“Bitcoin’s basically a re-enactment society for early modern economics. Like getting dressed up in medieval garb and going to feasts except instead you get to re-discover why each and every financial regulation we have today came into existence.” – Riina Stewart— David Gerard (@davidgerard) February 7, 2019
I would argue that you can apply this more generally to the entire tech industry.
The joke I heard:
Amy Klobuchar is a very likable and popular senator from Minnesota. She wins re-election with 70% of the vote there. The other 30% have worked for her.
I do not know of the stories about her treatment of her staff are true, but this joke is as funny as hell.
Amid record profits, GM is shuttering Canadian plants, and moving production to Mexico, and the Canadian auto union Unifor has run a Super Bowl ad condemning the move.
GM has responded by threatening to sue the labor union:
The Canadian trade union Unifor is pissed that GM is shutting down the Oshawa Assembly Plant, which has a long and rich history spanning over 100 years. GM says on its website that the facility—which now builds the Cadillac XTS, Chevy Impala, Chevy Silverado, and GMC Sierra—has been open since 1953, but that before that, it built McLaughlin Buicks and Chevrolets prior to The Bowtie merging with GM in 1918.
Despite all of that history, in 2018, GM announced plans to close the historic manufacturing site. Shortly thereafter, workers walked out in protest, and the president of Unifor, the trade union representing the plant workers, voiced his displeasure, saying “They are not closing our damn plant without one hell of a fight,” per CTV News.
But last night, during the Super Bowl, the battle between Unifor and GM got heated, with the former unleashing this commercial in Canada:
The commercial is scathing, mentioning how Canada helped GM with the bailout last decade, and criticizing the company’s expansion into Mexico. “GM, you may have forgotten our generosity,” the commercial concludes, “but we’ll never forget your greed. If you want to sell here, build here.”
According to the Detroit News, GM wasn’t thrilled, and even threatened legal action:
Who knew that the automobile manufacturer was such a bunch of beautiful cinnamon rolls who are too good for this world?
In related news, Unifor is also calling for a boycott of Mexican made vehicles.
If the VIN starts with the number “3”, it’s from Mexico.
One of the road hazards that users can report are speed traps, and cops HATE that, because that’s how they make their money.
Well, now the NYPD has issued a cease and desist letter to Waze, who promptly told them to go Cheney themselves:
The popular traffic app Waze gathers user-submitted feedback to alert drivers to possible inconveniences they might experience on the road—inconveniences like getting stuck at DWI traffic point. Now, the NYPD reportedly has a message for Waze and its parent company Google: Snitches get stitches.
CBS New York obtained a cease and desist letter that it claims was sent by the NYPD to Google in the law enforcement agency insists the Waze app is creating a dangerous situation by alerting users of nearby checkpoints. According to the report, the letter states:
Individuals who post the locations of DWI checkpoints may be engaging in criminal conduct since such actions could be intentional attempts to prevent and/or impair the administration of the DWI laws and other relevant criminal and traffic laws.
The posting of such information for public consumption is irresponsible since it only serves to aid impaired and intoxicated drivers to evade checkpoints and encourage reckless driving. Revealing the location of checkpoints puts those drivers, their passengers, and the general public at risk.
Curiously, a link to the full letter on the CBS website is now broken. An NYPD spokesperson told Gizmodo in an email, “I can confirm the NYPD sent the letter.” When asked for comment, a Google representative told us, “Safety is a top priority when developing navigation features at Google. We believe that informing drivers about upcoming speed traps allows them to be more careful and make safer decisions when they’re on the road.”
There are a number of things that are wrong with what the police have done.
First, Waze does not report sobriety check-points, ir reports speed traps, traffic cams, and the presence of police cars.
Second, this is a seriously chicken sh%$ move, but seriously chicken sh%$ moves are all a part of law enforcement mentality, which is why one occasionally hear porcine metaphors when referring to the local constabulary.
Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) is proposing a transaction tax on financial transactions.
This tax, called a “Tobin Tax”, after its creator, Nobel Prize winning economist James Tobin, would serve to disincentivize speculative activities:
Wall Street would bear the brunt of the latest tax proposal as Democrats jockey for the most progressive tax ideas with the approach of the 2020 elections.
Senator Brian Schatz, a Hawaii Democrat, is working on a plan that would tax financial trades, according to his spokesman, Michael Inacay, who declined to provide details on how, exactly, it would be structured.
Financial transaction taxes typically place a levy of a fraction of a percent on the price of a securities trade. The idea has gained popularity within the Democratic Party as a way to curb high-frequency trading as well as raise revenue for progressive policies such as free college tuition.
………
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, another 2020 presidential candidate, as well as Sanders, has backed plans that would tax financial trades. The revenue of a tax set at 0.1 percent of the value of a securities trade is estimated to raise about $777 billion over a decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Overseas, the idea for a tax on financial trades in gaining steam. Stock buyers in Europe would pay a 0.2 percent tax under a plan that Germany and France proposed last month.
Of course, such a tax might not raise that much money, because it would serve to discourage reckless speculation.
To quote Randall Munroe, “Mission f%$#ing accomplished.:
Assuming that it is properly structured, so, for example, short sellers would have to pay for each of their 4 transactions, (borrow, sell, buy, return) any revenue shortfall would be just fine with me.
SpongeBob Singing “Sweet Victory”:
It doesn’t feel like historically low unemployment, and one of the reasons why is that involuntary part-time work is also at an all time high, and the standard U-3 measure does not count them:
Britain just notched up yet another record-breaking low for unemployment, according to the government. Unemployment stayed at just 4%, while the number of people with jobs rose to 32.54 million, or 75.8%, “the highest since comparable estimates began in 1971,” according to the UK’s Office for National Statistics.
But once again, the monthly jobs tally eclipsed how that miracle was achieved. “Headline” unemployment is only at a record low because of a 42% increase in the number of people who are in “involuntary” part-time work.
“Involuntary” means they’re only working part-time because they cannot get a full-time job.
In March 2006, at the peak of the economic boom that preceded the great financial crisis, involuntary part-time work was at a low of 620,000. It rose to a peak after the 2008 crisis. But today, after 10 years of economic growth, it has settled back to 881,000 — an increase of 42% over the period, according to the ONS.This is not good news.
Four percent unemployment is technically “full employment.” Anyone who wants a job should be able to get one. But 881,000 workers need full-time jobs — the kind that get people out of poverty — and those jobs are not available.
I have a feeling that this is a feature, not a bug.
The politicians get to crow about success, and the captains of industry still don’t have to pay a fair wage.
Green energy campaigners in Canada applauded a precedent-settiing Supreme Court ruling on Thursday which ordered the bankrupt Alberta-based oil and gas company Redwater Energy to clean up its failed wells instead of leaving the task to the public.
Observing the “polluter pays principle,” the 5-2 ruling overturned two earlier decisions by lower courts which had sided with a federal law stating that insolvent companies could prioritize paying back their creditors over fulfilling their environmental obligations.
“Bankruptcy is not a license to ignore rules,” Chief Justice Richard Wagner wrote in the ruling, which was celebrated as one that would set a new precedent for the entire country.
“The Supreme Court of Canada has prioritized paying clean up costs before creditors when extractive companies go bankrupt. This outcome reinforces the growing understanding that polluters are responsible for their clean up obligations,” said the Pembina Institute, a think tank focused on clean energy and environmental policy.
Indeed.
I would argue that corporate bankruptcy generally serves to provide too much protection to companies and management.
In addition to ecological damage, how about allowing the claw back of sky high executive pay, private equity management fees, etc. as a part of bankruptcy proceedings.
The Russian Navy reportedly has a new weapon that can disrupt the eyesight of targets as well as make them hallucinate and vomit.
Russian state news agency RIA Novosti reported that a Russian military contractor has installed the weapon on two Russian warships.
The weapon fires a beam similar to a strobe light that affects the target’s eyesight, making it more difficult for them to aim at night. During testing, volunteers reportedly used rifles and guns to shoot targets that were protected by the weapon. The volunteers reported having trouble aiming because they couldn’t see.
Additionally, about half of the volunteers said they felt dizzy, nauseous and disoriented. About 20 percent of the volunteers reported experiencing hallucinations.
The weapon, called the Filin, has reportedly been installed on the Admiral Gorshkov and Admiral Kasatonov, two Russian warships. The weapon is expected to be installed on more ships that are currently being built.
This is actually not as far out as it sounds. A phenomenon known as Flicker vertigo, as well as a flashlight type device that has been mooted for law enforcement use, have been known for years.
Still, it’s an opportunity for me to make a cheap snark, so I took it.
T/t naked capitalism.
I understand that prosecutors are loath to pursue charges in cases of law enforcement, but this Sheriff needs to go to jail.He used courtroom cameras to read notepads of the defense attorney and a juror.
This is so blatantly corrupt and so blatantly illegal that he should be arrested and held without bail:
Some defense attorneys in San Juan County worry that Sheriff Ron Krebs has a finger on the scales of justice after learning he used a courtroom security camera to surreptitiously zoom in on defense documents and a juror’s notebook during a criminal trial last week.
The incident has drawn outrage from criminal and civil-rights attorneys and frustration from the county prosecutor, and prompted a rare weekend hearing during which a judge dismissed misdemeanor assault and trespass charges against a Lopez Island man after finding the incident amounted to government misconduct that had violated his right to a fair trial.
“I’m flabbergasted,” said San Juan Public Defender Colleen Kenimond, the attorney whose notes were targeted. “This was a court of law. You are supposed to be safe there, and the proceedings are supposed to be fair. Here, the sheriff used the courtroom to violate my client’s rights. Outrageous hardly covers it.”
Kenimond isn’t alone. San Juan County Prosecutor Randall Gaylord — whose office has been stung by misconduct in the Sheriff’s Office before — distanced himself from Krebs. “I too am frustrated at what has happened here, frustrated that it has happened to cases I personally was involved in, and concerned about the community we represent.”
………
In court filings, Krebs and Gaylord insisted the incident was isolated and unintentional and resulted from security concerns about the defendant in the case, who allegedly had threatened to stab a Lopez Island grocer. Krebs, in a sworn declaration, said he “inadvertently manipulated the camera in the District Courtroom in such a way that it zoomed in on one or more locations in the courtroom” and insisted he didn’t read or pass on anything he may have seen. He claimed he did not know the camera had a zoom function.
Bullsh%$.
I guarantee that this is not the first time that he did this, it’s just the first time he got caught doing this.
Even if it had been the fist time, he should be in facing criminal charges over this.
Remember Nancy Pelosi’s promise to the insurance companies that there won’t ever be Medicare for all.
I am not suggesting that you close your wallet for the 2020 election season, but I AM suggesting that allowing the party establishment to decide where YOUR money goes is a sucker bet”
Less than a month after Democrats — many of them running on “Medicare for All” — won back control of the House of Representatives in November, the top health policy aide to then-prospective House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with Blue Cross Blue Shield executives and assured them that party leadership had strong reservations about single-payer health care and was more focused on lowering drug prices, according to sources familiar with the meeting.
Pelosi adviser Wendell Primus detailed five objections to Medicare for All and said that Democrats would be allies to the insurance industry in the fight against single-payer health care. Primus pitched the insurers on supporting Democrats on efforts to shrink drug prices, specifically by backing a number of measures that the pharmaceutical lobby is opposing.
Primus, in a slide presentation obtained by The Intercept, criticized single payer on the basis of cost (“Monies are needed for other priorities”), opposition (“Stakeholders are against; Creates winners and losers”), and “implementation challenges.” We have recreated the slides for source protection purposes.
An added benefit to not giving to the DCCC is that the DC consultants won’t siphon away 60% of your donations to line their own pockets.
Thank God for language geeks.
The New York State Senate has appointed a vociferous critic of Amazon “HQ2” deal to the Public Authorities Control Board, which has the power to stop the deal.
I think that there are a couple of things going on here, first the Senate is feeling its oats in challenging a governor of their own party who attempted to keep the body in Republican hands, and second, after the Foxconn debacle in Wisconsin, this deal has become much less popular with the general public.
In either case, :
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and newly emboldened Democrats in the State Senate appeared headed for open warfare on Monday over a plan to bring Amazon to New York City after the Senate leader named a critic of the $3 billion deal to a state board that could scuttle it.
The decision to choose the critic, Senator Michael Gianaris, for the board immediately presented a direct political challenge for Mr. Cuomo — who must decide whether to refuse the Senate’s selection. And it demonstrated the ability of the Democrat-led State Legislature to call into question the governor’s control over the kinds of state boards that, in recent years, he had been mostly able to bend to his will.
………
Mr. Cuomo could reject the pick, though doing so could create a protracted standoff with the Senate leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, and her fellow Democrats. Already, the battle lines were hardening on Monday as Mr. Cuomo’s office reacted angrily to Mr. Gianaris’s appointment.
………
It was yet another sour note in the Amazon deal. Company executives have bristled at the intense criticism and, last week at a City Council hearing, seemed to float the notion that Amazon could reconsider its commitment to New York.
The ability of a local legislator to block the deal to bring a major new Amazon campus to Long Island City was exactly what Mr. Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio had tried to avoid when they decided to use a state development process and to bypass more onerous city rules. Opposition, while vocal, seemed futile.
But now, with the insistence of Senate Democrats on appointing Mr. Gianaris to the little-known Public Authorities Control Board, those who want to stop Amazon from coming to Queens have gotten their most tangible boost yet. The board will have to decide on the development plan for Amazon, Mr. Cuomo has said, and could veto it.
………
The obscure state board does have a history of blocking major deals: 14 years ago, it helped derail former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plans for a new stadium in Manhattan.
………
He would be one of three voting members of the board; any voting member of the board has the power to stop projects that come before it.………
Lawmakers have used the Public Authorities Control Board — whose voting members are appointed by the Senate, the Assembly and the governor — as a roadblock to big projects before. In 2005, Mr. Bloomberg saw his plan for a stadium on the West Side of Manhattan, part of the city’s bid to host the 2012 Olympics, shot down in front of the board by the vote of one state lawmaker, Sheldon Silver, who was then the Assembly speaker. Mr. Silver said he could not support a deal that could harm the district in Lower Manhattan that he represented.
(emphasis mine)
I doesn’t help that Amazon has stated that it will continue to aggressively sabotage any unionization efforts in the state.
Call me old fashioned, but I find being on the side of the KKK and Nazis vaguely un-American:
The FBI opened a “domestic terrorism” investigation into a civil rights group in California, labeling the activists “extremists” after they protested against neo-Nazis in 2016, new documents reveal.
Federal authorities ran a surveillance operation on By Any Means Necessary (Bamn), spying on the leftist group’s movements in an inquiry that came after one of Bamn’s members was stabbed at the white supremacist rally, according to documents obtained by the Guardian. The FBI’s Bamn files reveal:
- The FBI investigated Bamn for potential “conspiracy” against the “rights” of the “Ku Klux Klan” and white supremacists.
- The FBI considered the KKK as victims and the leftist protesters as potential terror threats, and downplayed the threats of the Klan, writing: “The KKK consisted of members that some perceived to be supportive of a white supremacist agenda.”
- The FBI’s monitoring included in-person surveillance, and the agency cited Bamn’s advocacy against “rape and sexual assault” and “police brutality” as evidence in the terrorism inquiry.
The FBI’s 46-page report on Bamn, obtained by the government transparency non-profit Property of the People through a records request, presented an “astonishing” description of the KKK, said Mike German, a former FBI agent and far-right expert who reviewed the documents for the Guardian.
………
Shanta Driver, Bamn’s national chair, criticized the investigation in a statement to the Guardian, saying, “The FBI’s interest in BAMN is part of a long-standing policy … Starting with their campaign to persecute and slander Dr. Martin Luther King, they have a racist history of targeting peaceful civil rights and anti-racist organizations, while doing nothing to prosecute the racists and fascists who attacked Dr. King and the movement he built.”The FBI launched its terrorism investigation and surveillance of Bamn after white supremacists armed with knives faced off with hundreds of counter-protesters, including Bamn activists, at a June 2016 neo-Nazi rally in Sacramento. Although numerous neo-Nazis were suspected of stabbing at least seven anti-fascists in the melee, leaving some with life-threatening injuries, the FBI chose to launch a inquiry into the activities of the leftwing protesters.
I really do believe that the FBI needs to to be fumigated to get the cockroaches descended from Hoover out of the organization.
So I will not be watching Trump’s state of the union speech.
Simply put, I will have a much more pleasant evening doing something else.
Now, where is that sledge hammer…….
It is impossible to secure 1,900 miles of real estate without a barrier. I don’t care what you call it. Call it a wall, infrastructure or even a wangdoodle! No matter what you call it we have to have some kind of physical barrier to secure our border. pic.twitter.com/vQHWUmmv10— John Kennedy (@SenJohnKennedy) January 31, 2019
Roll Tape!
We now have a name for the wall, courtesy of Senator John Kennedy (R-LA), who suggested “Wangdoodle”.
One of these days, I want to see the Great Wangdoodle of China.
Case in point, Ralph Northam, who voted for Bush in 2000 AND 2004, is now known to have not only had a fucking Klan picture in his medical school yearbook, but had the nickname “Coonman” in his VMI yearbook:
It was no easy feat. But on Saturday, Ralph Northam staked a claim in the annals of most surreal political news conferences, presiding over a 40-minute extravaganza that would do Mark Sanford and Jim McGreevey proud. Or something like that.
In a bid to salvage his job, the Democratic governor of Virginia denied he was one of the men dressed up as a Klansman or in blackface in a picture on his medical school yearbook page — after admitting the night before he was, in fact, in the photo.
But that was just the start. Here are six of the strangest moments of the presser.
BEAT IT
Northam said he “vividly” remembers dressing up in blackface to imitate Michael Jackson at a talent show in 1984 and that this memory solidified his belief that he wasn’t photographed in his yearbook dressed in blackface or in a Klan outfit. But when asked by reporter, he couldn’t remember the artist’s name and relied on his wife, Pam, to whisper his name.
………
In a different yearbook at Virginia Military Institute, Northam was nicknamed “Coonman.” Why? He wasn’t quite sure, he said.
“My main nickname in high school and in college was ‘Goose’ because when my voice was changing, I would change an octave. There were two individuals, as best as I can recollect, at VMI — they were a year ahead of me. They called me ‘Coonman’. I don’t know their motives or intent. I know who they are. That was the extent of that. And it ended up in the yearbook. And I regret that.”
This guy was a college age Republican at the height of the Reagan administration.
He voted for George W. Bush in 2004.
Of course he was doing racist sh%$ like this, it’s what college Republican pukes did back then.
Extortionists are targeting YouTube channels with copyright “strikes” to extort money:
In a terrible abuse of YouTube’s copyright system, a YouTuber is reporting that scammers are using the platform’s “three strike” system for extortion. After filing two false claims against ObbyRaidz, the scammers contacted him demanding cash to avoid a third – and the termination of his channel. Every week, millions of YouTubers upload content for pleasure and indeed profit, hoping to reach a wide audience with their topics of choice.
On occasion, these users run into trouble by using content to which they don’t own the copyrights, such as a music track or similar.
While these complaints can often be dealt with quickly and relatively amicably using YouTube’s Content ID system, allegedly-infringing users can also get a so-called ‘strike’ against their account. Get three of these and a carefully maintained channel, with countless hours of work behind it, can be rendered dead by YouTube.
As reported on many occasions, this system is open to all kinds of abuse but a situation highlighted by a YouTuber called ‘ObbyRaidz’ takes things to a horrible new level.
The YouTuber, who concentrates on Minecraft-related videos, reports that he’s received two bogus strikes on his account. While this is nothing new, it appears the strikes were deliberately malicious with longer-term plan to extort money from him.
………
While people should be protected from this kind of abuse, both from a copyright perspective and the crime of extortion, ObbyRaidz says he’s had zero luck in getting assistance from YouTube.
“It’s very unfortunate and YouTube has not done very much for me. I can’t get in contact with them. One of the appeals got denied,” he explains.
It’s the nature of Google that no matter what happens, you never ever get to contact a human being, so if they take you down, you are basically completely f%$#ed.
Tech support literally does not exist, and this is a core policy of Google, which means that any
As is noted at Naked Capitalism, “If your business depends on a platform, you don’t have a business.”
U-2 from Beale AFB disguised as the USS Enterprise! 🤣👍“NCC1701A” pic.twitter.com/4pcdHLambB
— Aircraft Spots (@AircraftSpots) January 30, 2019
Mr Spock estimates that the odds against these call numbers being a product of random chance are 14,345,251:1.
Facebook sells advertisers on its access to real people — 2.32 billion of them, a network that exceeds the populations of North America, South America and Africa combined.
But do that many people really use Facebook?
The answer lies partly in how many of the accounts are fake. The Silicon Valley company defines fake accounts as profiles that are either designed to break its rules, for example by spammers or scammers impersonating others, or that are misclassified, such as someone setting up a Facebook profile instead of a Facebook page for a business.
Yet the number of Facebook accounts that fit those descriptions is less clear. While the company discloses its estimates of fake accounts, its figures have fluctuated and are confusing. Even Facebook admits its understanding of the numbers is tenuous.
“Duplicate and false accounts are very difficult to measure at our scale,” it said in a securities filing in October, and the actual numbers “may vary significantly from our estimates.”
………
For years, investors, analysts and journalists had only Facebook’s estimates to judge fake accounts. Last year, Facebook introduced a transparency page, which discloses how many fake accounts it has taken down each quarter. Those figures revealed that the scope was far larger than the estimates in securities filings had suggested.
Let’s run through the math on this in more detail. Facebook’s new numbers added up to more than 2.8 billion fake accounts taken down in the 12 months that ended Sept. 30, or about 7.7 million a day.
Facebook had previously reported that about 3 percent to 4 percent of its active users were fake. According to the new figures, the accounts taken down each quarter were equivalent to 25 percent to 35 percent of its active users (though those accounts were not counted in Facebook’s active-user tallies because they had been removed).
I am shocked and stunned by this.
Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are the kindest, warmest, bravest, most wonderful human beings I’ve ever known in my life.
They would never do anything to violate the trust of their customers, and their users.
Please understand that the above is sarcasm.