Wall Street Shocked Argentine President-Elect Who Ran Against It Not Eager To Do What It Wants
Here is hoping that they go seriously medieval on Wall Street’s ass.
Year: 2019
Capitalism at Its Finest
In an effort to improve their (in retrospect non-existent) chance to land Amazon’s HQ2, Indiana regulators downplayed the online retailer’s responsibility for the death of one of their employees:
When an Amazon worker was killed by a forklift in a Plainfield warehouse in 2017, the state of Indiana’s investigator found the company was at fault. The state cited Amazon for four major safety violations and fined it $28,000.
But an investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has found that, as Gov. Eric Holcomb sought to lure Amazon’s HQ2 to Indiana, state labor officials quietly absolved Amazon of responsibility. After Amazon appealed, they deleted every fine that had been levied and accepted the company’s argument — that the Amazon worker was to blame.
The investigator on the case, John Stallone, had arrived at the warehouse a day after 59-year-old Phillip Lee Terry was crushed to death. He was so troubled by the pushback he was getting from higher-ups that he secretly recorded his boss, Indiana OSHA Director Julie Alexander, as she counseled the company on how to lessen the fine.
“It’s like being at a card table and having a dealer teach you how to count cards,” Stallone said.
………
It began in September 2017, when Amazon announced a search for a second headquarters, saying it would invest more than $5 billion and bring as many as 50,000 jobs to whichever city won the sweepstakes.
………
Indiana OSHA issued four serious safety citations, for a total fine of $28,000. Stallone sought more, but he was getting pushback. On Nov. 20, 2017, Stallone joined his boss, Julie Alexander, the Indiana OSHA director, as she called Amazon officials. He secretly recorded the conversation, which is legal in Indiana, and shared the recording with Reveal.
During the call, Alexander told the Amazon officials what she’d need from them in order to shift the blame from the company to “employee misconduct,” according to the recording.
And she walked them through how to negotiate down the fines. “We sometimes like to consider grouping citations to lower the penalty amounts,” she said.
She suggested Amazon could partner with her agency as a “leader in safety” to kick off a program promoting best practices in the logistics industry.
After hanging up with Amazon, Alexander said: “They’re wanting to probably take this offer and go back and look and say, ‘Hey, we’re partnering with Indiana. We’re going to be the leader.’ ”
She told Stallone, “I hope you don’t take it personally if we have to manipulate your citations.”
………
Some days after the conference call with Amazon officials, Stallone said Indiana Labor Commissioner Rick Ruble pulled him into his office. The governor was there, too, standing by the commissioner’s desk, according to Stallone.
He recalled that Holcomb told him how much it would mean to Indiana if the state won the Amazon headquarters deal. Then, Stallone said, the commissioner told him to back off on the Amazon case — or resign.
………
The same day Stallone sent his whistleblower email, Amazon’s corporate offices in Seattle gave a $1,000 campaign contribution to Indiana’s governor. It was years before Holcomb would next face reelection, and Amazon hasn’t donated to him before or since.
A year after Terry’s death, Indiana officials quietly signed an agreement with Amazon to delete all the safety citations and fines. The agreement said Amazon had met the requirements of an “unpreventable employee misconduct defense.” The official record now essentially blames Terry for his own death.
Note that that Amazon did not have to ask anyone to do anything for them.
This is just the nature of “business friendly” politicians and their administrations.
It doesn’t matter if the politician is a Republican or Democrat, though Holcomb is a Republican, these folks will literally sacrifice the blood of their citizens on the alter of profit.
Happy Thanksgiving
As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly:
H/t Eschaton.
Linkage
- Disinvestment, discouragement and inequity in small business lending (NCRC) Banks discriminate against people of color/
- Undercover investigation reveals evidence of unequal treatment by Long Island real estate agents (Newsday) Racism on Long Island? So not surprised.
- The Rewards of Poor Performance: CEO, Hedge Fund, and Private Equity Compensation (American Affairs Journal) “There is little link between the pay of CEOs and the returns they provide to shareholders.”
- Car Crashes Aren’t Always Unavoidable (The Atlantic) How politics made car an indispensable part of American society.
- Ban Facial Recognition (Fight for the Future) Using facial recognition on members of Congress to get them to ban the tech.
- We Need To Stop Talking About The Teacher Shortage (Forbes) Teachers are underpaid, poorly treated, and villified. This is why people do not want to be teachers.
This is literally every newspaper movie ever made:
There is Stupid, Desperate, Stupid and Desperate, an Then There Is ………
There is so clueless and desperate that you feel compelled to consult with Mark Penn, the man who (mis)managed Hillary Clinton’s 2008 Presidential campaign. (He did not know that the Democrats do not have winner take all primaries)
Penn is now advising Donald Trump on impeachment:
As President Trump’s White House battles impeachment, he turned to a familiar face last week: Mark Penn, one of President Bill Clinton’s top strategists.
Penn visited the Oval Office for more than an hour last Monday, three people familiar with the meeting said, and provided polling data and impeachment advice for the president. Penn reassured Trump that he would not be removed from office, according to people familiar with the meeting, and encouraged him to travel the country as Clinton did when he was fighting impeachment over 20 years ago, officials said.………
In a brief interview, Penn said repeatedly that he was not working for Trump. “It’s the second time I have ever met with the president. I’m not counseling him. I’m not advising him.” Penn said he discussed with Trump only publicly available data but declined to be specific on his advice. “I don’t get into presidential meetings.”
That is a distinction without a difference.
Penn is a hack and an incompetent, so while I am angry about his disloyalty to the Democratic Party, it’s better that this mook* is advising Trump as opposed to someone who has a modicum of competence.
*Not to be confused with 2016 Clinton campaign chair Robby Mook, who is also, ironically, a mook.
Preach It
Over at the Stanford Social Innovation Review, they make a cogent argument for limiting excessive salaries in the non-profit sector:
An average family participating in the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program costs taxpayers $400 a month. We pay $126 a month to the typical beneficiary of food stamps—the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
By contrast, Susan Desmond-Hellmann, the CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, costs us $44,200 a month. [This is the amount subsided by the tax deduction, not her salary, which is 2½ times that] This figure may catch some readers by surprise, because they probably don’t think of themselves as paying the salaries of people who work at nonprofit organizations. But we do pay her that amount, and it is a problem.
The salary of the Gates Foundation’s CEO costs taxpayers money because we gave Bill Gates a large tax break that subsidizes his contribution to his eponymous foundation or any other philanthropy. If Gates was in the 40 percent tax bracket (a safe bet before the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act pushed by President Donald Trump), then the government effectively picked up the tab for 40 cents of every dollar that Gates decided to contribute to his foundation.
There is a tendency to treat tax deductions, for charitable contributions or other purposes, as being qualitatively different from direct government spending. This may be a convenient way of thinking for the people who most benefit from these deductions, who tend to be richer on average. But it is nonsense.
………
We should have this fact in mind when we consider the purpose of the charitable-contribution tax deduction. In effect, we are saying that certain categories of activities are serving a general public purpose. If individuals choose to support these activities, through religious organizations, educational institutions, or philanthropic organizations such as the Gates Foundation, we will subsidize their contributions by allowing them to pay less in taxes.
This is a reasonable policy for the federal government. It provides subsidies for organizations that address a wide variety of social ends in diverse ways. These subsidies can help promote new and innovative practices that may ultimately be adopted more broadly.
However, the government does put conditions on the sorts of organizations that are eligible for tax-exempt status. For example, they must not be for-profit organizations. The government does not, at least explicitly, allow deductions for money paid to profit-making corporations. Nonprofits also must serve the general public purpose. I cannot have a charity to pay the person who mows my lawn. Nonprofits cannot advance a partisan political agenda.
This is important background for thinking about the money that taxpayers effectively pay to support the salary of the Gates Foundation’s CEO. Most people view the rise in income inequality as one of the major problems in the US economy. Desmond-Hellmann’s $1.33 million annual salary is way above the cutoff for the top 1 percent of US wage earners. In fact, it is far above the cutoff for the top 0.1 percent of wage earners.
While many factors have led to the rise in inequality, part of the story is the excessive pay of CEOs and other top executives. This is more an issue in the corporate sector, where the average pay of CEOs now approaches $20 million a year. Nonetheless, when pay for top executives in the nonprofit sector crosses the million-dollar mark, even at philanthropies such as the Rockefeller Foundation that worry about inequality, this is also part of the problem.………
In this case, we should keep our eye on the ball. The federal government is providing enormous subsidies to the bloated pay of top executives at nonprofits. This is simply not a good use of federal dollars, and it is hardly in keeping with the idea that nonprofits should be serving a public purpose. We can try to develop government policies to reverse market outcomes that generate inequality, but we should first end government policies that promote inequality.
I would note that some of the most highly remunerated employees at non-profits are coaches for NCAA Division I teams, which frequently are in the 8 figure range.
These high levels of compensation make a joke out of charities.
First, they make a mockery of the whole concept of charity, and second, as behavioral economist Dan Ariely showed in his studies, very high levels of remuneration actually decrease performance.
My Apologies for Missing a Pun
Yesterday, I posted an article titled, “They’ve Got Tapes. They’ve Always Got Tapes“.
I should have titled it something like, “Rudy Impaled by Vlad Tapes,”*, since it involved an attempt to extort action by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
*Oh for F%$#’s sake, it’s a play on the name of the Romanian Prince Vlad Țepeș, AKA Vlad the Impaler, AKA Vlad Drakul, the source of the Dracula story. Do I have to explain EVERYTHING?
A Good Idea
The Democratic Party of the State of California has come out in favor of requiring that charter schools have publicly elected boards.
This is an unalloyed good:
- It makes it more difficult for bad actors, and there are lots of them in the school privatization ecosystem, to loot their schools.
- It adds a level of accountability to administrators.
- Since the boards are publicly elected, it means that he proceedings, AND THE FINANCES of Charters must be made available under California’s tough Freedom of Information act.
Needless to say the Wall Street looters making money off of this will scream bloody murder:
Taking aim at the majority of charter schools in the state, the California Democratic Party has included language in its platform declaring that these schools should be overseen by publicly elected boards, in contrast to the self-appointed boards that run most of them.
The new language, adopted at the state party’s annual convention in Long Beach over the weekend, was promoted by the 120,000-member California Federation of Teachers and strengthens an already strongly worded section of the California Democratic Party’s platform on charter schools.
It is especially significant because it comes from a state with by far the largest number of charter schools in the nation, enrolling just over 10 percent of all the state’s public school students. It also underscored the ongoing divisions within the party over charter schools, which have become about one of the most contentious issues on the nation’s education reform agenda.
………
He said that according to the California education code, charter schools are public schools and therefore “should reflect the communities where we work and serve.” “One of the best ways to reflect the community and be accountable to the community is to be elected by the community,” he said.
………
The new language also calls for charter schools to adopt “fair labor practices” and respect labor “neutrality.” That means that if charter school teachers and staff want to join a union, school administrators should stay “neutral” and refrain from either supporting or opposing the unionizing effort.
This may be an even bigger deal. At the core of many school privatization efforts is an attempt to destroy, or at least emasculate, teachers’ unions.
As a result of a bill signed by Gov. Jerry Brown a year ago, California has already banned for-profit charter schools,
I missed this. It’s a good start.
The California Charter Schools Association, which represents most charter schools in the state and supported the for-profit ban, pushed back against the tougher language in the Democratic Party platform.
Mandy Rice-Davies Applies (MRDA), “Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?”
………
But coming just weeks after the California Legislature approved major legislation endorsed by Gov. Gavin Newsom revising the state’s 25-year-old charter school law, it’s unlikely that there’s much appetite in Sacramento for making further major changes, at least in the near term.
There is no reason that charters cannot be subject to the same accountability and same disclosure requirements, as public schools.
Absent this, they turn into a morass of corruption and self dealing.
H/T Diane Ravitch.
There Are Worse Things than Dressing Up as a Klans Man for Halloween
Things like opposing the repeal of Virginia’s “right-to-work” laws, wich nominal Democrat Ralph Northam just did:
Gov. Ralph Northam made clear to his revenue advisory council on Monday that he does not support repeal of Virginia’s right-to-work law that forbids compulsory union membership.
With Democrats preparing to take complete control of the General Assembly for the first time in more than 25 years, Northam sought to reassure Virginia business leaders that the state won’t take a sharp leftward turn on an issue that has long been a political fire alarm in a pro-business state.
“I can’t foresee Virginia taking actions [that would include] repeal of the right-to-work law,” he told the Governor’s Advisory Council on Revenue Estimates.
Virginia’s right-to-work law says participation in a union may not be a condition for employment in the state. In 2016, Virginia voters rejected a proposal to put provisions of the law in the state constitution.
………
Destiny LeVere, communications director of the Virginia AFL-CIO, said the organization reacted with “deep disappointment” to the governor’s remarks.
“Being named 1st for business and 51st overall for workers isn’t something Virginia should be proud of,” she said in a statement.
“This General Assembly session, workers will be joining together to ensure that there will be a robust, pro-labor agenda that values Virginia’s workers, putting us at the forefront. Number one on this agenda is repealing right-to-work.”
Northam is a f%$#ing coward and he is f%$#ing stupid.
Not only to anti-union laws like RTW hurt the average citizen, but they cost Democrats about 3½% of the vote.
Governor Northam, you are sh%$ting in your party in order to suck up to f%$#ing f%$#s like the f%$#ing Chamber of f%$#ing Commerce, which will oppose you and try to defeat you anyway.
They’ve Got Tapes. They’ve Always Got Tapes
It looks like indicted Giuliani associate Lev Parnas has tapes of both Rudolph Giuliani’s and Donald Trump’s efforts to extract an investigation of Hunter Biden from Kiev, and he has turned them over to the House Intelligence Committee for the impeachment investigation:
The House Intelligence Committee is in possession of audio and video recordings and photographs provided to the committee by Lev Parnas, an associate of President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who reportedly played a key role in assisting him in his efforts to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and Ukraine, multiple sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News.
The material submitted to the committee includes audio, video and photos that include Giuliani and Trump. It was unclear what the content depicts and the committees only began accessing the material last week.
“We have subpoenaed Mr. Parnas and Mr. [Igor] Fruman for their records. We would like them to fully comply with those subpoenas,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff told CNN Sunday, with a committee spokesperson adding they would not elaborate beyond the chairman’s comments.
An attorney for Parnas, Joseph A. Bondy, also declined to comment, directing ABC News to a statement released earlier in the day Sunday reading in part, “Mr. Parnas has vociferously and publicly asserted his wish to comply with his previously issued subpoena and to provide the House Intelligence Committee with truthful and important information that is in furtherance of justice, not to obstruct it.”
………
However, some of the material sought by congressional investigators is already in possession of federal investigators within the Southern District of New York and thus held up from being turned over, according to sources familiar with the matter.
………
Giuliani’s relationship with Parnas and Fruman is the subject of a criminal investigation in the Southern District of New York, according to sources. That case will have its next court date early next month.
I rather imagine whatever the SDNY has in their grubby mitts will not be getting to the impeachment inquiry in the near term, since Barr has made it clear that his first, and perhaps only, priority, is to obstruct the Congressional investigation.
Still, the mention of tapes does create a sense of nostalgia in this political child of the Watergate era.
Yes, $350 Screen Replacements are a Money Loser
So says Apple about its iPhone repairs, where it claims that it loses money on each repair that it makes.
So the unaffiliated repair shop down the street can fix it for $100.00, but apple can’t at 3½ times the price.
I want their accountant.
Actually, I don’t want their accountant, I want whatever their accountant is smoking:
It can be tough in the repair industry, and no one knows that better than struggling corporation Apple.
Cupertino has long been criticized for trying to control what its customers can do with their products, and especially so for charging what critics have said in an unjustifiable mark-up on repairing everything from iPhones to MacBooks.
But it’s just not true, the iGiant revealed this week to US Congress: in fact, despite charging between double and triple what other repair shops charge for fixing problems, Apple (2018 profit: $60bn) actually loses money on its repair business.
Asked by the House Judiciary subcommittee to “identify the total revenue that Apple derived from repair services,” the Cupertino idiot-tax operation revealed [PDF] that: “For each year since 2009, the costs of providing repair services has exceeded the revenue generated by repairs.”
That’s right, it may charge you $329 for a screen replacement that costs $100 everywhere else. Or $80 for a battery than costs $30 across the street. Or even $475 to replace a single key at an Apple store. But poor old Apple is making a loss every time.
Which is, of course, nonsense, though it’s interesting to explore how Apple can make the claim with a straight face. And the answer is creative accounting.
………
In short, Apple has, for years, carefully restricted the number of repair shops that can service its products in order to maintain artificially high prices – prices that it often sets for its authorized outlets. And it has gone to some lengths to discourage any repairs to its products outside of those authorized outlets or its own stores.
But people have grown fed up with the situation – hence the congressional review. That has resulted in a slow and carefully controlled expansion of independent repair shops approved by Apple. But even now someone at such an outlet has to go through an official Apple repair course before they’re allowed to touch its products. And Apple has put plenty of controls on both the course and any subsequent evaluation and approval of people that want to repair its products independently.
Apple defends this blatant market control in a dozen different ways in its responses, painting a picture of super-complex machinery that requires specialist and highly trained technicians. It’s nonsense but for some reason it’s effective, especially when people spend small fortunes on beloved electronics.
………
Even accounting for Apple’s BS however, how does it justify the claim that it is actually losing money on its repair business, despite charging multiples of what every other repair business does?
Easy: it counts its own ridiculous repair costs as what customers would have paid had they not taken out its over-price warranty. So if a customer pay $199 for AppleCare+ for their iPhone XS Max and brings it in to replace the screen, paying just $29 instead of the $329 out-of-warranty costs, Apple reckons it has just lost $101 – because that’s what the customer would have paid if they didn’t have a warranty.
Of course that completely ignores the fact that it costs Apple nowhere near $329 to replace the screen of a iPhone XS Max. We have no idea how much it does cost and Apple isn’t going to tell us either but that is how you get away with ripping people off while claiming poverty at the same time.
The cult of Apple is a manifestation of PT Barnum’s observation about the natural rate of increase of suckers,
“Robotruck,” Huh?
Concept
Execution
And the not-so bulletproof windows
So, Elon Musk has rolled out his “Cybertruck”, and I am profoundly unimpressed.
Honestly, I don’t think that Tesla was impressed either, as they set the deposit at only $100.00, as opposed to the $2500.00 deposit required for the Tesla Model Y, and $1,000 for the Model 3.
Its skin is made from 3mm (.118 in) thick 301 stainless steel skin which Musks refers to an an “Exoskeleton”, which means either that it is a unit body (skin is not a part of the structure, also called semi-monocoque), or a monocoque (skin is a part of the structure).
According to Musk, this is literally bullet proof, being able to stop a 9mm round at 10 meters. (The numbers work out for this)
Most trucks, by comparison, are body on frame, where there is a structure , typically a ladder frame, upon which the body is mounted.
This is one reason for the gradual taper behind the passenger cab, it’s needed for a stiff body.
Unit body is typically lighter than body on frame, and monocoque is lighter still than unit body, but significantly more difficult to manufacture, which is why it unit body is far more common in mass produced automobiles.
Also unit body makes implementing changes in the body of the car easier, since the skin merely needs to mate to the frame.
In aircraft, where weight is more significant, a full monocoque is typically used.
In any case, the skin is about 4 times thicker than that of a P-51 Mustang, which was aluminum which is about 2½ less dense than steel, so this is HEAVY.
Based on the pictures shown, and the thickness of the skin, the weight of the just skin is in the 4000 lb range.
When you add in windows, tires, motors, a 500 mile battery, tailgate, seats, electronics, lights, etc. I do not see the weight of the vehicle being any less than 8,000 pounds, and it might very well exceed 10,000 pounds.
By comparison, a Ford F-150 is about 5,500 pounds.
As such, not only will the car be expensive to operate, more weight means higher power consumption, but the handling is likely problematic, particularly in off road mode, where getting stuck in the mud is a thing.
The angular appearance of the truck may be driven by the choice of material and thickness, as 300 series stainless work hardens a lot, and at 3mm thick, it could be difficult to put complex curves in it.
Also, I’m not sure how it would corner at that weight. I’m thinking that it’s in the, “Looks like a fish, moves like a fish, steers like a cow,” category.
The Best Correction this Side of the Guardian
The British newspaper The Guardian is known for many things, including its “Corrections and Clarifications” page.
It was one of the first such pages, and given the relatively high number of typographic errors, there is a joke that at some point The Guardian will misspell its masthead as The Grauniad,
Well, now GQ has one for the ages.
They confused an IED with an IUD.
A+ correction pic.twitter.com/LveoknpEkG— Jake Maccoby (@jdmaccoby) November 22, 2019
It’s a fail, but it’s an EPIC fail.
Headline of the Day
OK Boomer, Who’s Going to Buy Your 21 Million Homes?
Makes a fairly straightforward observation: That the declining standards of living for the post baby-boomer generations means that much of the baby-boomer generation wealth, which is tied up in homes, may have no buyers.
Boomers, meet petard.
Oh, Snap
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
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
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!
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
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………
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.