Month: October 2019

Linkage

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This take-down of Australian mining billionaire, abusive employer, and wannabee politician, Clive Parker, is a true thing of beauty. Watch the whole thing:

Not Enough Bullets

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The judge in charge of Pacific Gas & Electric’s bankruptcy case has stated that the utility decided to pay dividends instead of properly maintaining its infrastructure:

A federal judge in San Francisco ruled Tuesday that if PG&E doesn’t meet aggressive goals aimed at preventing future wildfires, the utility won’t be able to pay dividends to shareholders after it emerges from bankruptcy proceedings.

At a probation hearing related to the utility’s deadly 2010 gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno, Judge William Alsup said the embattled utility hasn’t done enough to prevent wildfires through tree trimming and other maintenance work — even while its shareholders made millions.

“PG&E pumped out $4.5 billion in dividends and let the tree budget wither,” Alsup said.

But the judge declined to impose more sweeping changes that he’d earlier floated, including requiring PG&E to inspect its entire electrical grid. Lawyers for PG&E said that would take years to complete and be prohibitively expensive.

………

On Tuesday, the judge also directed a federal monitor to conduct random inspections of the tree-trimming program.

“I’m not cutting you any slack,” Alsup said. “If PG&E hasn’t cut the right trees, we’re going to have a hearing to get to the bottom of that.”

PG&E’s lawyers said that might be unrealistic.

“There’s a lot of trees out there, and we don’t have eyes on all of them,” said PG&E attorney Reid Schar.

“That’s a problem of your own making,” Alsup said, cutting him off. “A lot of money went to dividends that should’ve gone to your trees. Get square with the people of California, who depend on you to do the job safely.”

We really need to start throwing people like PG&E’s management in jail for the crap that they pull.

We need to find an especially deep hole for them.

Dead Man Walking

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Dennis Muilenburg, CEO of Boeing has been removed as chairman of the board.

The official argument is that he needs to focus on immediate matters at hand, but this is clearly a warning as well as a preparation for his eventual removal:

Boeing Co.’s board stripped Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg of his dual role as chairman on Friday in an unexpected shake-up at the highest ranks of the company amid the prolonged crisis of its 737 MAX plane.

Boeing said it took the action to allow Mr. Muilenburg to focus on running the company as it returns the MAX fleet to service after it was grounded world-wide in March following two fatal crashes in less than five months.

The leadership change came hours after a panel or air-safety experts sharply criticized Boeing and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration for missteps that led to the crashes, which killed all 346 people on flights in Indonesia and Ethiopia. The report has added to criticism in Washington, D.C., where lawmakers are considering potential changes to aviation oversight.

David Calhoun, a senior Blackstone Group Inc. executive who has been the board’s lead director, will become its chairman. The board has “full confidence in Dennis as CEO and believes this division of labor will enable maximum focus on running the business with the board playing an active oversight role,” Mr. Calhoun said in a statement.

This is clearly a warning shot across Muilenbugg’s bow, and it’s also setting him up as a skapegoat for the 737 MAX debacle.

I expect him to be out before New Years Day, 2021.

Linkage

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Mason Williams and 3000 Years of Art:

Ha Ha!

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If Uber loses its appeal on driver status, it faces over £1 billion in VAT to HM Revenue and Customs:

Earlier this week Uber London Ltd filed its full accounts up until December 2018 at Companies House.

The big news wasn’t that the division made a relatively meagre profit of £5.1m. (The profit is hardly indicative of anything due to the group’s structural complexity.)

It was Note 13 which recounted the following about Uber London’s contingent liabilities:

………

The most newsworthy part was arguably this one: “the Uber Group is involved in an ongoing dialog with HMRC, which is seeking to classify the Uber Group as a transportation provider. Being classified as a transportation provider would result in a VAT (20%) on Gross Bookings or on the service fee that the Company charges Drivers, both retroactively and prospectively.”

Uber London’s accounts do not provide any indication of the total sum being recorded as a contingent liability at Uber London’s parent, the Uber Group.

But various sources tell us the bill could be as large as £1bn, or more. These are not small sums.

………

This is a big deal because the threshold for UK businesses having to pay VAT at the time was a turnover of more than £81K (it’s now £85k).

Since Uber drivers mostly earn much less than that, most do not incur VAT liabilities. If Uber is deemed an employer, however, those revenues would then be deemed Uber’s rather than drivers’ — more than surpassing the VAT threshold and thus exposing the company to potentially huge VAT liabilities from then on.

So, in addition to cheating their drivers, they have been using their “Gig Economy” structure to evade taxes, and now it’s coming back to bite them in the butt.  Quelle surprise.

In related news, another scheme to cheat their drivers Uber’s auto insurance division has lost one of its underwriters, probably either because of the gypsy cab firm’s increasingly toxic public image, or because their risk reduction protocols, which would involve things like driver background checks, are woefully inadequate.

In either case, James River Group is claiming, “Pre-tax, adverse development of between $55 and $60 million,” which was enough for them to dump their largest customer and tank their own stock:

PEMBROKE, Bermuda, Oct. 08, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — James River Group Holdings, Ltd. (the “Company”) (NASDAQ: “JRVR”) today announced that it delivered a notice of early cancellation, effective December 31, 2019, of all insurance policies issued to its largest customer, Rasier LLC and its affiliates.  All insurance policies related to this customer are included in the Company’s commercial auto line of business within its Excess and Surplus Lines segment, and a majority of the insurance policies were due to expire on February 29, 2020.

 “This account has not met our expectations for profitability, and we think it best to terminate the underwriting relationship as of year end,” said J. Adam Abram, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of James River.

Uber doesn’t just f%$# its drivers, it f%$#s its suppliers as well.

H/t naked capitalism.

I am Calling Bullsh%$ On This

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The US Navy has filed a patent for a room temperature superconductor and a high-energy electromagnetic field generator, and the patents claim that these technologies are “operable”, meaning that they have working models.

There are a number of requirements for patent, most notably that it be non-obvious and novel, which the claims characteristics fulfill.

There is also a requirement that a patent be public, so that once it expires, a “Skilled person in the art,” can implement their invention.

There is an exception to the public requirement though, the government can classify a patent for national security reason.

For example, the first patent for a laser was classified, and the creator of the patent was refused access to it, because of his political activities in his youth.

If there were actually working models of these two inventions right now, the Navy would have classified the patents.

They don’t, but they want to clear the deck if someone does come up with working models, so those folks cannot restrict the government’s use of whatever is developed:

Last month, The War Zone reported on a series of strange patent applications the U.S. Navy has filed over the last few years and questioned what their connections may be with the ongoing saga of Navy personnel reporting incidents involving unidentified objects in or near U.S. airspace.

We have several active Freedom of Information Act requests with the Department of Navy to pursue more information related to the research that led to these patents. As those are being processed, we’ve continued to dig through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) Public Patent Application Information Retrieval database to get as much context for these patents as possible.

In doing so, we came across documents that seem to suggest, at least by the Navy’s own claims, that two highly peculiar Navy patents, the room temperature superconductor (RTSC) and the high-energy electromagnetic field generator (HEEMFG), may in fact already be in operation in some manner. The inventor of the Navy’s most bizarre patent, the straight-out-of-science fiction-sounding hybrid aerospace/underwater craft, describes that craft as leveraging the same room temperature superconductor technology and high energy electromagnetic fields to enable its unbelievable speed and maneuverability. If those two technologies are already operable as the Navy claims, could this mean the hybrid craft may also already operable or close to operable? Or is this just more evidence that the whole exotic ‘UFO’ patent endeavor on the Navy’s behalf is some sort of ruse or even gross mismanagement of resources?

At the heart of these questions is the term “operable.” In most patent applications, applicants must assert proof of a patent’s or invention’s “enablement,” or the extent to which a patent is described in such a way that any person who is familiar with similar technologies or techniques would be able to understand it, and theoretically reproduce it.

However, in these patent documents, the inventor Salvatore Pais, Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division’s (NAWCAD) patent attorney Mark O. Glut, and the U.S. Naval Aviation Enterprise’s Chief Technology Officer Dr. James Sheehy, all assert that these inventions are not only enabled, but operable. To help me understand what that term may mean in these contexts, I reached out to Peter Mlynek, a patent attorney.

Mlynek informed me that the terms “operable” or “operability” are not common in patent applications, but that there is little doubt that the use of the term is meant to assert to the USPTO that these inventions actually work:

If they had working models for this sort of technology, this would a classified submittal, because it would be a a leap forward in the technology.

Later in the article, there is correspondence between senior Navy personnel and the patent examiner advocating for what are a profoundly weird claims, which implies that the Navy, or the Pentagon, has a reason for aggressively supporting the claims.

And all of these documents were publicly available, because????

My guess is that either the Navy finds this credible enough that they want to preempt other patent holders, or this is an attempt to send scientists and engineers from other nations (Russia and China) down a dead end.

Once Again Da Vinci Amazes

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Subscale Reconstruction

Some wonks at MIT just did a recreation of a bridge proposal from Leonardo Da Vince, and, if their reconstruction from his notes is correct,* his bridge was centuries ahead of the state of the art:

Some 500 years after his death, researchers are still discovering just how talented and brilliant Leonardo da Vinci was. Architects and civil engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used a 3D printer to create a replica of a bridge da Vinci designed, but never built. To their surprise, not only did it work, but it would have also revolutionized bridge design five centuries ago.

As the story goes, in 1502 A.D. the Sultan Bayezid II wanted to build a bridge to connect the city of Istanbul to its neighbor, Galata. One of the proposed designs came from Leonardo da Vinci, who had already made a name for himself in the arts and sciences at the time. In a letter he sent to the sultan, accompanied by a notebook full of sketches, da Vinci described a bridge that would span the proposed distance using a single, flattened arch design, supported by bases on either shore. Bridges at the time were typically made using a series of semicircular arches, and to span the distance between the two cities would have required at least 10 evenly spaced piers in between to support the entire structure. Da Vinci’s design, which would have easily allowed sailboats to pass beneath it, was radically different (and centuries ahead of its time), which is probably why the sultan decided not to take the risk. Half a millennium later, researchers were curious if it would have succeeded.

………

Not only did the bridge work, remaining strong and stable without the use of any mortars or fasteners, but the team at MIT also realized that da Vinci had even engineered a way to minimize unwanted lateral movements in the structure, which would have quickly led to its collapse. The footings on either side of the arched bridge featured designs that splayed outwards to add a considerable amount of stability. The bridge would have even survived most earthquakes, which were common at the time in that area, as the MIT researchers discovered by putting their replica on two movable platforms. It wasn’t indestructible, but it would have been an ancient architectural marvel.

There are a number of “Ifs” here:

  • Did the technology of the day allow for the construction of abutments to handle the not-inconsiderable thrust loads.
  • Does the material handling technology of the day allow for the handling of the stone blocks.
  • could the barge and scaffolding technology of the day effectively provide for the support of the structure when under construction?

My guess is that Da Vinci never looked at the nitty-gritty details involved in actually putting up such a bridge, because he was never really a details kind of guy.

*That is a VERY big if.

Make it So

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After ignoring a judge’s order on forgiving loans for students of he failed Corinthian Colleges,  the judge is strongly implying that he will send Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to jail for contempt:

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has been threatened with the possibility of jail after a judge deemed she was violating a court order for continuing to collect student debts on a now-defunct school.

That ruling, handed down in June of 2018, was made by U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim and prevented DeVos and her Department of Education for going after former students at the bankrupt Corinthian Colleges Inc.

However, Kim said she was “astounded” to discover that DeVos was violating the court order at a hearing in San Francisco on Monday after a filing by the Education Department earlier disclosed that more than 16,000 former students at Corinthian College “were incorrectly informed at one time or another … that they had payments due on their federal student loans.”

At least 1,800 people reportedly lost wages or tax refunds according to the filing.

“At best it is gross negligence, at worst it’s an intentional flouting of my order,” Kim said, reported Bloomberg.

“I’m not sure if this is contempt or sanctions,” she added. “I’m not sending anyone to jail yet but it’s good to know I have that ability.”

Please send her to jail.

Pretty please?

You Have to Love the Tote Bag Set

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In news that should surprise no one, Philadelphia public radio station WHYY is declaring jihad on its employees unionization attempts, because solidarity with the working man is important, unless it inconveniences them personally:

A group of workers at the public media station WHYY last week delivered a petition to management declaring their intent to unionize with SAG-AFTRA.

The workers, who said they were unionizing to turn the station into a place where they could build their careers “without sacrificing [their] well-being,” had support from more than 80% of the nearly 100-person proposed bargaining unit — well over the simple majority needed to win a formal union election — and asked management to voluntarily recognize the union, rather than requiring it to go through a National Labor Relations Board election.

WHYY has not voluntarily recognized the union.

………

Generally, when workers announce their intent to unionize, it’s standard practice for employers to attempt to dissuade workers from voting for the union. As management-side lawyer Rick Grimaldi of Fisher Phillips put it, the employer uses the time before the NLRB election to “give employees the other side of the story.” Employers usually call this a period to educate their workers on the advantages and disadvantages of a union. Sometimes, though, employers agree to neutrality, promising not to carry out an anti-union campaign.

WHYY said in a statement, “WHYY is not anti-union nor have we made any attempts to dissuade workers from voting for the union.”

Station spokesperson Art Ellis confirmed it has retained Duane Morris attorney James Redeker, who has been meeting with managers and senior management to brief them on “all the legal aspects of NLRB proceedings.” Redeker’s website says he has “engineered numerous successful counter-organizational campaigns for clients … and conducted supervisory training throughout the country with respect to union avoidance.”

So, the station management is going to make it tough, and they have hired a union buster lawyer, because they are a bunch of people who think that running a humane workplace is beneath them.

I guess that it distracts them from being “Woke”.

This is literally every stereotype of the NPR type promulgated by right wing talk radio.

If We Enforced the Law, Half of San Jose Would be in Jail

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I am referring, or course to the recent revelations that Twitter collected users phone numbers for 2 factor authentication and then sold them to advertisers.

The Silicon Valley business models are increasingly indistinguishable from fraud and various forms or racketeering:

When some users provided Twitter with their phone number to make their account more secure, the company used this information for advertising purposes, according to a blog post from Twitter published on Tuesday.

This isn’t the first time that a large social network has taken information explicitly meant for the purposes of security, and then quietly or accidentally use it for something else entirely. Facebook did something similar with phone numbers provided by users for two-factor authentication, the company confirmed last year.

“We recently discovered that when you provided an email address or phone number for safety or security purposes (for example, two-factor authentication) this data may have inadvertently been used for advertising purposes, specifically in our Tailored Audiences and Partner Audiences advertising system,” Twitter’s announcement reads.

In short, when an advertiser using Twitter uploaded their own marketing list of email addresses or phone numbers, Twitter may have matched the list to people on Twitter “based on the email or phone number the Twitter account holder provided for safety and security purposes,” the post adds.

“This was an error and we apologize,” it read.

This wasn’t error, it was greed and a disdain for their users, who are, after all, not customers, but the protect that they sell to their customers, the advertisers.

I Can’t Even………

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Trump is defending his abandonment of our Kurdish allies in northern Syria because they did not hit the beaches with us at Normandy.

This is amazingly stupid and ahistorical. (Turkey was neutral in the war, and Syria, Iran, and Iraq were under the control of the UK by the time that America entered the war)

I’m not surprised about the betrayal of the Kurds, this has been a bipartisan standard operating procedure for the United States since (at least) the early 1970s, but this justification is mind-bogglingly stupid.

About F%$#ing Time

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The Supreme Court has ruled that blind people can sue businesses for having websites that are inaccessible to the disabled.

This is good for 2 reasons.

The first is that it’s a place of business, and places of business are required to be accessible to the disabled. There should be no get out of jail card for, “Because………Inernet.”

The second is that if they offer alternate websites that are disability friendly, these will be far less likely to be orgies of poorly written JavaScript that take 5 minutes to load.

The Supreme Court cleared the way Monday for blind people to sue Domino’s Pizza and other retailers if their websites are not accessible.

In a potentially far-reaching move, the justices turned down an appeal from Domino’s and let stand a U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling holding that the Americans With Disabilities Act protects access not just to restaurants and stores but also to the websites and apps of those businesses.

Guillermo Robles, who is blind, filed suit in Los Angeles three years ago and complained he had been unable to order a pizza online because the Domino’s website lacked the software that would allow him to communicate. He cited the ADA, which guarantees to people with a disability “full and equal enjoyment of the goods and services … of any place of public accommodations.”

This is Beyond Horrible

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I first heard about this when my RABBI mentioned that there had been a shooting this afternoon:

A heavily armed gunman with a live-streaming head camera tried to storm a synagogue in eastern Germany on Wednesday as congregants observed the holiest day in Judaism. Foiled by a locked door, he killed two people outside and wounded two others in an anti-Semitic spree that smacked of far-right terrorism.

Hours later the police announced the arrest of a suspect in the assault in the city of Halle, one of the most brazen in a string of recent attacks aimed at Jews in Germany. Police officials declined to confirm if the suspect was the gunman or whether he had any accomplices.

The methodology of the assailant bore a striking resemblance to the rampage by a far-right extremist against two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, more than six months ago, in which he broadcast his killings live on social media. Fifty-one people died in that attack.

Like the Christchurch killer, the Halle assailant recorded himself, in a 35-minute video of shooting, mayhem and hateful language. In accented English, he identified himself as Anon, denied the Holocaust, denounced feminists and immigrants, then declared: “The root of all these problems is the Jew.”

………

The assailant uploaded his video to Twitch, a live-streaming platform owned by Amazon that has struggled with moderating the real-time content that floods in from millions of active broadcasters. Alerted to the broadcast, Twitch scrambled to remove it and issue an apology, but not before right-wing sites had archived it. Some exalted the killer as a hero.

It could have been worse, but it appears that the gunman was a pretty crappy gunsmith, and his homemade weapons, an automatic weapon and a shotgun, both failed.

Of course he did it on Yom Kippur.

F%$# Nazis.

Morally Indefensible

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I’ve been thinking about the white cop (not mentioning her name) who murdered Botham Jean, and was (remarkably) convicted for her act, and specifically the behavior of her brother, Brandt Jean, and the judge presiding over the trial(!), after the sentence was announced.

Specifically they both gave hugs to the murderer cop in the spirit of forgiveness.

My take on this is profoundly different from that most of the (white and smugly) media about this, and not because of the “Magic Negro”* aspect of the whole storage. (Both Mr. Jean and the judge are African American)

It’s not that I do not find this criticism unpersuasive, I find it very persuasive, but as someone who can pass as white without trying, I am so completely removed from the black experience to say anything meaningful.

On the other hand I am a Jew, and from a Jewish perspective, or at least MY perspective, (though not just me) I have found the behavior, particularly from the judge, disturbing, and with Yom Kippur coming up, I felt I need to talk about repentance, (teshuva) and forgiveness.

Forgiveness without teshuva is wrong in normative Judaism, and teshuva in Judaism is not the profoundly different from mere regret, or even guilt. Teshuva is about correcting the wrongs that you have done, and correcting yourself so that the wrongs are not repeated, and the harms are remediated as much as possible.

The murderer cop has done none of this, and forgiveness without teshuvah is more than meaningless, it is harmful.

To quote Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5; Yerushalmi Talmud 4:9, Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 37a, “Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.”

The cop didn’t just kill Botham Jean, and hurt his brother, and his mother, and his other loved ones, it is as if she destroyed the whole world.

This sort of throw away forgiveness minimizes the whole concept of repentance and the whole concept of forgiveness.

It makes the world a worse place, and it is completely wrong.

*Specifically, it appears that whenever a white person is finally held to account for brutality against a person of color, there the an expectation that some sort heart-warming expression of forgiveness must be made by the victim, or the victim’s family in order to assuage any potential feelings of guilt from white narcissists.

I’ve Made Jokes about the Home Root Canal Kit, But………

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The folks hawking an at-home rape kit have exceeded even my tasteless sense of humor, and God help them, they are serious:

It should perhaps come as no surprise that in the post-Theranos (and mid-Tia) world, someone, somewhere would attempt to “disrupt” the rape kit. The MeToo company, a start-up based in Brooklyn and created by Madison Campbell, has created — in theory — the first at-home, self-managed forensic exam, intended to be used by survivors of sexual assault. Campbell calls her product the “MeToo kit,” and its slogan adopts the ethos and language of its namesake movement: “Your experience. Your kit. Your story. Your life. Your choice.”

But many in the sexual-assault advocacy and legal professional communities have voiced concerns about the MeToo kit’s viability in the criminal justice system. At the end of August, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel sent the company a cease-and-desist letter, accusing it of violating several sections of Michigan’s Consumer Protection Act. Nessel stated, “This company is shamelessly trying to take financial advantage of the ‘Me Too’ movement by luring victims into thinking that an at-home-do-it-yourself sexual assault kit will stand up in court … Career prosecutors know that evidence collected in this way would not provide the necessary chain of custody.” This week, New York attorney general Letitia James joined Nessel’s call for Campbell to cease and desist, stating her concern that the MeToo kits would “deter individuals from seeking professional care.”

Ebony Tucker, advocacy director of the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence, echoes the attorney generals’ concerns. “When evidence is taken as part of a forensic exam in a rape case, there has to be a very clear order of who came into contact with the evidence: who had access to touch it, see it, know where it was,” she says. These measures are taken in order to ensure evidence isn’t tampered with, and to prevent that claim from being made in court. Done at home, by oneself, there would be countless opportunities to contaminate evidence — and any defense attorney would know that.

The entire concept becomes even more horrifyingly clueless as you read further down in the story.

The whole “Disruption” culture is really a complete sh%$ show.

Someone Who Knows that he Owns his Persecutors

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Former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is refusing a release from prision, and is instead demanding an investigation of the prosecutors who are now desperate to bury the corruption in their prosecution of him:

The same Brazilian prosecutors who for years exhibited a single-minded fixation on jailing former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva are now seeking his release from prison, requesting that a court allow him to serve the remainder of his 11-year sentence for corruption at home. But Lula — who believes the request is motivated by fear that prosecutorial and judicial improprieties in his case, which were revealed by The Intercept, will lead to the nullification of his conviction — is opposing these efforts, insisting that he will not leave prison until he receives full exoneration.

In seeking his release, Lula’s prosecutors are almost certainly not motivated by humanitarian concerns. Quite the contrary: Those prosecutors have often displayed a near-pathological hatred for the two-term former president. Last month, The Intercept, jointly with its reporting partner UOL, published previously secret Telegram messages in which the Operation Car Wash prosecutors responsible for prosecuting Lula cruelly mocked the tragic death of his 7-year-old grandson from meningitis earlier this year, as well as the 2017 death of his wife of 43 years from a stroke at the age of 66. One of the prosecutors who participated publicly apologized, but none of the others have.

Far more likely is that the prosecutors are motivated by desperation to salvage their legacy after a series of defeats suffered by their once-untouchable, widely revered Car Wash investigation, ever since The Intercept, on June 9, began publishing reports based on a massive archive of secret chats between the prosecutors and Sergio Moro, the judge who oversaw most of the convictions, including Lula’s, and who now serves as President Jair Bolsonaro’s Minister of Justice and Public Security.

The prosecution of Lula was always sketchy as hell, and Lula realizes that the whole case against him is unraveling, and the prosecutors are now threatening to physically throw him OUT of prison in an attempt to prevent a thorough review of their behavior by Brazil’s supreme court.