to rid herself of her Maybot image. Her election campaign had been too presidential. Too scripted. She said, reading awkwardly from a script. Even when she is trying to be engaging, sentences don’t come naturally to her.

“The British. Dream. That. Is what I am. In politics. For,” she repeated leadenly time and again as she tried to reinvent herself as a three-dimensional entity. But each time she said it, she only sounded more automated. Emotional intelligence is even harder to master than artificial intelligence.

Then the British Dream turned into a nightmare. First the comedian Simon Brodkin, dressed as a conference delegate, wandered up to the stage. “Boris asked me to give this to you,” he said, handing her a P45. Which Theresa gratefully accepted. Because in her heart of hearts, this was what she had always really wanted. Being PM just wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It was too stressful. No fun.

………

It rapidly got worse. Once Brodkin was escorted out the hall, it was the turn of Theresa’s voice to make its own protest. By going awol. This time she knew what words she wanted to say, she just couldn’t get them out as her voice had its own psychosomatic, narcissistic, breakdown. She tried to clear her throat. She drank water. Still nothing came out. Eventually the chancellor handed her a cough sweet which temporarily did the trick.

“The British. Dream. That is. What I. Am in Poli. Tics for,” she croaked in a barely audible whisper. By now almost everyone in the audience was feeling almost as uncomfortable as her. People started muttering and staring at the floor. Opera heroines have died a less public, less agonising death.

………

As she reached her final appeal for the party to stop squabbling – a bit rich after she had spent the previous three days saying how united the cabinet was – the frog got the upper hand again. This time it didn’t limit itself to obstructing her throat, it also hopped across the stage and started knocking letters off the slogan, Building a country that works for everyone, on the screen behind her. First the f of for disappeared. Then the last e of everyone fell to the ground. Theresa’s world was literally falling apart around her. 

Seriously, this absurdity would have deemed a step too far by Monty Python in the day.

She could have bitten off the head of a kitten during the speech and done better.

*Since all but about 8 years of Winston Churchill’s political career.†
†Seriously. Aside from 1939-45, this guy was a f%$#ing horror show.

iPhone Design Fail

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This kind of defeats the 2mm you saved in thickness

Apple has finally added a dongle with both a charging port and an earphone port, and it is ugly and stupid:

It took an entire year after the release of the iPhone 7 for Apple to start selling a dongle that lets you plug in headphones (or your car’s AUX cable) and charge at the same time. But now it’s here. Apple is just selling the thing, mind you — not making it. In September, Belkin quietly announced a new, second version of its “Rockstar” adapter that now includes both a 3.5mm jack and Lightning port. Last year’s version had two Lightning ports, so if you wanted to use wired headphones with it, you had to plug Apple’s own headphone dongle into another dongle. Going double-dongle is bad enough on a laptop, but on a phone?! Good grief.

Well, this is expected for iPhone users.

After all, you get your super thin phone, and then you put the delicate snowflake in a case that doubles its thickness because otherwise it breaks in a stiff breeze.

Deplorable People of the Week

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Seattle police officers including lead plaintiff Robert Mahoney who attempted to assert a 2nd Amendment right to administer violence indiscriminately:

When the Department of Justice handed down remedies for the Seattle Police Department’s excessive use of excessive force, it told officers they would need to dial back their penchant for deadliness. Just prior to the DOJ’s civil rights investigation, the PD was responsible for 20% of the city’s homicides. The DOJ recommended officers work on their de-escalation tactics, as well as partake in training meant to steer officers away from viewing anything strange (medical conditions, mental health issues, drug impairment, behavioral crises) as something to be shot at or beaten.

Seattle PD officials adopted the DOJ recommendations and altered the department’s use of force policies. Rather than comply or quit, several police officers decided to file a federal lawsuit against the DOJ. The officers asserted a nonexistent right (the “right” to make it home alive) and hammered an existing right (the 2nd Amendment) to it in hopes of persuading a federal court that using less force less often somehow violated their right to keep and bear arms.

The crowdfunded lawsuit didn’t get very far. The district court pointed out the 2nd Amendment does not create a “right” to defend yourself, much less attempt to guarantee officers’ personal safety. Gun ownership is regulated, not a free pass for cops to violate PD use of force policies as they see fit. It also tossed a variety of other rights violations claims, noting these were even more tenuously connected to the officers’ protest of the new use of force policy than the 2nd Amendment claims.

The officers appealed this decision because of course they did. Despite raising less than $4,000 of their $100,000 legal defense fund goal, the officers apparently had enough funding to lose twice. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected [PDF] the officers’ ridiculous rights violation assertions. (h/t Kevin Gosztola)

These guys are not peace officers, they are a clear and present danger to the community.

Yeah, This is Senior Investors Plotting an Exit Strategy

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Uber’s board of directors voted on Tuesday for governance changes that will reshape the balance of power at the ride-hailing service, paving the way for a stock sale to the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and for the company to go public by 2019.

The 11-member board met for less than four hours to approve some of the terms from a proposal put forward last week by Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber’s new chief executive, and Goldman Sachs, the investment bank that is an investor in the privately held company.

As a result, the clout of certain Uber shareholders — including, most significantly, its former chief executive, Travis Kalanick, who is a board member — will be reduced, according to people briefed on the deliberations, who asked to remain anonymous because the conversations were confidential. Other proposed measures, including one that would have posed hurdles to Mr. Kalanick’s returning as chief executive, were dropped before the meeting.

Still, the board approved enough changes for Uber to move forward on an investment from SoftBank. SoftBank has held discussions to buy a significant chunk of Uber’s stock, but the deal was contingent on changing the company’s governance structure so that some of its early investors would have an incentive to sell. In addition, directors approved a resolution for Uber to go public by 2019, the people briefed on the meeting said, setting up what could be one of the largest technology stock offerings in years.

These are a group of people looking to find some rubes so that they can cash out.

You have been warned.

Republican Family Values

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Representative Tim Murphy (R-PA 18), a prominent anti-abortion wingnut, has been caught trying to convince his mistress to get an abortion.

A text message sent in January to U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy by a woman with whom he had an extra-marital relationship took him to task for an anti-abortion statement posted on Facebook from his office’s public account.

“And you have zero issue posting your pro-life stance all over the place when you had no issue asking me to abort our unborn child just last week when we thought that was one of the options,” Shannon Edwards, a forensic psychologist in Pittsburgh with whom the congressman admitted last month to having a relationship, wrote to Mr. Murphy on Jan. 25, in the midst of an unfounded pregnancy scare.

A text from Mr. Murphy’s cell phone number that same day in response says, “I get what you say about my March for life messages. I’ve never written them. Staff does them. I read them and winced. I told staff don’t write any more. I will.”

The congressman has been lauded by the Family Research Council, for his stance on abortion, as well as for family values, generally. He also has been endorsed by LifePAC, which opposes abortion rights, and is a member of the House Pro-Life Caucus, an affiliation that is often cited by his office.

As Atrios notes, “I am sure that there isn’t a single anti-abortion male who would object to an abortion if an inconvenient pregnancy happened.” (This is true of many of the women as well.)

The article actually covers a whole litany of what is called “Mishugas” by the distinguished gentleman from Pennsylvania, including an office environment that his chief of staff described as, “A hostile workplace in which Mr. Murphy repeatedly denigrated employees, threatened them and created a state of terror.”

Lord of the Flies, Uber Edition

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It appears that Travis Kalanick has gotten to the breaking sh%$ of grief, specifically, he just appointed two board members without consulting with the board of Uber’s new President:

The phone calls began late Friday among Uber’s new chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, and the ride-hailing company’s executives, as well as board members and a raft of lawyers. They were facing an emergency.

The problem was that Travis Kalanick, Uber’s former chief executive and a board member, had appointed two new directors — Ursula Burns, the former chief executive of Xerox, and John Thain, the former chief of Merrill Lynch — to the privately held company without informing them. The moves, which pushed the nine-member board to 11 people, gave Mr. Kalanick new potential allies on major decisions at Uber.

Mr. Kalanick’s actions were “disappointing,” Mr. Khosrowshahi wrote on Friday in a letter to employees that was obtained by The New York Times. “Anyone would tell you that this is highly unusual.”

The trigger for Mr. Kalanick’s move — one made possible by a board vote last year giving him control of three seats — was a proposal that Mr. Khosrowshahi and the investment bank Goldman Sachs, an Uber shareholder, brought to the board on Thursday. The proposal, which is set to be discussed by directors on Tuesday, includes measures that would shift the power on Uber’s board by reducing Mr. Kalanick’s voting clout, expanding Mr. Khosrowshahi’s powers and imposing a 2019 deadline on the company to go public, according to three people with knowledge of the proposal who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Parts of the proposal were also read to The Times.

Let me translate this into English, the investors realize that Kalanick has become toxic, and as a result is facing increased regulatory and media scrutiny.

In particular, people are beginning to notice that, “Uber has no conceivable path to profitability,” because once they rise prices to reach profitability, entrants re-enter the market, and suddenly they are not particularly special and unicornish any more.

The big investors want to go public before it is too late, and that means rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic and then getting into a lifeboat before the rush starts.

Well, This Sucks

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It appears that Tom Petty suffered a cardiac arrest, and may or may not be dead though the most recent reports strongly imply that it’s just a matter of time:

For several hours on Monday, rock star Tom Petty was dead to some members of the news media, even if he wasn’t in fact.

Though gravely ill and lingering near death, Petty was still clinging to life when CBS News incorrectly reported that he had died. The report — which the outlet blamed on unidentified sources in the Los Angeles Police Department — was later withdrawn and corrected.

But not before touching off a stampede of he’s-dead/no-he’s-not reporting by other news organizations. The result was a monumental mishmash of confusion, joining the long history of misreporting on the deaths of well-known people.

TMZ, the tabloid website with a history of being first on celebrity deaths, was the first outlet to report that Petty was in the hospital and soon updated its story to say: “TMZ reports that Petty had no brain activity when he got to the hospital and a decision was made to pull him from life support,” while never pronouncing that the “American Girl” singer had died.

Rolling Stone magazine reported around 4:15 p.m. EST that Petty had died and published a lengthy obituary of him. But the magazine upgraded Petty’s condition to “hospitalized” about an hour later without explaining what had happened to its earlier report. A note at the bottom of its story said, “This story is developing.”

I rather liked his music, and he did the best Mad Hatter ever, so I will miss him.

Thoughts and Prayers, and Nothing Else

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We’ve had yet another mass shooting, with the highest death toll yet for a single killer. (If you count various forms of race riots and Indian massacres, the death toll is not so remarkable)

At first, it sounded like fireworks — a loud, crackling noise. Then the awful realization began to spread, unevenly, through the huge crowd.

 It dawned on people when they heard screams, when they saw bloodied victims collapse around them, or when others stampeded for the exits, trampling some of the people in their way.

 Many of the terrified concertgoers followed their instincts and crouched or lay flat, not realizing that they remained exposed to a gunman lodged high above them. Others surged into surrounding streets and buildings, leaving behind debris lost in the panic — drink cups, shoes, and cellphones that kept ringing for hours, as relatives and friends tried to reach their loved ones and find out if they were safe.

 By sunrise on Monday, the staggering toll at an outdoor country music festival on a cool desert night was becoming clear: at least 59 people killed, the police said, and 527 injured, either by gunfire or in the flight to safety.

 A lone gunman perched on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino had smashed the windows of his hotel suite with a hammer, taken aim at a crowd of 22,000 people, and committed one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history. Late on Monday, law enforcement officials said they still had no idea what the motive was.

 The gunman had 17 firearms, including a handgun, in his suite, according to Sheriff Joseph Lombardo of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. And when the police searched the shooter’s house on Monday, “we retrieved in excess of 18 additional firearms, some explosives, and several thousand rounds of ammo,” Sheriff Lombardo said. He added that they also found ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer sometimes used in making bombs, in the gunman’s car.

God bless America, huh?

Of course, we will be in the politicians, “Thoughts and Prayers,” but I expect nothing meaningful to happen.

Here’s hoping that NRA President Wayne LaPierre mishandles a gun and shoots his own testicles off.

Naah ……… I’m not bitter.


See full Tom Tomorrow cartoon here.

Linkage

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Marilyn Manson was injured at a concert the other day by a falling prop. Here is him covering “Tainted Love”, which seems remarkably appropriate.

Another Step Forward for Reaction Engines

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Proposed Test Stand


Heat exchanger with miles of tiny tubes

Reaction engines, whose SSTO Skylon concept has been making the rounds for nearly a decade, seems to be getting more support, specifically, it has scored a large contract with DARPA to demonstrate its precooler engine technology:

Reaction Engines has achieved a major breakthrough in the U.S. market with a contract from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The award covers conducting high-temperature testing of the precooler technology at the heart of its proposed hypersonic air-breathing, combined-cycle Sabre rocket concept.

Reaction has seen interest grow in the U.S. about elements of Sabre, particularly the precooling heat exchanger, ever since the concept was first independently validated by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory in 2015 (AW&ST Aug. 3-16, 2015, p. 63). Designed to chill airflow from over 1,800F to −240 F (1,000C to −150C) in less than 1/20th of a second, the heat exchanger is pivotal to the process of extracting oxygen from the air for use by the rocket.

However, the heat exchanger can also be used more generically to precool other engine cycles and reduce heating on engine components in high-speed flight. According to Reaction, the design, dubbed HTX, “could enable new classes of vehicles and operational possibilities.” The precooler will be tested at speeds up to Mach 5 in a new high-temperature airflow evaluation facility to be built in Castle Rock, Colorado, as a base for REI (Reaction Engines Inc.), the U.S. subsidiary of the UK-based company.

It does appear that their technology is getting funding and support, so I’m hoping to see a flight test article in the next 5 years or so.

Previous posts about Reaction Engines here.

Fail, Madrid Edition

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The Catalan independence referendum has faced an unbelievably heavy handed response from the central government in Madrid, with the obvious result, supporters of secession have flocked to the polls, while opponents are unwilling to get a baton to the crotch, so early results show overwhelming support for Catalonia leaving Spain:

Catalan officials have claimed that preliminary results of its referendum have shown 90% in favour of independence in the vote vehemently opposed by Spain.

Jordi Turull, the Catalan regional government spokesman, told reporters early on Monday morning that 90% of the 2.26 million Catalans who voted Sunday chose yes. He said nearly 8% of voters rejected independence and the rest of the ballots were blank or void. He said 15,000 votes were still being counted.The region has 5.3 million registered voters.

Turull said the number of ballots did not include those confiscated by Spanish police during violent raids which resulted in hundreds of people being injured. At least 844 people and 33 police were reported to have been hurt, including at least two people who were thought to have been seriously injured.

………

Puigdemont had pressed ahead with the referendum despite opposition from the Spanish state, which declared the poll to be illegal, and the region’s own high court. He told crowds earlier in the day that the “police brutality will shame the Spanish state for ever”.

The Spanish government defended its response after hundreds of people were hurt when riot police stormed polling stations in a last-minute effort to stop the vote on Sunday.

Spanish PM Mariano Rajoy, and his People’s Party, has been running against Catalonia, and against Catalonian independence for years, and this has served to galvanize the secessionists movement.

First, they rushed to overturn existing agreements, and now they have sent national and other police forces into Catalonia as an occupying force with a license to abuse, and the results are ugly: senior citizens bloodied, voters dragged out of polling areas by their hair, and condemnations from Human Rights Watch.

I don’t think that we are headed for another Spanish Civil War, but if someone doesn’t put a leash on Rajoy, things are going to get a lot worse.

Common Sense That I Did Not Expect out of State

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But reports that there are direct contacts between the US and the DPRK is an indication of at least a small modicum of sanity in Foggy Bottom:

The Trump administration acknowledged on Saturday for the first time that it was in direct communication with the government of North Korea over its missile and nuclear tests, seeking a possible way forward beyond the escalating threats of a military confrontation from both sides.

“We are probing, so stay tuned,” Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson said, when pressed about how he might begin a conversation with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, that could avert what many government officials fear is a significant chance of open conflict between the two countries.

“We ask, ‘Would you like to talk?’ We have lines of communications to Pyongyang — we’re not in a dark situation, a blackout,” he added. “We have a couple, three channels open to Pyongyang,” a reference to North Korea’s capital.

Considering the fact that the US and the DPRK are the principals in their dispute, direct contacts are a good thing, even if it runs against the standard US regime change consensus among the DC cognoscenti.