Because of a slightly confusing site, I missed am about 2 weeks late on some credit union closings:
Here is the Full NCUA list.
So, once again there are more credit union failures than there are commercial bank failures.
I still don’t know why this is so, but it is profoundly odd to me.
A bunch of privileged white boy dotcommers have decided that, because they got lucky, they should determine the future of the Democratic Party.
They call their nascent movement “Win the Future”, yes, it has the initials “WTF”, and it has debuted to much derision.
They are referring to themselves as a “Virtual Party”, and their most substantive policy proposal appears to be pushing Third Eye Blind frontman Stephan Jenkins as a political party.
In any case, this characterization of the founders is prize:
Mark Pincus is the co-founder of Zynga, your grandmother’s favorite video game publisher. Reid Hoffman is co-founder of LinkedIn, a networking website that’s harder to escape than a Scientology outpost buried underneath a gulag. These tech visionaries decided they’d had enough of business as usual in politics, put their brains together, and created an exciting new group called Win The Future. Its mission is to influence the Democratic party platform and assist the #Resistance. If you’re skeptical of this project, keep these facts in mind: People in tech are smarter than you are; disruption makes everything better; everybody loves winning; the internet is the future; and the group is called Win the Future. Enough said.
(emphasis mine)
Is it just me, or does Silicon Valley increasingly seem to be a charity to support the lifestyles of over privileged youth?
Corbyn’s Earned the Right to Do What He Pleases – and He’s Decided to Leave Mewling Self-Entitled Blairites out in the Cold
I wholeheartedly approve of this.
Blair’s political innovation was finding a way to suck up to media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and all it cost was the Labour Party’s soul, and he was the only Labour candidate to win using that formula.
“New Labour”, much like the “New Left” and the “New Democrats”, have proven disastrous for both their own movements and for their countries.
It really is time for Labour to clean house.
Does anyone believe that Uber made an honest mistake in tax calculations when it took hundreds of millions of dollars from its drivers?
I certainly don’t:
Amid the turmoil at Uber that resulted in Travis Kalanick’s stepping down as chief executive, the company announced a series of changes in late June aimed at improving its drivers’ work experience, including a new tipping option in its passenger app.
But even as Uber makes a concerted effort to win over drivers, it has not acknowledged all the ways it may have squeezed them in New York State.
In May, Uber admitted to taking excessive commissions out of the fares of its New York drivers, who are independent contractors, and promised to make amends. Increasing evidence, however, suggests that the company may have shortchanged the drivers by far greater sums than it acknowledged.
The following are signs that the ride-hailing service improperly deducted what could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars from drivers’ earnings to pay taxes that, under New York State law, are technically due from passengers:
- Uber receipts from other states reflect a tax accounting at odds with the company’s justification for deducting sales tax from the fares received by its New York drivers.
- Language from Uber’s recent contracts indicates that the company should not have taken the taxes from those fares.
Uber has insisted there was nothing improper in its handling of the taxes. Here is a look at the law and the evidence on the question — including the way a major competitor, Lyft, deals with the same issue.
If anyone believes that Uber was acting in good faith, they haven’t been following the news lately.
As you are no doubt aware, Apple has locked down its iPhone platform something fierce.
Among other things, it makes security research much more difficult, which makes bugs a rare commodity in the Apple security community.
Of course, under the laws of supply and demand, it means that the price of the bugs would increase, which means that Apples iPhone bug bounty program has no takers, because it’s not enough money:
For now, security researchers who have been invited by Apple to submit high-value bugs through the program prefer to keep the bugs for themselves.
In August 2016, Apple’s head of security Ivan Krstic stole the show at one of the biggest security conferences in the world with an unexpected announcement.
“I wanna share some news with you,” Krstic said at the Black Hat conference, before announcing that Apple was finally launching a bug bounty program to reward friendly hackers who report bugs to the company.
The crowd erupted in enthusiastic applause. But almost a year later, the long-awaited program appears to be struggling to take off, with no public evidence that hackers have claimed any bug bounties.
The iPhone’s security is so tight that it’s hard to find any flaws at all, which leads to sky-high prices for bugs on the grey market. Researchers I spoke to are reluctant to report bugs both because they are so valuable and because reporting some bugs may actually prevent them from doing more research.“People can get more cash if they sell their bugs to others,” said Nikias Bassen, a security researcher for the company Zimperium, and who joined Apple’s program last year. “If you’re just doing it for the money, you’re not going to give [bugs] to Apple directly.”
Patrick Wardle, a former NSA hacker and researcher at Synack who now specializes in MacOS research and was invited to the Apple bug bounty program, agreed. He said that iOS bugs are “too valuable to report to Apple.”
………
But it’s not just about the immediate reward. iOS is such a complex, locked-down, and secure operating system that simply to inspect and do research on it, one needs multiple, unpatched, zero-day bugs, perhaps even a full-fledged jailbreak, according to researchers. In other words, you need unknown bugs just to find bugs in other parts of the operating system that might be otherwise locked.
That’s why some prefer to keep their bugs and continue doing research rather than handicapping themselves for a reward of few thousand dollars.
“Nobody is going to kill bugs unless they’re fucking dumb,” Luca Todesco, a well-known iPhone jailbreaker, told me a few months ago. “Just because they will kill their own future […] If I kill my own bugs then I’m not able to do my own research.”
………
While the researchers were visiting Cupertino, they asked Apple’s security team for special iPhones that don’t have certain restrictions so it’s easier to hack them, according to multiple people who attended the meeting. These devices would have some security features, such as sandboxing, disabled in order to allow the researchers to continue doing their work. One researcher described them as “developer devices.”
But Apple, for now, isn’t willing to provide those special devices, according to three researchers who recounted the exchange.
These bugs actually have a legal market, helping law enforcement breaking into phones, as well as firms that sell jailbreak (which is legal) software to end users, which allows end users to evade Apple’s frequently arbitrary rules on how a user might choose to use their own phones.
In any case, Apple’s opacity has raised the cost of bugs to more than Apple is willing to pay.
As to whether this is a good or a bad thing, I will leave that to the reader.
Not exactly the most inspiring political slogan, @dccc: pic.twitter.com/oIE9bTBHa0— Derek Willis (@derekwillis) July 5, 2017
Yes, this is real.
“Arby’s: Cause, you know, Jared”— Richard T. (@Miceelf88) July 6, 2017
The best tweet in response
I am, of course, referring to the political consultants for the Democratic Party.
Case in point, the geniuses at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), who have a proposed, “Have You Seen the Other Guys?“
No, this is not satire.
The campaign arm for House Democrats on Wednesday tried out a new slogan: “I mean, have you seen the other guys?”
The sticker slogan, one of several floated as part of a fundraising effort by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), caused a stir on social media, where many wondered why the party would try out such a self-deprecating campaign line.
Why would they do this?
Because they are incompetents who are unqualified to work at a fast food joint?
Seriously donors, this is what your money is paying for.
If you don’t start demanding accountability, by which I mean firing their hapless flabby asses.
Also, keeping the DCCC, DSCC, and DNC from fobbing off their incompetent brothers-in-law on state and local campaigns and party committees would be a good thing too.
This makes me want to learn to play the bass, and it’s just a promo.
As I have said before, a symphony orchestra on just 4 strings:
U.S. Flag Recalled After Causing 143 Million Deaths
Truly this is, “America’s Finest News Source.”
We now find rampant sexual harassment and discrimination at Tesla Motors, wunderkind Elon Musk’s most high profile project:
The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day was “be bold for change” in the fight for a “more gender inclusive world” – but some at Tesla had a different plan for the day.
It was an opportunity for women to discover essential oils. A “health and wellness group” at the electric car company invited female staff members to an 8 March “lunch ‘n learn” about oils and how they can help improve people’s “health and happiness”, according to emails seen by the Guardian, which reveal that the proposed event was quickly met with vocal criticism. It was particularly offensive to some given that a week earlier, AJ Vandermeyden, a female engineer, had publicly accused Elon Musk’s company of sexual harassment and discrimination.
Tesla postponed the oils session. The company organized a town hall meeting on diversity for that day, which included six male executives and one woman, according to multiple attendees. At the crowded meeting at the Fremont factory, women took the microphone one-by-one and shared stories of sexual harassment, mistreatment by male managers, unfair promotion decisions and more, sources said.
Vandermeyden, who attended the meeting, thought the outpouring of comments validated her own story. But soon after, Tesla fired her, accusing her of pursuing a “miscarriage of justice” by filing a lawsuit that alleged “pervasive harassment” and pay discrimination. Testimony from the town hall – along with internal emails from Musk, and Vandermeyden’s first interview since her termination – paint a picture of a company that has struggled to respond to mounting complaints about gender discrimination and has aggressively attempted to discredit a woman who publicly criticized it .
………
Musk also appeared to reference Vandermeyden in a company-wide email sent two days after her termination. In the email – with the subject “Doing the right thing”, sent at 2.29am – Musk lamented the scrutiny that his company faces, saying, “The list of companies that want to kill Tesla is so long, I’ve lost track.”As as a result, he continued, employees must work harder and faster than competitors, adding they can’t be a “jerk” in the process.
Musk did not name Vandermeyden, but went on to offer what seemed to be a thinly veiled attack on her lawsuit: “If you are part of a less represented group, you don’t get a free pass on being a jerk yourself. We have had a few cases at Tesla where someone in a less represented group was actually given a job or promoted over more qualified highly represented candidates and then decided to sue Tesla for millions of dollars because they felt they weren’t promoted enough. That is obviously not cool.”
(emphasis mine)
What a classic example of a narcissistic self entitled tech bro, and Elon Musk is supposed one of the “good” guys in Silicon Valley, someone who is out to save the world.
If this is their best, there is something seriously rotten in the immediate vicinity of San Jose.
Yesterday, the Teabaggers had a major case of butt hurt over a series of tweets sent out by National Public Radio.
They claimed that they were an attempt to provoke a revolution against Donald Trump. They were claiming that it was “fake news” and left wing propaganda.
One small problem, the series of 113 tweets was the declaration of independence:
For about 20 minutes Tuesday, NPR traveled back to 1776.
To echo its 29-year on-air tradition, the public radio network’s main Twitter account tweeted out the Declaration of Independence, line by line.
There — in 113 consecutive posts, in 140-character increments — was the text of the treasured founding document of the United States, from its soaring opening to its searing indictments of King George III’s “absolute tyranny” to its very last signature.
Who could have taken issue with such a patriotic exercise, done in honor of the nation’s birthday?
Quite a few people, it turned out.
Perhaps it was the Founding Fathers’ capitalization of random words or the sentence fragments into which some of the Declaration’s most recognizable lines were broken. But plenty of Twitter users reacted angrily to the thread, accusing NPR of spamming them — or, worse, trying to push an agenda.
Seriously?
You are claiming that the quoting the Declaration of Independence on Independence Day is a communist plot?
What the actual f%$#?
Where did you get your education, Hamburger University?
Seriously, if you freaked out over this, then you seriously need to evaluate your value system.
Also, take a history course, and try to actually read the founding documents that you claim to have so much affection for.
I am referring, of course to Hobby Lobby, which has been caught smuggling antiquities to provide exhibits for their “Museum”:
The packages that made their way from Israel and the United Arab Emirates to retail outlets owned by Hobby Lobby, the seller of arts and craft supplies, were clearly marked as tile samples.
But according to a civil complaint filed on Wednesday by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, they held something far rarer and more valuable: ancient clay cuneiform tablets that had been smuggled into the United States from Iraq.
Prosecutors said in the complaint that Hobby Lobby, whose evangelical Christian owners have long maintained an interest in the biblical Middle East, began in 2009 to assemble a collection of cultural artifacts from the Fertile Crescent. The company went so far as to send its president and an antiquities consultant to the United Arab Emirates to inspect a large number of rare cuneiform tablets — traditional clay slabs with wedge-shaped writing that originated in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago.
In 2010, as a deal for the tablets was being struck, an expert on cultural property law who had been hired by Hobby Lobby warned company executives that the artifacts might have been looted from historical sites in Iraq, and that failing to determine their heritage could break the law.
Despite these words of caution, the prosecutors said, Hobby Lobby bought more than 5,500 artifacts — the tablets and clay talismans and so-called cylinder seals — from an unnamed dealer for $1.6
million in December 2010.
In addition to the complaint, the prosecutors on Wednesday filed a stipulation of settlement with Hobby Lobby that requires the company to return all of the pieces, and to forfeit to the government an additional $3 million, resolving the civil action.………
Hobby Lobby’s purchase of the artifacts in December 2010 was fraught with “red flags,” according to the prosecutors. Not only did the company get conflicting information about the origin of the pieces, its representatives never met or spoke with the dealer who supposedly owned them, according to the complaint.
Instead, on the instructions of a second dealer, Hobby Lobby wired payments to seven separate personal bank accounts, the prosecutors said. The first dealer then shipped the items marked as clay or ceramic tiles to three Hobby Lobby sites in Oklahoma. All of the packages had labels falsely identifying their country of origin as Turkey, prosecutors said.
Multiple transfers to accounts, deliberate and varied mislabeling of their country of origin, and the CEO of Hobby Lobby is claiming that they should have been better at dotting their “I”s and crossing their “T”s.
This is bullsh%$. This was an organized effort by Hobby Lobby boss Steve Green to smuggle artifacts into the United States: He went to the UAE to inspect the artifacts, ignored conflicting data regarding provenance, and was scrupulous in using an intermediary to avoided dealing directly with the dealer of the artifacts.
Prosecutors should be pursuing him personally over this. The federal conspiracy statutes should cover this nicely.
Charter schools claim they are public schools. They are not. What public school is part of a corporate chain? What public school operates for profit? What public schools charges fees for service?
The KIPP schools in Houston have been charging fees to poor parents. Now that the scam has been exposed, KIPP refuses to refund the money to parents who need the money far more than the multi-million dollar KIPP organization does. KIPP [should] ask its patron, the rightwing Walton Family Foundation, for a few more dollars, enough to reimburse the needy families that it ripped off.
Supporters of school privatization will claim that this is an aberration. It isn’t.
This is a natural and foreseeable consequence of applying the for-profit business model to a public good.
It’s all about maximizing profit on while being paid by the taxpayers.
This is a feature, not a bug.
See also this diagram
The GE Engine
GE will be attempting to challenge Pratt & Whitney in the turboprop market, where the PT6 turboprop completely dominates the market.
Of interest to me is that GE will be copying the basic operating principals of the PT6,(paid subscription required) P&W’s reverse flow operation.
The inlet is at the back of the engine, and air flows forward. This allows the compressor and the compressor turbine to be completely separate from the power turbine and prop.
While the air flow is rather more circuitous than that of a straight through engine, it has a number of significant advantages:
The PT6 has used this formula to completely dominate the market, and it looks like GE will be aping their approach, with a lot of additive manufacturing throw into the mix:
………
Then there’s the ATP, GE’s Advanced Turboprop engine (see photo, above). This is a very big deal in terms of technology and targeting.
For those cloistered monks among you, some background: Pratt & Whitney Canada’s PT6 family has reigned supreme among turboprops since, well, forever. And for good reason. The type ranges in power from 500-2,000 shp and has demonstrated rock-solid reliability through decades of operation. Its bulletproof reputation is the reason almost all single-turboprop-powered aircraft—from the Piper’s owner-flown M600 to Beechcraft’s PT-6 Texan II military trainer to the do-it-all Pilatus PC-12—are fitted with a PT-6. More than 51,000 PT6s have been produced since the engine’s introduction in the 1960s. It has been expanded to include 69 versions that power some 100 different aircraft models, including all production King Airs.
GE hopes the ATP will break Pratt’s near monopoly. Developed at the company’s “turboprop center of excellence” in Prague with a $400 million investment, this, the world’s most “printed” engine (additive manufacturing has replaced 855 parts with a mere dozen 3D-printed components)features a single-lever integrated engine and propeller control, 16:1 pressure ratio, reverse-flow combustor and output of 850-1,650 shp. The design promises 20% better fuel burn, 10% more power and longer maintenance intervals than you know what.
This is, in its own way, a tribute to the genius of the design team that first devised the PT6.
The Canadian government has decided to pay Can$ 10 million to Omar Khadr.
To recapitulate the story, he was taken to Afghanistan by his father as a 15 year old, and then threw a grenade in a firefight that killed a US soldier.
He was taken into custody, tortured repeatedly, and eventually pled guilty, he was later repatriated to Canada, and then released on bail in 2014.
Khadr filed suit against the Canadian government for depriving him of his rights, and illegally treating as an adult while in detention, and now Canada has settled with him, paying him Can$10 million settlement:
Canada’s Liberal government will apologize to former Guantanamo Bay inmate Omar Khadr and pay him around C$10 million ($7.7 million) in compensation, two sources close to the matter said on Tuesday, prompting opposition protests.
A Canadian citizen, Khadr was captured in Afghanistan in 2002 at age 15 after a firefight with U.S. soldiers. He pleaded guilty to killing a U.S. Army medic and became the youngest inmate held at the military prison in Cuba.
Khadr later recanted and his lawyers said he had been grossly mistreated. In 2010, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that Canada breached his rights by sending intelligence agents to interrogate him and sharing the results with the United States.
The case proved divisive: defenders called Khadr a child soldier while the then-Conservative government dismissed calls to seek leniency, noting he had pleaded guilty to a serious crime.
The US took a child soldier and treated him as a criminal, they then tortured him abd coerced a confession out of him with the active support of the Canadian state security apparatus, a fact that Canada’s judiciary has repeatedly taken a dim view of.
This is a good thing, though I am not surprised that former PM Stephen Harper had to exit the scene for the right thing to be done. Harper was to doing the right thing as Josef Stalin was to rule of law.
It’s nice that the Canadian government is doing the right thing.
It will never happen here, since Obama decided to normalize this behavior, (Looking forward, not backward) and then systematically promoted the people who aided and abetted crimes against humanity in the US state security apparatus.
There will never be an accounting for the torturers, much like there will never be an accounting for the banksters who blew up the world in 2008.
There seems to be much hand wringing over the fact that not enough people want to work construction these days:
About two-thirds of the contractors who are struggling with the labor shortages gripping the construction industry say it has become a challenge to finish jobs on time, according to a new survey.
More than one-third of contractors said they are being forced to turn work down and 58% said they are putting in higher bids, said the survey sponsored by USG Corp. and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Three-quarters of those who said they are having difficulty finding skilled labor said they are simply asking their employees to work harder.
“Basically they’re just making people work harder as a way to cope,” said Steve Jones, senior director of Dodge Data & Analytics, which was the research partner of USG and the Chamber on the project.
If you have a shortage of workers, increase wage and non-wage remuneration to a level where you have enough workers.
This is literally Econ 101.
There are certain people who I will assume that anything they do is in furtherance of evil.
One of them is Peter Thiel, who literally has aspirations to be a vampire.
Now, he’s dropping big bucks on an attempt to revive the species of the Woolly Mammoth.
I do not know how reviving the Woolly Mammoth will make life more miserable for the rest of us, but given that Thiel is funding it, I guarantee that it will make life more miserable for the rest of us.
At least he’s not a one of the megalomaniacs planning on mounting a private operation to mine asteroids, which could easily be turned into a devastating weapon.
We are the most powerful warship in the world:
Holocaust History: My Aunt Had a Dinner Party, and Then She Took Her Guests to Kill 180 Jews
Both fascinating and horrifying.
Hizzoner wants to get money earmarked for handling the opioid crisis to avoid breaking his no new tax pledge.
As a result of the shutdown, all but emergency government services are shut down.
This includes things like government offices and state parks, unless you are Governor Chris Christie, in which case you have the beach to yourself:
People hoping to visit Island Beach State Park this holiday weekend were not allowed in because of the state government shutdown Gov. Chris Christie ordered amid the state budget standoff in Trenton.
But there was one family there: Christie’s. They are using the summer beach house provided by the state for a weekend down the Shore.
And here are exclusive aerial photos by NJ Advance Media showing Christie surrounded by wife, Mary Pat Christie, and others.
It was taken early Sunday afternoon before the governor headed to Trenton to hold another news conference about the shutdown.
At that news conference, Christie was asked if he got any sun Sunday.
“I didn’t,” he said. “I didn’t get any sun today.”
When later told of the photo, Brian Murray, the governor’s spokesman, said: “Yes, the governor was on the beach briefly today talking to his wife and family before heading into the office.”
“He did not get any sun,” Murray added. “He had a baseball hat on.“
(emphasis mine)
Bad move Governor. I’ve seen your poll numbers, and they are so low that about the only way for you to salvage your political career would be to get cancer.
It make some voters feel sympathy for you. (Not me, but some voters ……… maybe)
Take off the hat, and no sunscreen.
The state of Washington commissioned a study of Seattle’s minimum wage, and found that low wage workers lost money as a result.
This comes as a surprise, since all the other studies found no effect, but this has not stopped the economic journalist community from touting this as conclusive evidence that raising the minimum wage does now work.
What the study concluded was that for low wage workers, the number of hours worked decreased, resulting in a loss of wages, but the devil is in the details.
The study appears to have been deliberately structured to deliver this results:
This is complete crap:
Words cannot describe the torment experienced by the data before they confessed what the University of Washington team got them to confess. I can only urge readers with an open mind to study Table 3 carefully. The average wage increase, from the second quarter of 2014 to the third quarter of 2016, for all employees of single site establishments was 18 percent. Eighteen percent! That is an annual increase of almost 8 percent. For two and a quarter years in a row. Not bad. And the number of hours worked of ALL employees of single site establishments? Up 18 percent in a little over two years. That too is an increase of almost 8 percent per annum.
Now multiply that wage by those hours and the total payroll for all employees rose 39.5 percent over the course of nine quarters. An annual rate of increase of 17.5 percent. These are BIG numbers. They are freaking HUGE numbers.
It must have taken a team of at least six academics to extract a 9.4 percent decline in hours from the 86,842 workers (out of a total of 336,517) earning under $19 dollars an hour at these single-site establishments. Look at the Table and weep.
(emphasis original)
Sources as diverse as the Economic Policy Institute and the Financial Times have excoriated the methodology here as well for much the same reasons.
Since the study has not yet been peer reviewed, I’d like to see the results, because I think that the the authors had a conclusion, and then cherry picked data to confirm their desired outcome.
