Month: March 2019

Corrupt, Incompetent, and Stupid Is No Way to Go through Life, Son

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I am referring, of course to Zuckerberg’s monster, AKA Facebook, where their vaunted legions of programmers were unable (or unwilling) to take down videos of the Christchurch mosque shooting:

Facebook admitted, at best nonchalantly, on Thursday that its super-soaraway AI algorithms failed to automatically detect the live-streamed video of last week’s Christchurch mass murders.

The antisocial giant has repeatedly touted its fancy artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques as the way forward for tackling the spread of harmful content on its platform. Image-recognition software can’t catch everything, however, not even with Silicon Valley’s finest and highly paid engineers working on the problem, so Facebook continues to rely on, surprise surprise, humans to pick up the slack in moderation.

There’s a team of about 15,000 content moderators who review, and allow or delete, piles and piles of psychologically damaging images and videos submitted to Facebook on an hourly if not minute-by-minute basis. The job can be extremely mentally distressing, so the ultimate goal is to eventually hand that work over to algorithms. But there’s just not enough intelligence in today’s AI technology to match cube farms of relatively poorly paid contractors.

………

Facebook has blamed the failure of its AI software to spot the video as it was broadcast, and soon after when it was shared across its platform, on a lack of training data. Today’s neural networks need to inspect thousands or millions of examples to learn patterns in the data to begin identifying things like pornographic or violent content.

If I were a cynic, I could conclude Facebook probably wanted to keep the video, just to get the clicks and ad revenue.

Wait ……… I am a cynic, and my guess is that Facebook milked this for all it’s worth.

2 Face Palms Here

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The RIAA is claiming that an ISP is inducing music piracy in court.

It appears that the amazingly high speeds offered by the provider are inducing piracy.  (facepalm 1)

Face Palm 2

The provider that they are accusing of  “dangerously fast” internet?  Charter Communications.

Charter communications is so bad that they WISH that they had Comcast, a company so reviled that it had to take the alias Xfinity.

The music industry is suing Charter Communications, claiming that the cable Internet provider profits from music piracy by failing to terminate the accounts of subscribers who illegally download copyrighted songs. The lawsuit also complains that Charter helps its subscribers pirate music by selling packages with higher Internet speeds.

While the act of providing higher Internet speeds clearly isn’t a violation of any law, ISPs can be held liable for their users’ copyright infringement if the ISPs repeatedly fail to disconnect repeat infringers.

………

The music labels’ complaint also seems to describe the basic acts of providing Internet service and advertising high speeds as nefarious:

Many of Charter’s customers are motivated to subscribe to Charter’s service because it allows them to download music and other copyrighted content—including unauthorized content—as efficiently as possible. Accordingly, in its consumer marketing material, including material directed to Colorado customers, Charter has touted how its service enables subscribers to download and upload large amounts of content at “blazing-fast Internet speeds.” Charter has told existing and prospective customers that its high-speed service enables subscribers to “download just about anything instantly,” and subscribers have the ability to “download 8 songs in 3 seconds.” Charter has further told subscribers that its Internet service “has the speed you need for everything you do online.” In exchange for this service, Charter has charged its customers monthly fees ranging in price based on the speed of service.

That paragraph from the music labels’ complaint merely describes the standard business model of Internet providers. There is nothing illegal about offering higher Internet speeds in exchange for higher prices.
But the labels also allege that Charter’s lax approach to copyright enforcement helped it earn more revenue, in part because piracy supposedly inspired consumers to subscribe to faster Internet tiers.

So basically, they are suing Charter for being an ISP, and they are suing Charter for being too fast.

If I didn’t know the RIAA, I would be convinced that they were punking the judge.

Linkage

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Perhaps the best analysis I’ve seen of Brexit, and it is (nominally) comedy.

Spoiler: it is a natural consequence of government not serving the public.

It’s Worse Than a Crime, It Was a Mistake

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We now have a a summary of Robert Mueller’s report.

It’s pretty much what most people who weren’t trying to alibi their own incompetence in 2016, and the people who melted down like Mort Sahl did in 1963 (I’m talking to you, Maddow).

Basically, there is little evidence of direct coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, but that there are concerns about obstruction of justice.

So, something may yet come of this, but something may not.

The bigger picture, though, is that the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, hitched its wagon to “Russiagate”, in order to ignore the pervasive incompetence the party establishment.

Now, it appears that Trump, who is almost certainly both mobbed up and a bunco artist, has effectively been immunized from any accusations of wrongdoing for the 2020 election.

This was a big unforced political error.

My Heart Bleeds Borscht

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Bayer is now facing major blow-back over from its acquisition of Monsanto.

Evil is as evil does:

Bayer insists that glyphosate-based weedkillers like its Roundup and Ranger Pro products pose no health risk to the farm workers and gardeners who use them around the world. For one particular group of people, however, the substance has proven highly toxic: Bayer’s own shareholders.

Shares in the German pharmaceuticals and chemicals group took another plunge on Wednesday, after a San Francisco jury found that there was a direct causal link between glyphosate and cancer. The product in question was Roundup, the weedkiller acquired by Bayer as part of its $63bn takeover of US seeds and chemicals giant Monsanto last year.

The latest legal setback appeared to take investors by surprise, sending Bayer shares down more than 10 per cent. Since last August, when another California jury ordered Bayer to pay $289m in damages in a similar case, the group’s shares have fallen by more than a third — wiping almost €25bn from its market value. As they contemplate the ever-growing list of glyphosate cases pending in US courts — 11,200 at the latest count — investors have every reason to feel glum.

If you lie with dogs, you get up with fleas, and those glum investors are getting what they deserve.

As Goes California………

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The US Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal meaning that California truck drivers classified as owner-operators must be reclassified as direct employees.

This is a very big deal, not just in the trucking industry, but also in terms of the “Sharing Economy” (Lyft, Uber, etc):

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal by the California Trucking Association on Monday in a case that could classify tens of thousands of California truck drivers as employees of freight-hauling companies, with the right to minimum wages, overtime pay and reimbursement for business expenses.

The drivers sign up with freight haulers under standard contracts that describe them as “owner-operators” of their trucks. The Trucking Association and its members contend those drivers are independent contractors, paid at a specific rate and responsible for their own expenses.

More than 400 of the drivers have challenged their classification before the state Department of Industrial Relations, which has found nearly all of them to be employees rather than contractors. Other drivers have joined in class-action suits against trucking companies, seeking employee status.

California labor officials have relied on a 1989 state Supreme Court ruling that classified workers as employees if the company had substantial control over the work they did, and that put the burden of proof on the company to show contractor status.

Last April the court, in a case involving package delivery drivers, said a company must prove workers are running their own independent businesses to classify them as contractors. Labor unions are backing legislation that would affirm that ruling as state law.

In federal court, the Trucking Association argued that a 1994 federal deregulation law prohibited California from determining the drivers’ employment status. That law bars states from enforcing any statutes or regulations “related to a price, route or service of any motor carrier … with respect to transportation of property.”

………

But the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the state regulation in September and said the classification of drivers as employees or contractors did not regulate a company’s prices, routes or services.

The use of independent contractor status as a way of evading one’s responsibility as an employers is wrong, and it should be ended.

What is DARPA’s Endgame Here?

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Nuclear thermal rockets typically have around twice the Isp (basically fuel economy) of chemical rockets, on the order of 800—1000, which is a lot less than than electric propulsion, which is typically ten times that of chemical rockets, but the available thrust produced is far greater, 100-1000 kilo-newtons for nuclear thermal vs. 10-500 milli-newtons for the various electric rockets.

For longer missions, Mars and the further, it’s clear that electric propulsion is better and faster, so the only applications that I see are some sort of manned moon base, or an as yet undisclosed military mission:

DARPA plans to demonstrate a nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) system that can be assembled on orbit to expand U.S. operating presence in cislunar space, according to the Pentagon advanced research agency’s fiscal 2020 budget request.

The agency is seeking $10 million in 2020 to begin a new program, Reactor On A Rocket (ROAR), to develop a high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) propulsion system. “The program will initially develop the use of additive manufacturing approaches to print NTP fuel elements,” DARPA’s budget document says.

“In addition, the program will investigate on-orbit assembly techniques (AM) to safely assemble the individual core element subassemblies into a full demonstration system configuration, and will perform a technology demonstration,” the document says.

In a nuclear thermal rocket, propellant such as liquid hydrogen is heated to high temperature in a nuclear reactor then expanded through a rocket nozzle to produce thrust. Propulsive efficiency, or specific impulse, can be twice that of a chemical rocket.

Given the advances in electric propulsion, I do not see where nuclear thermal will have an advantage, except possibly for supplying a moon base or some as yet undisclosed military program.

Don’t Give to the DCCC

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I’ve mentioned on many times that the DCCC (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) does a piss-poor job of supporting real Democrats when they run for Congress.

Now the DCCC is saying that it will blacklist any political consultants who work for someone challenging an incumbent:

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee warned political strategists and vendors Thursday night that if they support candidates mounting primary challenges against incumbent House Democrats, the party will cut them off from business.

The news was officially announced Friday morning, paired with a statement on the committee’s commitment to diversity in consulting — “which, obviously, is just to give themselves cover,” a Democratic political consultant who learned of it Thursday told The Intercept. The consultant asked for anonymity given their relationship with the DCCC, and the party organization’s professed strategy of blacklisting firms that don’t fall in line.

To apply to become a preferred vendor in the 2020 cycle, firms must agree to a set of standards that includes agreeing not to work with anyone challenging an incumbent.

“I understand the above statement that the DCCC will not conduct business with, nor recommend to any of its targeted campaigns, any consultant that works with an opponent of a sitting Member of the House Democratic Caucus,” the form reads.

If you make campaign donations to Democrats, it is likely that the DCCC has contacted you.

Just say no.

Any Californians Want to File a Report to the Medical Board?

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A single San Diego doctor wrote nearly a third of the area’s medical vaccination exemptions since 2015, according to an investigation by the local nonprofit news organization Voice of San Diego. The revelation follows growing concern that anti-vaccine parents are flocking to doctors willing to write dubious medical exemptions to circumvent the state’s vaccination requirements. Since California banned exemptions based on personal beliefs in 2015, medical exemptions have tripled in the state. The rise has led some areas to have vaccination rates below the levels necessary to curb the spread of vaccine-preventable illnesses. Moreover, it signals a worrying trend for other states working to crack down on exemptions and thwart outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases. There are currently six outbreaks of measles across the country.

Medical vaccination exemptions are intended for the relatively few people who have medical conditions that prevent them from receiving vaccines safely. That includes people who are on long-term immunosuppressive therapy or those who are immunocompromised, such as those with HIV or those who have had severe, life-threatening allergic reactions (e.g. anaphylaxis) to previous immunizations. Such patients typically receive medical exemptions incidentally during their medical care. But some doctors are providing evaluations specifically to determine if a patient qualifies for an exemption and granting exemptions using criteria not based on medical evidence. Some doctors are even charging fees for these questionable exemption evaluations—including the doctor in San Diego, Tara Zandvliet.

Zandvliet’s practice website specifically lists “Evaluation for Medical Exemption to Vaccination” as a service provided. The website also lays out the conditions and diseases she considers as qualifying for a medical exemption. The list reaches far beyond what medical experts say are acceptable reasons for exempting someone from life-saving immunizations. The list includes having a family history of bee-sting allergies, type I diabetes, or simply hives. After a reporter with the Voice of San Diego questioned some of the conditions listed, Zandvliet removed three from the list: asthma, eczema, and psoriasis.

“I have found that a few of the diseases on my list seem to invite misinterpretation more than others, and so I have deleted them,” she told the outlet in an email.

Zandvliet charges $180 for the evaluation, and her practice does not accept insurance.

Since 2015, Zandvliet has issued 141 of the 486 total medical exemptions granted in the San Diego Unified School District. After Zandvliet, the second highest number of medical exemptions granted by a single doctor was 26. The Voice of San Diego noted that Zandvliet’s practice is listed on several websites as being friendly to anti-vaccine parents.

She is renting her medical license to antivaxxers.

The solutions is to pull her medical license.

Mark Zuckerberg is a Lying Sack of Excrement, Part VMCMLXIX

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This is not a surprise.

All evidence indicates that, at least until it got caught, Facebook did not care about how its data was used until it became a public relations debacle, because they still got their money:

Facebook knew about Cambridge Analytica’s dodgy data-gathering practices at least four months before they was exposed in news reports, according to internal FB emails.

Crucially, the staff memos contradict public assurances made by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as well as sworn testimony offered by the company.

Those emails remain under a court seal, at Facebook’s request, although the Attorney General of Washington DC, Karl Racine, is seeking to have them revealed to all as part of his legal battle against the antisocial media giant.

Racine’s motion to unseal [PDF] the files this month stated “an email exchange between Facebook employees discussing how Cambridge Analytica (and others) violated Facebook’s policies” includes sufficient detail to raise the question of whether Facebook has – yet again – given misleading or outright false statements.

The redacted request reads: “The jurisdictional facts in the document shows that as early as September 2015, a DC-based Facebook employee warned the company that Cambridge Analytica was a “[REDACTED]” asked other Facebook employees to “[REDACTED]” and received responses that Cambridge Analytica’s data-scraping practices were “[REDACTED]” with Facebook’s platform policy.”

It goes on: “The Document also indicates that months later in December 2015, on the same day an article was published by The Guardian on Cambridge Analytica, a Facebook employee reported that she had ‘[REDACTED].'”

The reason this is critical is because Facebook has always claimed it learned of Cambridge Analytica’s misuse of people’s profile information – data obtained via a third-party quiz app built by Aleksandr Kogan – from press reports. Zuckerberg said in a statement more than two years later: “In 2015, we learned from journalists at The Guardian that Kogan had shared data from his app with Cambridge Analytica. It is against our policies for developers to share data without people’s consent, so we immediately banned Kogan’s app from our platform.”

Zuck omitted, incidentally, that Facebook threatened to sue the newspaper if it published its story. Facebook also admitted today that its executives have claimed the same thing as their boss under oath – that the social network only learned about the data misuse from press reports.

………

The truth is that Facebook is a train wreck with executives encouraged to do whatever they wanted in order to secure Facebook’s position in the digital economy and bring in revenue, regardless of laws or ethics or morals or anything else.

Its work culture is fundamentally broken with top executives making it plain that the company will obfuscate, mislead, block and bully before they even consider telling the truth – and that culture attracts more of the same.

Even by the notoriously lax ethical standards of the tech industry, Facebook is a particularly bad actor.

Interesting Data Point

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The press has been saying a lot about Beto O’Rourke’s fundraising in the first 24 hours since his announcement, but it should be noted that it came from far fewer donors than Bernie Sanders:

Beto O’Rourke announced additional details Wednesday about the massive fundraising haul in the first day of his presidential campaign, showing that while he may have beat rival Bernie Sanders in total money raised, Sanders had the advantage in two key metrics.

After a campaign stop here, O’Rourke told reporters that he received “more than 128,000 unique contributions” in the first 24 hours, with an average donation size of $47. O’Rourke’s campaign later corrected the average donation size, saying it was actually $48. By comparison, Sanders’ campaign said its first-day haul came from over 223,000 individual donors for an average contribution size of $27.

………

O’Rourke first announced Monday that he had raised $6.1 million in the opening 24 hours of his campaign. That figure was $5.9 million for Sanders.

The difference in averages actually is more significant than one would initially think.

Think about the case of Jeff Bezos walking into a bar.

On average, everyone in the bar would now be a billionaire.

We already have reports of big money bundlers raising Wall Street cash for Beto, so it’s not unreasonable to surmise that most of his money came from (perhaps) 10% of his donors.

This means two things:  His support is not broad, and his donors may already be running into campaign finance law limits on donations.

I Would Suggest Changing Your Name to Rectal Bleeding, or Pedophile, or Alex Jones

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It appears that, because of the poor reputation of their members, American Cable Association changing its name to America’s Communications Association. 

Kind of like when Comcast became Xfinity, or when Blackwater became Xe became Academi, or when Nazis became the Alt-Right.

When your behavior is so reprehensible that you have to change your name, perhaps you should be looking at something more substantial than just changing the optics:

Cable lobbyists don’t want to be called cable lobbyists anymore. The nation’s top two cable industry lobby groups have both dropped the word “cable” from their names. But the lobby groups’ core mission—the fight against regulation of cable networks—remains unchanged.

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) got things started in 2016 when it renamed itself NCTA-The Internet & Television Association, keeping the initialism but dropping the words it stood for. The group was also known as the National Cable Television Association between 1968 and 2001.

The American Cable Association (ACA) is the nation’s other major cable lobby. While NCTA represents the biggest companies like Comcast and Charter, the ACA represents small and mid-size cable operators. Today, the ACA announced that it is now called America’s Communications Association or “ACA Connects,” though the ACA’s website still uses the americancable.org domain name.

Seriously, there is a reason that everyone hates your clients .

Wrong

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It looks like the usual suspects are trying to sell a bloated defense budget as being a net job creator.

In this case, it’s Peter Navarro, assistant to the president and the director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, and in his New York Times OP/ED, he extols how, “the Trump defense budget is helping to create good manufacturing jobs at good wages.”

Those jobs cost on the order of 10 times as much, and at the end of they day, we have nothing.

To quote Ike Eisenhower, these tanks, and guns, and bombs are “A theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

You could get 5-10 times the number of jobs spending money on repairing our decaying infrastructure, or by working on projects to get new less polluting power on the grid, or on healthcare and early education.

But that, of course, is socialism, so flushing money down a Desert Tan toilet it is, I guess.

New Zealand Fixes Things

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In less than a week, they have banned semi-auto weapons, less than a week after the Christchurch massacre:

New Zealand has banned military-style semiautomatic weapons and assault rifles, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced Thursday, just six days after attacks on two mosques in Christchurch that left 50 people dead.

A buyback program will be launched to take existing weapons out of circulation, and gun owners who do not comply will be subject to fines, she said.

“On 15 March, our history changed forever. Now, our laws will, too,” Ardern said. “We are announcing action today on behalf of all New Zealanders to strengthen our gun laws and make our country a safer place.”

The gunman who attacked the Al Noor and Linwood mosques here Friday used AR-15 rifles in the worst mass shooting New Zealand has ever seen. In addition to the 50 killed, 40 people were injured.

New Zealand has a tradition of hunting and shooting as sport, but there is no legal provision to own weapons for self-defense.

Ardern has said there is no reason for New Zealanders to own these kinds of weapons, and there is broad consensus on that argument.

The center-right opposition National Party supported the ban. Its leader, Simon Bridges, said it was “imperative in the national interest to keep New Zealanders safe.”

The changes mean that the weapons will now be removed from circulation.

After the return period has passed, those who continue to own them will face a $2,700 fine or up to three years imprisonment.

This is what it looks like when you don’t have an ammosexual lobby poisoning any discussion of gun reform like the United States.

Good on them.

What You’ve Just Said Was One of the Most Insanely Idiotic Things I Have Ever Heard

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and May God Have Mercy on Your Soul

The above Billy Madison quote is directed at Katie Wheelbarger, acting assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.

She is a part of the Pentagon freakout over Turkey buying S-400 SAMs from Russia.

As I have noted before, this butt-hurt is about US defense contractors not geting their vigorish, and then not distributing a cut to Pentagon Generals through post-retirement sinecures.

There are claims of security issues, but given that US allies in NATO are currently operating the nearly as capable S-300 system, Bulgaria, Greece, and Slovakia, I’m calling bullsh%$.

Katie, however, turned the knobs on stupidity and hypocrisy up to eleven with when she said this:

“The S-400 is a computer. The F-35 is a computer. You don’t hook your computer to your adversary’s computer and that’s basically what we would be doing,” Katie Wheelbarger, acting assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, told Reuters.

Undoubtedly the S-400 has ESM capabilities, and as such it could read emissions from the F-35 (as could more extensive installations in Russia) but the idea that somehow, because they both have chips in them, the S-400 could hack into the F-35 is beyond brain dead.

I have it on good authority that you can tell when Katie Wheelbarger has been using your computer, because there is Wite-Out® on the screen.

Why an Impeachment Investigation is Merited

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Given the current theory that a Republican (and only a Republican) President is unlimited in their powers by virtue of the unitary executive theory, the fact that, “Trump White House Lawyers Plan To Tell House Judiciary to ‘Go F*ck Themselves’,” the only way to pierce the veil of executive impunity is via an impeachment investigation, since the Constitution unequivocally pierces executive privilege:

President Trump’s White House attorneys are preparing to tell a key congressional panel investigating the administration “to go f%$# themselves,” as a person familiar with the deliberations characterized them to The Daily Beast.

According to three sources familiar with the situation, the White House counsel’s office, currently headed by Pat Cipollone, was still, as of Thursday morning, in the process of drafting a letter responding to the House Judiciary Committee’s request for a wide array of documents.

The documents requested by the Democratic-run committee are part of the sweeping and long-telegraphed inquiry into a range of Trump administration and Trump-associate activities earlier this month.

Cipollone’s letter response to the committee is essentially similar to one he sent to the Oversight, Foreign Affairs, and Intelligence committees, which Politico reported on Thursday. Those committees, along with the Ways and Means panel, coordinate regularly over their complementary investigations into the administration.

The formal response to House Judiciary, these sources say, is expected to raise executive-privilege concerns and initially withhold any documents that the committee has requested. The response from the Trump White House is already several days overdue, per the Monday deadline set by Democratic lawmakers on the committee.

It’s the latest sign that Trump and his team are gearing up for a protracted war with the Democrats on the committee. Representatives for the committee did not immediately respond to a Daily Beast inquiry.

Beginning an impeachment investigation in order to forestall any ratf%$#ing by an increasingly corrupt and politicized federal judiciar would allows Democrats to thread a political needle.

They would be able to show a base that is clamoring for impeachment that they are willing to move, while reassuring a Democratic Party establishment that has lost anything resembling a set of cojones, that this is just a pretense to allow them to conduct real investigations.

Just do it.

It is Purim

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So I may be blogging drunk, which means that I will likely be even less coherent than usual.

I know what you are asking yourself, “How could he get any LESS coherent?”

However, I promise that even if I drink so much that I cannot tell the difference between Mordecai and Haman, I will be able to tell the difference between Donald Trump and a fence post, with the latter being more honest, more intelligent, and more attractive.

Kremlinology is Difficult with People This Evil

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I am referring, of course, to the House of Saud, where it appears that what appears to be a superficial clipping of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s wings by his father:

The heir to the Saudi throne has not attended a series of high-profile ministerial and diplomatic meetings in Saudi Arabia over the last fortnight and is alleged to have been stripped of some of his financial and economic authority, the Guardian has been told.

The move to restrict, if only temporarily, the responsibilities of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is understood to have been revealed to a group of senior ministers earlier last week by his father, King Salman.

The king is said to have asked Bin Salman to be at this cabinet meeting, but he failed to attend.

………

The relationship between the king and his son has been under scrutiny since the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which was alleged to have been ordered by Prince Mohammed and provoked international condemnation of the crown prince. This has been denied by the Saudi government.

………

But while most observers expect Prince Mohammed to accede to the throne, there are some signs that the king is seeking to rein in his controversial son at a time when Saudi Arabia is under the spotlight.

I don’t know what this all means.

I simply do not have a frame of reference:  The Saudi court is simply to venal and too unconcerned about their subjects’ well being for me to understand their approach to governance.