Month: June 2018

Finally, a Google Update that I Approve Of

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Back in January 2017, Google and Uber teamed up to put a cool feature in Google Maps: You could search for, book, and pay for an Uber all directly from Google Maps. You didn’t even need the Uber app installed. Now, 18 months later, the feature is dead. Google posted a new support page (first spotted by Android Police) that flatly states, “You can no longer book Uber rides directly in Google Maps.”

The feature would have you search for a location in Google Maps and ask for directions like normal, but instead of choosing walking, driving, biking, or mass transit directions, a tab for ride-sharing would allow you to book a ride directly. The ride-sharing tab still exists, but instead of booking an Uber, it just gives you an estimate and offers to kick you out to the Uber app.

My guess?  Other ride sharing apps were looking for a similar space, and Uber attempted to steal autonomous driving tech from Google, and Uber has simply become toxic on many levels.

Of the three, my guess is that the latter was the deciding factor.

Not a Surprise

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As someone who founded a non-profit 501(c)3 charity, I tried to make sure that I never personally benefited from what it did.

It wasn’t that hard, because I never drew a salary, and the total budget while I ran involved in managing the organization was less than $100K annually while I was there.

I did, however, manage to f%$# up lots of other things,

However, it appears that this was a bridge too far for Donald Trump and his Evil Minions™:

The New York State attorney general’s office filed a scathingly worded lawsuit on Thursday taking aim at the Donald J. Trump Foundation, accusing the charity and the Trump family of sweeping violations of campaign finance laws, self-dealing and illegal coordination with the presidential campaign.

The lawsuit, which seeks to dissolve the foundation and bar President Trump and three of his children from serving on nonprofit organizations, was an extraordinary rebuke of a sitting president. The attorney general also sent referral letters to the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Election Commission for possible further action, adding to Mr. Trump’s extensive legal challenges.

The lawsuit, filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, culminated a nearly two-year investigation of Mr. Trump’s charity, which became a subject of scrutiny during and after the 2016 presidential campaign. While such foundations are supposed to be devoted to charitable activities, the petition asserts that Mr. Trump’s was often improperly used to settle legal claims against his various businesses, even spending $10,000 on a portrait of Mr. Trump that was hung at one of his golf clubs.

The foundation was also used to curry political favor, the lawsuit asserts. During the 2016 race, the foundation became a virtual arm of Mr. Trump’s campaign, email traffic showed, with his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, directing its expenditures, even though such foundations are explicitly prohibited from political activities.

The attorney general’s office is seeking the Trump Foundation to pay $2.8 million in restitution, the amount raised for the foundation at a 2016 Iowa political fund-raiser. At the time, Mr. Trump skipped a Republican debate and set up his own event to raise money for veterans, though he used the event to skewer his opponents and celebrate his own accomplishments.

Seriously, this sh%$ is not tough.

When I applied for not-for-profit in Massachusetts, they provided the case study, where Students Against Driving Drunk (SADD) and its founder were bitch-slapped by authorities for making significant golden parachute payments.

Determining what is, and is not, illegal “Self Dealing” ain’t rocket science, folks, but the Trump clan are too stupid, and too venal, to get that.

Your Military Industrial Complex in a Nutshell

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As a part of supporting the Afghan military, the Pentagon is upgrading Kabul’s helicopters.

There are a few small problems though: In addition to the Afgan military not being able to maintain its new Black Hawk helicopters, the Russian Helos that it is replacing outperform the Black Hawk by almost every metric:


A report from a top U.S. military watchdog has finally acknowledged that the UH-60A+ Black Hawks that the United States is supplying to the Afghan Air Force are less capable and harder to maintain than the Russian-made Mi-17 Hip helicopters they have now. The review raises concerns that this could limit Afghanistan’s ability to conduct operations across the country unless steps are taking to mitigate the loss of capability, something we at The War Zone have long warned could easily be the case.

………

“The transition [from Mi-17s to UH-60s] presents several challenges that have yet to be fully addressed,” the report says in a section dedicated to the issue. “Black Hawks do not have the lift capacity of Mi-17s.”

“They are unable to accommodate some of the larger cargo items the Mi-17s can carry, and in general, it takes almost two Black Hawks to carry the load of a single Mi-17,” the review continues. “Furthermore, unlike Mi-17s, Black Hawks cannot fly at high elevations and, as such, cannot operate in remote regions of Afghanistan where Mi-17s operate.”

………

“The Mi-17 is ‘much more conducive to the education level available in the general Afghan population than the UH-60As’ when it comes to maintenance,” the 9th Air Expeditionary Task Force-Afghanistan (AETF-A), the U.S. Air Force’s top command for operations in Afghanistan, which also oversees advising the Afghan Air Force, said, according to the Pentagon Inspector General’s review. “The expectation is that the AAF will be almost entirely reliant on contractors for Black Hawk maintenance in the near- to mid-term.”

That reliance on contractors is a feature not a bug:  This is more of the deferred compensation for general officers program that appears to be the raison d’être of the Pentagon these days.

Whoever made this decision will secure a well remunerated post military retirement sinecure with Sikorsky, one of its suppliers, or the contractors that the Afghans (actually us) are paying very well for support services.

What Took So Long?

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2 years after the Theranos was revealed to be a fraud, prosecutors have finally gotten around to charging Theranos executives with fraud.

Is Elizabeth Holmes had been a black woman kiting $500 in checks, she would have already been tried, convicted, and would be serving a decade long sentence:

Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of Theranos, the lab testing company that promised to revolutionize health care, and its former president, Ramesh Balwani, were indicted on Friday on charges of defrauding investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars as well as deceiving hundreds of patients and doctors.

The criminal charges were the culmination of a rarity in Silicon Valley — federal prosecution of a technology start-up. This one boasted a board stacked with prominent political figures and investors, and a startling valuation of $9 billion just a few years ago. In the fabled universe of overnight billionaires and unicorns, companies with billion-dollar valuations, Ms. Holmes had catapulted herself and her company into the buzz-filled world of “disrupters” by pledging to upend the health industry and give consumers control over their own care.

Both Ms. Holmes and Mr. Balwani pleaded not guilty to charges of wire fraud. Lawyers for Ms. Holmes could not be reached for comment, but a lawyer for Mr. Balwani said in a statement that his client was “innocent and looks forward to clearing his name at trial.”

The indictment was filed by the United States attorney’s office in San Francisco and came about three months after the Securities and Exchange Commission settled civil fraud charges against Ms. Holmes.

On Friday, Theranos also announced that Ms. Holmes, who founded Theranos in 2003 as a 19-year-old Stanford University dropout, stepped down as chief executive. She will be replaced by David Taylor, the company’s general counsel, according to a statement from the company, which did not respond to requests for additional comment.

The small picture here is a multi-billion dollar grift

The larger picture is that this is generally how business is done in Silicon Valley, only with software, where you can always claim that the next patch will take care of the problem.

Much of the whole “Unicorn” culture of Silicon Valley is indistinguishable from fraud.

Alexander Was Not Greek, He Conquered Greece

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Their alleged causus belli was that Macedonia’s name implied a claim to a Greek province.

In reality, the Greeks want to imagine that the foreigner who conquered Greece 2500 years ago was actually Greek, and their feelings were hurt.

Those delicate snowflakes:

The leaders of Macedonia and Greece reached an agreement on Tuesday to end a 27-year feud surrounding the Balkan country’s name.

The prime ministers Alexis Tsipras and Zoran Zaev have agreed to refer to Macedonia as the Republic of Northern Macedonia, or Severna Makedonija in the Macedonian language. The name change is an effort to prevent territorial claims to Greece’s northern region of Macedonia.

Greece’s Macedonia includes the major port city of Thessaloniki, and tensions have existed between Greece and its neighbor for over two decades following the breakup of Yugoslavia.

The capital of Skopje adopted the name of Macedonia in 1991, following its independence, and Greece vetoed the country’s bid to join NATO and the European Union over the name dispute.

Doing Good Does Not Excuse Doing it Badly

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Case in point, Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, who has decided to go Walmart on its employees’ attempt to unionize:

Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains is asking Donald Trump’s National Labor Relations Board for help in busting its staff union. Last December staff at the clinic voted to join the Service Employees International Union (SEIU); management is challenging that decision.

By using the rightwing Trump administration against its own workers, a Planned Parenthood chapter is effectively pitting two powerful beacons of progressive politics against one another, at a time when we all need them to be working together. That’s bad enough. But it’s especially troubling for a reproductive rights organization to take an anti-union stance, given that unions are central to feminist progress.
Unionized workers suffer less sex discrimination and sexual harassment than other workers, and when they do experience these things, unions offer grievance procedures to address them, as well as solidarity and guidance. By contrast, the neoliberal workplace – and the gig economy – offer women the opportunity to lean in and suck it up.

The goal at this point should not be just to have Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains to reverse course:  Their senior management needs to go now.

This behavior, I call it the Ralph Nader school of persnnel management for non-profits, is an intolerable and an unaffordable hypocrisy.

Pass the Popcorn

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Paul Manafort has been remanded to custody for violating his bail by attempted witness tampering:


A federal judge ordered Paul Manafort to jail Friday over charges he tampered with witnesses while out on bail — a major blow for President Trump’s former campaign chairman as he awaits trial on federal conspiracy and money-laundering charges next month.

“You have abused the trust placed in you six months ago,” U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson told Manafort. “The government motion will be granted, and the defendant will be detained.”

The judge said sending Manafort to a cell was “an extraordinarily difficult decision” but said his conduct — allegedly contacting witnesses in the case in an effort to get them to lie to investigators — left her little choice.

“This is not middle school. I can’t take away his cellphone,” she said. “If I tell him not to call 56 witnesses, will he call the 57th?” She said she should not have to draft a court order spelling out the entire criminal code for him to avoid violations.

“This hearing is not about politics. It is not about the conduct of the office of special counsel. It is about the defendant’s conduct,” Jackson said. “I’m concerned you seem to treat these proceedings as another marketing exercise.”

Manafort was led out of the courtroom by security officers. He turned and gave a last look and wave to his wife, seated in the well of the court. She nodded back to him.

As a spectator sport, I actually find this a lot more interesting than watching the World Cup, but I’m an American, so Soccer ……… meh.

Three Stopped Clock Moments in 1 Week

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First, notwithstanding the ruling by a George W. Bush appointed judge approving the AT&T — Time Warner merger, Trump and his Evil Minions™ were correct in opposing that merger.

Judge Richard Leon noted the lack of immediate negative consequences to the consumer, the classic analysis developed by Robert Bork, but that analysis is legally, functional, and historically bankrupt. 

Even a cursory analysis of antitrust law reveals that Congress’s original intent was driven by concerns about the barriers to entry for new competitors and the political power of monopolies than it was consumer welfare.

Second, Trump was right in the core of his dispute with the other G7 members in that he trade deals should not be an eternal and unchanging edifice upon which our world is based.

His proposal for sunset clauses in trade deals, so that countries can reevaluate policies as conditions change, is correct.

To quote Keynes, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?”

He gets almost everything wrong. But last weekend Donald Trump got something right. To the horror of the other leaders of the rich world, he defended democracy against its detractors. Perhaps predictably, he has been universally condemned for it.

His crime was to insist that the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) should have a sunset clause. In other words, it should not remain valid indefinitely, but expire after five years, allowing its members either to renegotiate it or to walk away. To howls of execration from the world’s media, his insistence has torpedoed efforts to update the treaty.

In Rights of Man, published in 1791, Thomas Paine argued that: “Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.” This is widely accepted – in theory if not in practice – as a basic democratic principle.

Finally, of course, is his talks with the DPRK, which has shown more progress than 20 years of refusing to negotiate on an one on one and direct basis and sanctons.

Of course, this is Trump, and he, and his administration, could f%$# up a 2 car funeral, so the probability that this will eventually lead to concrete positive developments is a rather remote.

There Is a Joke Here, but I Need Help to Find It

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Pimp Dennis Hof, the owner of half a dozen legal brothels in Nevada and star of the HBO adult reality series “Cathouse,” won a Republican primary for the state Legislature on Tuesday, ousting a three-term lawmaker.

Hof defeated hospital executive James Oscarson. He’ll face Democrat Lesia Romanov in November and will be the favored candidate in the Republican-leaning Assembly district.

Hof celebrated his win at a party in Pahrump with Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss at his side.

“It’s all because Donald Trump was the Christopher Columbus for me,” Hof told the Associated Press in a phone call. “He found the way and I jumped on it.”

Hof, who wrote a book titled “The Art of the Pimp,” has dubbed himself “The Trump of Pahrump,” and held a rally with longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone. Hof was in the limelight in 2015, when former NBA player Lamar Odom was found unconscious at Hof’s Love Ranch brothel in Crystal after a four-day, $75,000 stay.

Seriously:  I see that there is a joke here, but the actual gag (pun intended) escapes me.

Linkage

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My favorite song from The Who:

I Am Shocked — Shocked — to Find That Gambling Is Going on in Here!

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Your winnings, sir

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has looked at stock buybacks, and has discovered to its chagrin that it looks a lot like stock manipulation:

A study by the SEC of 385 recent share-buyback announcements — this is when companies announce how much money they will spend in the future on buying back their own shares, but before they actually begin buying them — found:

  • Share-buyback announcements led to “abnormal returns” in the share price over the next 30 days.
  • Executives used this share price surge to cash out.

“In fact, twice as many companies have insiders selling in the eight days after a buyback announcement as sell on an ordinary day. So right after the company tells the market that the stock is cheap, executives overwhelmingly decide to sell,” explained SEC Commissioner Robert Jackson Jr. – appointed by President Trump and sworn in earlier this year – in a speech today. He went on:

And, in the process, executives take a lot of cash off the table. On average, in the days before a buyback announcement, executives trade in relatively small amounts—less than $100,000 worth. But during the eight days following a buyback announcement, executives on average sell more than $500,000 worth of stock each day—a fivefold increase. Thus, executives personally capture the benefit of the short-term stock-price pop created by the buyback announcement:

“This trading is not necessarily illegal,” he added. “But it is troubling, because it is yet another piece of evidence that executives are spending more time on short-term stock trading than long-term value creation.”

Gee, you think?

Stock buybacks used to be banned, they were considered illegal stock manipulation, but Ronald Reagan rescinded that rule, and the ensuing orgy of looting was the inevitable result.

God bless America.

Support Your Local Police

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Baltimore’s own Gun Trace Task Force

A police chief in Florida decided that it would be good to have a 100% clearance rate on burglaries, so he framed a teen to close 4 cases:

Raimundo Atesiano had a statistic to tout at a town council meeting in Biscayne Park, a village of 3,000 in the middle of Florida’s Miami-Dade County.

The Biscayne Park Police Department, where Atesiano was chief at the time, had a clearance rate of 100 percent for burglaries, he said at the July 2013 meeting, according to federal court documents.

But the statistics were a fictitious stunt to gain favor with elected officials, according to an indictment filed by Benjamin G. Greenberg, the U.S. attorney in South Florida.

Atesiano, with the help of two officers from his department, conspired to falsely arrest and charge a 16-year-old with four unsolved burglary cases that year, prosecutors said Monday.

Atesiano and the two former officers, Charlie Dayoub and Raul Fernandez, were charged by federal prosecutors with conspiracy to violate civil rights under color of law and deprivation of the 16-year-old’s civil rights. If convicted, the three could face 11-year prison sentences.

Not enough time in jail for these folks.

The Official Headgear of the Seattle City Council

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Perfect for Caving

The Seattle City Councel has caved to Amazon and its Evil Minions™, and voted to repeal their head tax on large employers.

It appears that Jeff Bezos’ campaign donations are more important than dealing with the homeless problem:


Seattle’s city council on Tuesday rolled back its so-called “head tax” on big businesses to fund homeless services, less than a month after it unanimously approved the compromise deal.

The tax would have collected about $275 per head on employees at businesses with more than $20 million in annual revenue, raising roughly $48 million a year for housing and other services for the city’s booming homeless population. By the latest count, King County was home to more than 12,000 people experiencing homelessness, most of them in Seattle.

“We have reached the conclusion that this is not a winnable battle at this time,” Councilwoman Lisa Herbold said before the vote. “I am not someone who walks away from what looks like a losing fight, but … there is so much more to lose between today and November.”

Pressure from Amazon had already cut the original tax nearly in half, but then the company joined Starbucks and others in backing a campaign to put the tax to a referendum vote this fall. The No Head Tax campaign had raised more than $285,000 through the end of May, according to filings with the city.

………

The decision to repeal the tax was blamed on the bottomless coffers of the opposition, a nod to Amazon’s stunning wealth, and thus, influence in local politics.

“I have been unable to find a way forward that we could out-fund and out-resource the opposition campaign by November,” said Councilwoman Lorena Gonzalez ahead of the vote. “Money has funded this campaign that put us in a position where we have to repeal this law.”

NO.

You don’t just give up without a fight.

You fight, and you make them spend that money, and you talk about Amazon is the worst employer in America that constantly has its hand out for subsides, and you staple this issue to recently retired Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz so that his putative campaign for President.

Amazon and Starbucks don’t own Seattle, and you need to fight back.

Pathetic.

When People Who Hate Mass Transit Make Mass Transit Recommendations

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Appearing in The Atlantic, which seems to be ground zero for contrarian idiocy. is the suggestion that the solution to the chronic under-funding of the New York City subway is tearing out the tracks and using the tunnels for self-driving cars and hoverboards.

What we have here is a techno-libertarian who believes that the way to fix mass transit is to replaced it with personal transit, which have already clogged the streets of every major metropolis.

The reason that the subway, or for that matter surface mass transit, moves far more people in far less space than individual cars is because it is following a discrete route with discrete stops.

Personal mass transit is not mass transit, and has few, if any benefits of real mass transit.

As to innovations, one only needs to look at how app enabled Gypsy cabs have worsened traffic congestion, to see how they don’t f%$#ing get it.

Someone is SO Getting Fired

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The New York Times published a rather ordinary article about how various space launcher firms are trying to appeal to the hyper-rich.

What you may not notice if you click to go to the story is what the original URL is: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/09/style/pigs-in-spaaaaaace.html though it now redirects to https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/09/style/axiom-space-travel.html.

I prefer the first url, since this is clearly a “Rich Pig” story, even if the author played is straight.

Kudos to whoever got this on the Times web site, if only for a few hours.

H/t Naked Capitalism for finding this bit of IT mischief.