Month: November 2019

Oh, Snap

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If you want a snapshot of public opinion in Hong Kong about the recent pro-democracy protests, the district council elections indicate widespread support:

Pro-democracy candidates buoyed by months of street protests in Hong Kong won a stunning victory in local elections on Sunday, as record numbers voted in a vivid expression of the city’s aspirations and its anger with the Chinese government.

It was a pointed rebuke of Beijing and its allies in Hong Kong, and the turnout — seven in 10 eligible voters — suggested that the public continues to back the democracy movement, even as the protests grow increasingly violent. Young Hong Kongers, a major force behind the demonstrations of the past six months, played a leading role in the voting surge.

With three million voters casting ballots, pro-democracy candidates captured 389 of 452 elected seats, up from only 124 and far more than they have ever won. With one race undecided, the government’s allies held just 57 seats, a remarkable collapse from 300.

………

The elections were for district councils, one of the lowest elected offices in Hong Kong, and they are typically a subdued affair focused on community issues. The job mostly entails pushing for neighborhood needs like bus stops and traffic lights.

But this election took on outsize significance, and was viewed as a referendum on the unrest that has created the city’s worst political crisis in decades. In a semiautonomous part of China where greater democracy is one of the protesters’ biggest demands, it gave residents a rare chance to vote.

The gains at the ballot box are likely to embolden a democracy movement that has struggled with how to balance peaceful and violent protests to achieve its goals.

Unfortunately, I think that Beijing will take exactly the wrong lesson from this, and pressure local authorities to crack down further.

In the long run, I tend to think that Hong Kong’s special status is doomed within the PRC.

The Other Problem With Self-Driving Cars

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There are a number of claims as to the benefits, and one, that it would make transportation more efficient, has been shown to be objectively false in a study.

The study was fairly straightforward, they have people cars with drivers, and studied how their vehicle use changed.

Many more trips and many more miles driven, meaning more congestion and more waste and pollution:

A few years ago, Mustapha Harb realized there was a problem in his field of research about how autonomous cars will change the way people travel. The solution to the problem he settled on was as simple as it was revealing.

………

One did not have to look far for studies and articles suggesting fleets of self-driving cars could, for example, reduce traffic. These techno-utopian articles claimed the same highways we use today could, with slight modifications, accommodate many more autonomous vehicles than they do human-driven cars. AVs could, using more precise control systems, follow one another at much closer distances. Similarly, lanes could be narrowed, accommodating perhaps six lanes where there are only five today.

These promises were, and remain, the foundation upon which AV utopianism has been built: a greener, safer, faster, and more pleasant transportation future just around the corner.

But, Harb found, these promises couldn’t be checked. After all, self-driving cars didn’t exist yet.

Harb, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California Berkeley’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, was intimately familiar with the research already done on the subject in his field. Most of it consisted of surveying which, while far from perfect, was the best approach available.

“You would send people a survey,” Harb described, “like, hey, there’s a self-driving car in the future, how do you think your travel will change in the future?”

These studies, flawed as they were, found something very different from the rosy future AV companies wanted investors and the public to imagine. They found reason to believe AVs would drastically increase the number of vehicle miles traveled, commonly shortened to “VMT” in academic literature.

And the more vehicles miles traveled, all else being equal, the more traffic and emissions we can expect, canceling out many of the AV’s touted benefits.

………

While the survey results were potentially alarming, it was difficult for researchers like Harb to put too much stock into them. Some surveys predicted only a few percentage points increase in VMT in a self-driving car future. Others, upwards of 90 percent.

………

But his advisor, Professor Joan Walker, had an idea. What if they hired chauffeurs to drive random people around?

The chauffeur, Walker outlined, will do the driving for you. And, just like the most optimistic AV future of fully autonomous robot cars zooming around, you don’t even have to be in the car.

“All these things the self-driving car can do for you in the future,” Harb summarized, “a chauffeur can do for you today.”

The concept, once it reached published form, elicited praise and jealousy from other researchers. “It’s delightfully clever and brazenly simple,” gushed Don MacKenzie, head of their Sustainable Transportation Lab at the University of Washington. “I wish I had thought of it.”

………

For example, the chauffeur could bring the kids to soccer practice and back or drive a friend home and then return to the house. They could even pick up groceries and make a Target run to simulate a driverless car future where items could get bought online and loaded into your AV by a store employee before returning home.

Harb readily admits the study is not perfect, nor is it likely to prove the most accurate predictor of what our autonomous vehicle future looks like. But it is, by many estimates, the best first approximation we have.

And that approximation is, in key ways, a vision of things to come.

Harb thought they would see people sending their cars out more than if they were driving themselves, something like a 20 or 30 percent increase in VMT with the chauffeurs. Nothing to sneeze at, of course, but towards the middle of the wide range of the results the surveys had suggested.

He was wrong. The subjects increased how many miles their cars covered by a collective 83 percent when they had the chauffeur versus the week prior.

To put these findings in perspective, when researchers looked into the impact Uber and Lyft have had on urban congestion, they reported an increase in VMT in the single digits. San Francisco, which has seen some of the largest percentage increase of cars driving around in its downtown thanks to Uber and Lyft, had an increased VMT of 12.8 percent.

Knowing how much gridlock and traffic those rideshare cars have added to the city, imagine six and a half times as much car driving as that is almost impossible.

………

But none of the researchers Jalopnik spoke to believe those flaws detract from the overarching, real-world conclusion: AVs will change people’s behavior in profound ways. MacKenzie called it “probably the best data we have based on actual, measured behavior.”

There are places for self-driving cars, but the reality envisioned by folks like Elon Musk is a looks to be rather dystopian.

Google Is More Evil Than You Think

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It turns out that Google has been deceiving us about the level of human intervention of their search results:

Google, and its parent company Alphabet, has its metaphorical fingers in a hundred different lucrative pies. To untold millions of users, though, “to Google” something has become a synonym for “search,” the company’s original business—a business that is now under investigation as more details about its inner workings come to light.

A coalition of attorneys general investigating Google’s practices is expanding its probe to include the company’s search business, CNBC reports while citing people familiar with the matter.

………

Google’s decades-long dominance in the search market may not be quite as organic as the company has alluded, according to The Wall Street Journal, which published a lengthy report today delving into the way Google’s black-box search process actually works.

Google’s increasingly hands-on approach to search results, which has taken a sharp upturn since 2016, “marks a shift from its founding philosophy of ‘organizing the world’s information’ to one that is far more active in deciding how that information should appear,” the WSJ writes.

Some of that manipulation comes from very human hands, sources told the paper in more than 100 interviews. Employees and contractors have “evaluated” search results for effectiveness and quality, among other factors, and promoted certain results to the top of the virtual heap as a result.

One former contractor the WSJ spoke with described down-voting any search results that read like a “how-to manual” for queries relating to suicide until the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline came up as the top result. According to the contractor, Google soon after put out a message to the contracting firm that the Lifeline should be marked as the top result for all searches relating to suicide so that the company algorithms would adjust to consider it the top result.

Or in another instance, sources told the WSJ, employees made a conscious choice for how to handle anti-vax messaging:

………

The company has since maintained an internal blacklist of terms that are not allowed to appear in autocomplete, organic search, or Google News, the sources told the WSJ, even though company leadership has said publicly, including to Congress, that the company does not use blacklists or whitelists to influence its results.

The modern blacklist reportedly includes not only spam sites, which get de-indexed from search, but also the type of misinformation sites that are endemic to Facebook (or, for that matter, Google’s own YouTube).

We already know that algorithms tend to reinforce, rather than mitigate, human bias and bigotry.

Now we know that there are discrete human fingers on the scales.

This is why we need real antitrust enforcement.

Oh, Snap!

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It appears that Congressman Devin “Moo” Nunes just got caught soliciting foreign support for Trump’s 2020 campaign.

Likely ethics investigation to follow:

The top Democrat on the House armed services committee said Saturday that Republican Rep. Devin Nunes is likely to face an ethics investigation over allegations he met with an ex-Ukrainian prosecutor at the center of the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.

“Quite likely, without question,” House Armed Services Committee chairman Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash) said when asked by MSNBC’s Joy Reid whether Nunes (R-Calif.), the House Intelligence Committee’s top Republican and a longtime Trump ally, could be investigated.

CNN reported late Friday that an associate of Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, has information on meetings Nunes allegedly had with former Ukrainian prosecutor general Victor Shokin.

The CNN report says that Lev Parnas, according to his attorney, put Nunes in touch with Shokin to help him gather damaging information on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s dealings with Ukraine.

I do not expect any serious consequences for this, because it’s OK if You are a Republican. (IOKIYAR)

Today in Hack Journalism

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The New York Times uncritically reports on a study that shows that a wealth tax would slow down the economy.

The study assumes that none of the money collected will be spent on other programs, so this tax, like ANY tax will have a contractionary effect.

It’s only a few paragraphs down that they mention this.

It’s called burying the lede:

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax would slow the United States economy, reducing growth by nearly 0.2 percentage points a year over the course of a decade, an outside analysis of the plan estimates.

The preliminary projection from the Penn Wharton Budget Model, which was unveiled on Thursday in Philadelphia, is the first attempt by an independent budget group to forecast the economic effects of the tax that has become a centerpiece of Ms. Warren’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The assessment found that if the tax raised as much new federal revenue as Ms. Warren intends, and if the proceeds went toward reducing the federal debt, annual economic growth would slow from an average of 1.5 percent to an average of just over 1.3 percent over a decade.

The model did not assess growth effects from Ms. Warren’s spending plans, which critics said undercut its findings. Economists who favor Ms. Warren’s plan said the analysis did not accurately account for the economic boost from programs she would fund with the tax revenue, including universal child care, increased education funding and student loan forgiveness.

Instead, it assumed that the tax revenue would be used to reduce the national debt, a move that encourages growth in the Penn Wharton simulation. Had the Penn Wharton model factored in the money’s going into programs rather than paying down debt, it most likely would have produced an even larger drag on growth from the wealth tax.

So, their model calls upon the austerity fairy in order to make their numbers.

This analysis is complete bullsh%$, and the report is even more cow excrement.

Speaking of Rich People Who Should Be in Jail………

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Note that this is Facebook’s case, and so the best possible case.  The reality is probably rather stark.

In news that should surprise no one who, it turns out that Facebook is aggressively promoting fake accounts.

Given that their business is selling ads to all of its accounts, this means that Facebook is actually something akin to a Ponzi scheme:

At first glance, Amy Dowd’s Facebook account appears perfectly normal. There is a smiling profile picture of a young woman surrounded by autumnal leaves and the date that she began a new job at Southeast Missouri State University. But look more closely and things begin to seem strange. Unlike most 29 year olds, Amy has no friends, no interests and no photos. The only thing she has written is a gushing review of a US haulage company. “Fake account,” replied one user. They were right.

 This Amy Dowd does not exist. Her account is a fake bought by the Financial Times as part of an investigation into the millions of bogus accounts littering the social media network in spite of efforts to better verify users.

 The proliferation of phoney identities has reached a record high. That is a problem for a company that trumpets user growth — considered a barometer of health by investors — while receiving criticism for failing to prevent the spread of false information by third parties.

 Facebook’s own estimates suggest duplicate accounts represent approximately 11 per cent of monthly active users while fake versions make up another 5 per cent. Others claim the total is higher. Yet Facebook continues to promote its user base as an incredible 2.45bn per month — close to one-third of the global population.

How about a meaningful investigation of fraud among Silicon Valley firms?

Showing these guys that they are not above the law would produce a noticeable benefit for society.

Deport them to China, Where They Can Have a Bullet Put in Their Skulls

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In China, this merits the death penalty, and the Sacklers merit a ride on a Chinese Execution Van:

The mega-rich family behind the OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma is back to selling its highly addictive pain-killer with underhanded tactics and deceptive advertising—this time in China, via its international company, Mundipharma. That’s all according to a searing new investigation by the Associated Press.

The Sackler family, which owns both Purdue and Mundipharma, is embroiled in litigation in the United States over its alleged role in sparking the country’s epidemic of opioid abuse and overdoses. Thousands of plaintiffs—many state and local governments—claim that Purdue and the Sacklers misled patients, doctors, and regulators on the addictiveness of their drugs, aggressively marketed them, and wooed doctors into over-prescribing them.

While Purdue has since declared bankruptcy and stopped promoting OxyContin in the US, the Sacklers seem to be employing the same practices in China.

Based on documents and interviews with multiple Mundipharma representatives in China, the AP investigation found that reps were at times posing as doctors, providing debunked information that its long-acting opioids are safe and less addictive, and even illegally copying private medical records of patients to inform sales tactics.

I should note that I am opposed to the death penalty, and I do not actually support their being sent to China and executed.

Instead, I favor the punishment extolled by Billy Ray Valentine, “The best way to hurt rich people is to turn them into poor people.”

Mayor Sentient Mayonnaise Strikes Back

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If you ever wondered why Pete Buttigieg is polling at 0% in the Quinnipiac poll of South Carolina, this quote should be rather informative.

In 2012, the Springfield, MA police department adopted counterinsurgency techniques, and Mayor Mayonnaise gave his full throated endorsement.

It turns out that since 2012, the Springfield PD has been a morass of corruption, racism, and violence.

But they are keeping people of color down, so Mayor Pete is good with them.

It should surprise no one that since 2012 the Springfield, MA, police department has been subject to multiple civil rights probes; state & federal criminal investigations & prosecutions of officers; a federal civil suit with a $450K jury/fees award… https://t.co/sBgAeTZ1TE pic.twitter.com/gDJheH4qIp

— Houston Institute (@houstoninst) November 21, 2019

Shooting Someone at Noon on 5th Avenue

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Donald Trump was right about his supporters, because the Republican response to the impeachment hearings indicates that Donald Trump could literally shoot someone on camera, and the ‘Phants would say, “No impeachable offense,” or, “Everyone does it,” or just, “F%$# you.”

Impeachment is, of course an inherently political process, but this is insane.

Tweet of the Day

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if pete doesn’t like people who meet and work with dictators and war criminals, i got some news for him about McKinsey…

— tyson brody (@tysonbrody) November 21, 2019

Considering McKinsey’s profoundly unethical behavior in recent years, it really behooves Mayor Pete “Sentient Mayonnaise” Buttigieg to come clean about what exactly he was doing during his time at the consulting firm.

Being Evil

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After employee protests over kowtowing to Chinese demands for censorship, sexual harassment, DoD and CBP contracts, AI bias, etc., Google has done the obvious “heel move”, and clamped down on employee discussions and hired a notorious union busting firm:

Google has hired an anti-union consulting firm to advise management as it deals with widespread worker unrest, including accusations that it has retaliated against organizers of a global walkout and cracked down on dissent inside the company.

The firm, IRI Consultants, appears to work frequently for hospitals and other health care organizations. Its website advertises “union vulnerability assessments” and boasts about IRI’s success in helping a large national health care company persuade employees to avoid a union election despite the unions’ “dedicating millions of dollars to their organizing campaigns.”

Google’s work with IRI is the latest evidence of escalation in a feud between a group of activist workers at Google and management that has tested the limits of the company’s traditionally transparent, worker-friendly culture. Since Google was founded two decades ago, employees had been able to ask management tough questions at weekly meetings, and anyone who worked there could look through documents related to almost any company activity.

………

Last fall, Google employees around the world walked out to protest the company’s handling of sexual harassment complaints. And discussions on the company’s internal message boards have at times turned into contentious debates about politics or company policies that have become public embarrassments.

………

Google employees stumbled upon the company’s relationship with IRI in October, according to two employees familiar with the discovery, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the fear of retaliation. They unearthed internal calendar entries indicating that Google had hired IRI, according to screenshots shared with The New York Times.

………

At the time of the discovery, Google had recently installed a tool on employees’ web browsers that would flag internal calendar events requiring more than 10 meeting rooms or 100 participants.

Many employees believed that the so-called browser extension, which was first reported by Bloomberg, was a surveillance tool designed to crack down on organizing among workers. The company said at the time that it simply wanted to reduce internal spam and that the tool did not collect personally identifiable information.

………

Last month, Google management in Zurich caused an uproar when it tried to cancel an employee discussion about unionization and proposed its own discussion about labor laws and employee rights. In September, a small group of contractors that work for Google voted to unionize with the United Steelworkers.

The management, of course, thinks that they are something special and unique, and that the rank and file simply does not understand.

Would that they spoke in the language of their predecessors and simply said, “The peasants are revolting.”

Thus is always the way with self-entitled assholes.

It’s Called Obeying the Law, Everyone Else Does It

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Once again, the “Disruptors” from Silicon Valley are whining about having to follow the law like ordinary people.

In this case, it’s the food delivery services, who have decided that taxes are too hard to figure out.

Hire a f%$#ing accountant you f%$#ing f%$#s, and stop asking for a subsidy, which is what the real agenda is here.

And while your are at it, stop f%$#ing your employees who deliver the actual food:

Grubhub Inc. Chief Executive Matt Maloney says his food-delivery rivals need to charge more sales taxes on their delivery fees. They disagree.

Delivery fees administered by companies like Uber Technologies Inc.’s Uber Eats division, Postmates Inc., DoorDash Inc. and Grubhub are receiving increasing attention from local officials who have watched the industry grow quickly in the past several years. Food-delivery companies were projected to charge $10.4 billion in delivery fees in the U.S. by 2023, compared with $4.4 billion in 2017, according to analysts at Cowen & Co.

If such fees get taxed more uniformly, customers could shell out tens of millions of dollars more for the newly popular delivery services. Already customers can find themselves paying different amounts for the same order, depending on which service they use, and those delivery costs could rise further as the companies shift away from incentives and aim to improve profitability.

Meanwhile, some of the services could face tax liability for incorrect collections in the past.

………

An Uber spokeswoman said the company collects sales tax on delivery fees where required. A Postmates spokeswoman said the company is complying with all regulations and tax laws, and a DoorDash spokeswoman declined to comment.

Grubhub’s Mr. Maloney said he is confident that his company is collecting the appropriate sales taxes.

“The 34 states that have told us to tax our service and delivery fees need to audit everyone in our industry to make sure we’re following their tax laws,” he said in an interview. “I’m happy to be audited with the rest of them.”

………

A Wall Street Journal analysis of dozens of test food orders across the four states and Washington, D.C., showed that Grubhub’s three major rivals typically collect sales tax on the food subtotal, whereas Grubhub charges tax on food plus fees. In some cases, the same restaurants sold the same food at the same price on all four websites, but the totals varied widely based on the added fees. Only Grubhub collected sales tax on delivery and service fees in all of the instances.

This is an opening salvo in attempt to to make lobby lawmakers for a tax carve out.

Screw that.

F%$# Yeah!!!!

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All those years of hypocrisy and dishonesty have finally caught up with Benjamin Netanyahu:

For the first time in Israel’s history, a sitting prime minister is accused of bribery: Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit announced Thursday Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be charged with bribery, fraud and breach in three corruption cases, dubbed Cases 4000, 2000 and 1000.

The indictment comes after a four-day hearing with Netanyahu’s defense team last month, followed by weeks of intensive discussion at the attorney general’s offices.

Laying out the charges in a press conference, Mendelblit said he made the decision to indict the prime minister “with a heavy heart, but wholeheartedly,” stressing it was not an issue of left-wing or right-wing politics and that enforcing the law is not a matter of choice.

The attorney general lamented that “while conducting a professional hearing process, we’ve witnessed repeated attempts to delegitimize the people who were involved” in the investigations. He defended his colleagues, saying “These people acted out of proper motives.”

This man has been a pox on the Middle East, and a clear and present danger to the state of Israel, subsuming both human decency and the well-being of Israeli society to his ambitions.

Now that he has been indicted, maybe a government can be formed without his sorry bigoted ass.

Live (Drunk) Blogging the November Debates

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11:19pm:
I am completely drunk.

11:14pm:
Closing statements:
Cory Booker is a very good speaker.

Tom Streyer: A big bag of nothing.

Tulsi Gabbard: Nice closing, but she got very little air time.

Andrew Yang: Silicon Snake Oil.

Amy Klobuchar: I don’t know why, but I just hate her.

Kamala Harria: She REALLY needs a hook.

Pete Buttigieg: Content free hope and change.

Sanders: Talks up his history of opposing bigotry. He also touts his support from small donors.

Warren: Calls out corruption of government. I hope that it means realistic change.

Biden: Word salad with a reference to Barack Obama.

11:00pm:
Charlie has taken away my bottle. I am really REALLY drunk.

10:58 pm:
Gabbard calls out Mayor Mayonnaise’s call for occupation of Mexico. Good. Drink.

10:50pm:
Tulsi Gabbard comes out for paper ballots counted manudlly, 2 snaps up. Drink.

10:56pm:
Mayor Mayonnaise is right to bring up Gerrymandering.

10:53pm:
Roe for Wade now comes up: the Elephant in the room.

Warren dodges the question about John Bel Edwards support for anti-abortion legislation, but Bernie comes out unequivocally in favor of abortion rights.

10:44pm:
Biden says that he is now in favor of legalization of marijuana, major policy change.

Still calling for health studies, but this is a major policy change.

Also, I am completely f%$#ed up. Charlie is now acting as my spotter.

10:40pm:
Corey Booker: “I’ve had a lifetime of experience with black voters, I’ve been one since I’ve one since I was 18.”

Also he goes after Biden on his antediluvian pot policies. Take a drink.

10:36pm:
Mayor Mayonnaise: Let me talk about what’s in my heart. Does not mention evicting poor people to make spaces available for wealthy developers. Take a drink.

10:30pm:
Yeah, I am seriously drunk now. Thank God for auto spell check.

White Supremacist violence is brought up.

I did not expect this, and it is a good question.

The proper answer is, “I will go after white supremacists like Obama and Holder went after Occupy Wall Street.”

10:27pm:
Brian Williams talks up post debate analysis at MSNBC.

F%$# that. I’m switching to the Daily Show.

Also, the ads for The Report (CIA torture) and Queen and Slim (Black Lives Matter) seem a savvy market move.

10:26 pm:
Mayor Mayonnaise refers to Trump using 17th technology like moats filled with alligators and walls. Drink.

10:22 pm:
Sanders: “Saudi Arabia is not a reliable American ally.”

Also Sanders: “Me must treat the Palestinians with the they deserve.”

Good.

He also said, “Be clear.” Drink per Taibbi rules.

Also, I am a bit shicker now.

10:16pm:
My rather unscientific sense is that Sanders is getting an absolute minimum of time in the debates.

10:14pm:
Yang asked what his call to Putin would be if he was elected.

Stupidest question of the evening.

10:12pm:
Bernie asked about Afghanistan, and makes point that the endless wars we are promulgating need to be ended, “But unlike Trump, I will not do it by a tweet at 3 in the morning.” Nice slam, take drink.

10:09pm:
On the DPRK, Harris has a good line, “Donald Trump got punk’d.” Take a drink.

She then goes on with a full throated defense of American empire, and Joe Biden follows down the same path, and adds a dash of brinksmanship. Take shot.

10:07pm:
Climate change, and Steyer, Biden, and Sanders are generally on the same page.

The Biden bit surprises me.

Sanders calls big oil criminals. Oh, snap. Take a shot.

10:01pm:
I’m back, and I’ve cracked a bottle of rum.

Took a shot to start. It’s 151 black rum. I felt it in my ears.

Have a bottle of water for a chaser.

9:29pm:
Off to pick up Charlie.

9:26pm:
Kamala Harris basically goes down the “Tulsi Gabbard is a tool of the enemy” path.

Not surprised. Gabbard brought up Harris’ awful record as a prosecutor in prior debates, which has killed her campaign.

9:19 pm:
Mayor Mayonnaise (Pete) is using Republican talking points on Medicaid for All.

9:16 pm:
Warren and Booker are getting into it over a wealth tax.

Warren had a good line, “I’m tired of freeloading billionaires.”

Booker is clearly not into taxing rich people.

9:10pm:
Joe Biden is asked about how he will full his (IMNSHO delusional) vision of of bipartisan action given that the Republicans are going after his kid.

Mostly, he danced around  and brought back to impeachment.

9:01pm:
First question is about impeachment developments, and the Ambassador Sondland bombshell.

Basically an easy question in the context of debates.

Sanders observes that the Senate can walk and chew gum at the same time, and continue to do their day job while conducting an impeachment.

Pete Buttigieg really is sentient mayonnaise.

9:00pm:
At the introductions, and since I have to pick Charlie from the Metro, so I am currently not drinking.

I am not repeating the mistake that I made in September, when I went with 30 proof Buttershots, I am going with (cheap) rum, and using an actually shot glass, as opposed to a small glass, but I hope to get hammered before the debates are done.

Once again, I will be posting at the top, with each update having a time in HH:MM pm format.

Once again, my drinking will be guided, thought not controlled, by Matt Taibbi’s most recent debate drinking game.

Going Long on Fig Newton Futures

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The House Judiciary Committee has passed a bill removing marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act,

This is the first time that any committee in Congress has ever passed a bill descheduling cannabis out of committee:

For the first time ever, a congressional committee has approved a piece of legislation to end marijuana prohibition in the United States. The Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment, and Expungement Act, better known as The MORE Act, would remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act and impose a minor excise tax on the legal cannabis industry to pay for the expungement of criminal records, among other changes, passed with a bipartisan vote of 24 to 10.

“This is a truly historic moment in our nation’s political history. For the first time, a Congressional committee has approved far-reaching legislation to not just put an end to federal marijuana prohibition, but to address the countless harms our prohibitionist policies have wrought, notably on communities of color and other already marginalized groups,” stated NORML Executive Director Erik Altieri, “Opposition to our failed war on marijuana has reached a boiling point with over two-thirds of all Americans, including majorities of all political persuasions, now supporting legalization. Congress should respect the will of the people and promptly approve the MORE Act and close this dark chapter of failed public policy.”

“The passage of the MORE Act represents the first time that the Judiciary Committee has ever had a successful vote to end the cruel policy of marijuana criminalization,” said NORML Political Director Justin Strekal. “Not only does the bill reverse the failed prohibition of cannabis, but it provides pathways for opportunity and ownership in the emerging industry for those who have suffered most. In 2018 alone, over 663,000 Americans were arrested for marijuana-related crimes, a three-year high. Now that Chairman Nadler has moved the MORE Act through committee, it is time for the full House to vote and have every member of Congress show their constituents which side of history they stand on.”

I wonder if Joe Biden will be asked about his whole, “Marijuana is a gateway drug,” delusion.

The Computer is Your Friend

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Someone was ranting about how HR evaluation software is less accurate than reading the entrails of a recently slaughtered gazelle. (See below, it’s worth the read)

Someone gave me this strategy for getting a human being to look at your resume, and it is brilliant:

So, job seekers, in case no one has told you this:

Always put the job description in tiny white text at the bottom of your resume so the resume scanner software picks you up as a 100% match but it’s imperceptible to the human eye

— Michele Hansen (@mjwhansen) November 14, 2019

Full Twitter thread after the break:

Also this

Schadenfreude Alert!!!!

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It appears The House of Saud’s IPO for Aramco is going about as well as WeWork’s:

Some of the world’s top investment bankers gathered at a Riyadh palace on Saturday to deliver their final recommendations on a project that had consumed the government of Saudi Arabia for the past few years: the initial public offering of Saudi Aramco.

The financiers were there to meet Yasir al-Rumayyan, the state oil company’s chairman and the head of the country’s sovereign wealth fund, along with cabinet ministers and the company’s leadership.

Their message would disappoint the hosts: international investors were unwilling to buy shares in Saudi Aramco anywhere near the $2tn valuation long sought by the kingdom’s powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. No amount of sweeteners — from promises of higher dividends to bonus shares for local retail investors — had managed to change that reality.

It could not happen to evern

Remember Skybolt?

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I am referring, of course, to the GAM-87 Skybolt air-launched ballistic missile, which was developed by the United States in the early 1960s as a was to penetrate increasingly capable Soviet air defense systems.

It was canceled when the Polaris SLBM was determined to better fit the needs.

We now have evidence that the People’s Republic of China is developing a very similar system, though it will likely not be used as a strategic system.

It appears to be a derived from the mobile land base DF-21 of the It will be used to target aircraft carriers, and the air launched capabilities will force carrier groups even further from China, particularly since the platform China’s upgraded Badger the H-6N, is designed with air to air refueling capabilities:

A centrefold graphic recently flourished intimate details of a Chinese bomber carrying a stark new weapon. State-controlled media has since gone into cover-up mode. But military analysts think Beijing may have been caught with its pants down.

The government produced Modern Ships magazine has splashed high-resolution computer-generated images of China’s most recent addition to its strategic bomber line-up – the H-6N – over the front and feature pages.

But that’s not what drew the eye of the world’s defence thinkers.

The graphics showed the new bomber carrying a huge ballistic missile slung under its fuselage. And that missile looks a lot like one of a family of ballistic weapons deployed by China’s People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) as aircraft carrier killers.

I do not think that this is an unintentional release of information.

After all, how can you deter a CVBG if they do not know about the threat.

The carrier aircraft is extensively modified as well:

Defence enthusiasts noted several strange things about the latest N variant of China’s Xian H-6 series of strategic bombers when it was unveiled to the public at the 70th National Day parade in October.

The state-controlled Xinhua news service simply said it was a “homemade strategic bomber capable of air refuelling and long-range strike”.

But when a flight of three of the bombers flew over Beijing, military experts saw it doesn’t have bomb-bay doors. Instead, it has what appears to be new heavyweight attachment points in a recess along the centre-line of its fuselage.

Also noted was its modified, extended nose-cone and an air-to-air refuelling nozzle.

Assuming that the system can be made to work reliably, and this would include a multitude of sensors and cuing systems, it would be a formidable areal denial system.