I really appreciate this very, very generous profile from @petercoy but I do want to disagree with the headline, which is reinforced by the article. I do have a credential- the intersection of my whiteness, maleness and cisness. 1/N https://t.co/h9YcdjFDkK
— Nathan "Donate to @survivepunishNY" Tankus (@NathanTankus) July 2, 2020
It’s good to see someone acknowledge their own privilege in such a straightforward and honest way.
I choose Frankenstein, the monster who is intelligent but feared only due to his appearance—who argues to his own creator that he is a living being with a right to happiness, and is driven to violence only by that man’s cruelty and drive to exterminate his life. pic.twitter.com/GFA19Fa8HM— Matt Bors (@MattBors) July 2, 2020
This is a wonderful take-down of right-wing political cartoonist by non-hack cartoonist Matt Bors.
Some things never change:
Facebook has admitted that it wrongly shared the personal data of ‘inactive’ users for longer than it was authorized to, as revealed in a blog post from the company.
The social media giant estimates the error saw around 5,000 third-party app developers continue to receive information about users who had previously used Facebook to sign into their apps, even if users hadn’t used the app in the past 90 days.
Exceeding that time frame goes against Facebook’s policy, which promises third-party apps would no longer be able to receive personal information about a user if they had not accessed the app within the last 90 days.
………
The 90-day limit was introduced as part of Facebook’s overhaul of its privacy settings, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 which saw an estimated 87 million users have their personal data harvested by the now defunct political consulting firm without consent.
This is something that happens with Facebook on a VERY regular basis.
This is not an error, it is deliberate policy.
This evil needs to be confronted, and excluded from the brotherhood of nations, not traded with:
Chinese authorities are carrying out forced sterilisations of women in an apparent campaign to curb the growth of ethnic minority populations in the western Xinjiang region, according to research published on Monday.
The report, based on a combination of official regional data, policy documents and interviews with ethnic minority women, has prompted an international group of lawmakers to call for a United Nations investigation into China’s policies in the region.
………
The country is accused of locking more than one million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim minorities in re-education camps. Beijing describes the facilities as job training centres aimed at steering people away from terrorism following a spate of violence blamed on separatists.
A report by Adrian Zenz, a German researcher who has exposed China’s policies in Xinjiang, says Uighur women and other ethnic minorities are being threatened with internment in the camps for refusing to abort pregnancies that exceed birth quotas.
………
Zenz found that population growth in Xinjiang counties predominantly home to ethnic minorities fell below the average growth in primarily Han majority counties between 2017 and 2018, a year after the officially recorded rate of sterilisations in the region sharply overtook the national rate in 2016.
………
“These findings raise serious concerns as to whether Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang represent, in fundamental respects, what might be characterised as a demographic campaign of genocide” under UN definitions, Zenz said in the report.
The US gained back 4.8 million jobs in June.BUT there’s a big asterisk. Take a look at the chart below. The Labor Department’s jobs survey were done in mid-June just before the big surge in covid-19 cases.https://t.co/48xohZeGGl h/t @andrewvandam pic.twitter.com/TvxxTF2yCT
— Heather Long (@byHeatherLong) July 2, 2020
It’s Thursday, which means that initial jobless claims for last week has has been released, and because the first Friday of July is a holiday, they also released the Kraken June unemployment rate.
Unemployment (U3) fell to 11.1%, though the more expansive (and IMHO more accurate) U6 measure remained above 18%.
Unemployment over 10% is catastrophic, and the weekly job losses of 1.4 million would have been considered apocalyptic in pre-2020 days, though they are a significant improvement over what has been going on since March.
It should also be noted that the week that was used for the unemployment sample, it’s always the week containing the 12th almost surgically cuts off before the explosion of Covid-19 cases:
The U.S. economy added a record 4.8 million jobs in June, according to federal data released Thursday, but a surge in new infections and a spate of new closings threatens the nascent recovery.
Two key federal measurements showed the precarious place the economy finds itself in three and a half months into the pandemic as the country struggles to hire back the more than 20 million workers who lost their jobs in March and April.
While companies have continued to reopen, a large number of Americans are finding their jobs are no longer available. The unemployment rate in June was 11.1 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said, down from a peak of 14.7 percent in April but still far above the 3.5 percent level notched in February.
And another 1.4 million Americans applied for unemployment insurance for the first time last week and more than 19 million people are still receiving unemployment benefits, stubbornly high levels that show how many people are struggling to find or keep work.
The Congressional Budget Office on Thursday said the coronavirus pandemic gave such a shock to the labor market that it would not fully recover for more than 10 years.
The economy is still in a dire condition, with the only good news being that the continuing cratering in hotel occupancy is likely to destroy Trump’s highly leveraged hotel empire.
It turns out that black home owners are assessed significantly higher property taxes than white home owners.
Obviously, racism figures prominently in this state of affairs, but the obvious question that is raised is whether this is an artifact of the communities in which they live, or does it effect people of color regardless of whether they live in largely segregated communities.
It turns out that it’s a bit of both:
We decompose this finding into two components. We show that slightly more than half of the assessment gap can be explained by between-neighborhood variation. Residential sorting by race in the U.S. means that the average black or Hispanic resident faces a different set of local attributes than a white resident does. Market prices appear to be substantially more sensitive to a wide range of observable neighborhood characteristics than assessed valuations. We use hedonic regressions to show that market prices and assessed values align well on home-level attributes, but diverge on tract-level characteristics. This mismatch, along with residential segregation patterns, generates 6–7 percentage points of the total tax burden inequality.
We show that the remaining 5–6 percentage points of inequality persists even within very small geography. We hypothesize that the main channel for this effect is racial differ- entials in property tax appeals. We use administrative data from Cook County, the second largest county in the US, to demonstrate that such racial differentials can exist: in Cook County, minority residents are 1% less likely to appeal; are 2% less likely to win an ap- peal; and conditional on success, receive a 2–3% smaller reduction. We then exploit racial changes in ownership around property transactions to test for racial differentials in assessment trajectories, and find patterns consistent with an appeals mechanism in the national data.
There are communities that target minorities in all sorts of nefarious ways, (Ferguson, MO) for revenue, AND individual black homeowners are simply charged more, and when they appeal property tax assessments they more likely to be denied.
I’m pretty sure if we weren’t in the middle of a pandemic, ti would have gone the other way:
Oklahoma is poised to become the 37th state to expand Medicaid to cover more low-income residents after voters narrowly approved State Question 802 on Tuesday.
………
State Question 802 passed by 6,488 votes, making Oklahoma the fifth state expand Medicaid through a ballot initiative.
The question will enshrine Medicaid expansion in Oklahoma’s constitution — effectively preventing Oklahoma’s GOP-controlled Legislature or Republican governor from limiting or undoing the expansion.
After nearly a decade of waiting on politicians to act, Oklahomans decided on Tuesday to take health care into their own hands, Yes on 802 campaign manager Amber England said in a statement.
“In the middle of a pandemic, Oklahomans stepped up and delivered life-saving care for nearly 200,000 of our neighbors, took action to keep our rural hospitals open, and brought our tax dollars home to protect jobs and boost our local economy,” she said.
The campaign for SQ 802 was launched after years of legislative inaction on Medicaid expansion. The Yes on 802 campaign turned in a record number of signatures to qualify the question for the ballot.
Good politics and good policy.
cheerily walking into the HOA meeting with this handy guide pic.twitter.com/wHXYx4xVtb— womanfredo tafuri (@mcmansionhell) July 1, 2020
As an FYI, the section reproduced by the tweeter is from a World War II vintage OSS manual on sabotage, specifically, sections 11 and 12 of the OSS’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual.
Using this at a HOA meeting is the most appropriate use of the dark arts ever. 
Let me be clear here: This is completely and totally wrong.
Anyone who allows the subject of their story to be dictated by their subject is not a journalist, they are a stenographer.
They are not talking about the coverage of private citizens in their private lives, they are talking about people engaged in public demonstrations to influence policy.
The question is simple: Would you give this right to a counter-protester who was a member of the Klu Klux Klan of a Neo-Nazi group?
The answer, of course, is no, not ever.
A new Photo Bill of Rights, inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic and the current uprising against police brutality, has caused fissures in the American photojournalism community and raised an important question about “informed consent” in photographing protesters.
………
But the bill’s language about how photographers should use “informed consent,” especially in the context of the current protests against police brutality, has caused a stir among journalists:
………
At the latter organization, this has caused tensions. Photojournalist Noah Berger, who left the NPPA because it signed onto the bill of rights, said in a phone interview that it has long been understood that photographing people gathered in a public space for a protest has always been fair game, and that the language of the statement only furthers the right-wing smear that journalists are “fake news,” or an opposition movement.
I have criticized the consulting company McKinsey & Company on a number of occasions.
I have accused them of laundering their (undeserved) reputation for probity to place a gloss on destructive self-dealing by politicians and senior managers.
Essentially, if you want to sell off the company in pieces, and lay of thousands, while issuing obscene bonuses, you hire McKinsey to give you the rubber stamp.
Slate has a very good survey of how their racket operates:
What exactly do management consultants do? Well, consultants help solve problems for people who run companies and other organizations. The client defines the problem, and the consultant helps find a solution. But there are consultants … and then there’s McKinsey & Company.
The idea that McKinsey hires the best of the best is central to the story that the firm tells about itself. It tackles the hardest problems for the biggest clients—and the fees it charges those clients reflect all this. They’re the bluest-chip management consultants around. And that’s why, over the course of nearly 100 years in business, McKinsey has been able to adapt to changing market conditions and skate through crises with little harm to its bottom line. Most companies see periodic dips in demand for their products and services, but there’s rarely been a down market for what McKinsey has to offer—because McKinsey sells solutions to other companies’ problems. What sorts of problems? Whatever you got.
………
The guy who had that idea, back in the 1920s, was an accounting professor named James McKinsey. At the time, accounting basically meant one thing: keeping track of the money that came in and the money that went out. You spend a dollar, you wrote it down. You earned $5, you wrote it down. At the end of the month, you added it all up and reconciled the past with the present. But what James McKinsey realized was that a smart company could use those same techniques to see the future. You could look at those numbers—numbers that represented costs and revenues—and use them as the basis for next year’s budget, or to chart a long-term corporate strategy. Maybe that seems sort of obvious? Well, it wasn’t obvious in 1926. And while a few people had similar insights right around that time, James McKinsey was the only one to build a massive consulting company around it.
………
Under Marvin Bower, McKinsey would respect the numbers, but it would refuse to be bound by them. Instead, the firm would offer advice and counsel of all sorts. If James McKinsey had turned accountants into consultants, then Bower turned consultants into professionals. To Bower, a professional was discreet; a professional talked and dressed like those top executives. McKinsey consultants were even required to wear hats right up until the 1960s, when John F. Kennedy changed the world by appearing in public with a bare head. But most importantly, Bower thought a professional should give clients the good advice they might not get internally and tell them the hard truths they might not want to hear. A professional, in Bower’s estimation, would do what was best for the client, not what was most lucrative for the adviser. “He basically said to their clients, ‘We will put your interests ahead of ours always,’ ” says McDonald. “And that is the foundation upon which McKinsey’s entire reputation and business was built.”
………
So, OK, consultants work for management. They’re trained to identify with management. And when there’s a conflict between what’s good for people who run the companies and what’s good for everyone else, which side would you expect the consultants to be on?
In 1951, a McKinsey consultant published a study in Harvard Business Review showing that ordinary worker wages were rising roughly three times as fast as executive wages. “This study made the rounds among elite American executives,” says Daniel Markovits, a Yale law professor and author of The Meritocracy Trap. “The elite executives took the view that they would like their compensation to grow more quickly.”
So the executives started bringing new problems to the consultants: foreign competition, increasing costs, declining profits. And what the McKinsey consultants started telling them was, broadly, “Do you really need all those middle managers?” Of course, most executives don’t enjoy putting people out of work, and they certainly don’t like being seen as heartless. Fortunately, that’s another problem McKinsey can help them with. Once a company has decided to fire a bunch of people, McDonald says, “it’s a lot easier to say to your employees … the ones who will still be showing up to work, that ‘I didn’t want to do this, but we went and asked McKinsey, and this is their advice.’ McKinsey will willingly be the scapegoat for that story.”
………
Over the course of its history, McKinsey has advised downsizing for so many different companies that, according to Duff McDonald, the firm may well be “the single greatest legitimizer of mass layoffs [of] anyone, anywhere, at any time in modern history.” The wave of layoffs that tore through the economy from the ’70s through the ’90s changed the shape of the American corporation. Afterward, there were fewer employees in that middle tier coordinating between the production line and the executive suite. Corporate jobs were increasingly divided between replaceable cogs at the bottom and stressed-out captains of industry at the top.
………
Of course, losing all those white-collar workers in the middle saved companies a lot of money. Some of that money went to profits. Some of it went to the consulting firms they brought in to help them. And some of it went to the salaries of those increasingly important top executives. According to Markovits, this is exactly how the meritocracy looks after its own interests. “It’s not part of my argument that places like McKinsey or Boston Consulting Group or Bain or any of these other elite consulting shops are snake oil salespeople,” he says. “They are providing real skill and expertise. It’s just that when companies manage themselves using skill and expertise delivered in this way, what ends up happening is that they increase the wages of really elite managers and graduates of fancy universities and decrease everybody else’s wages.”
………
But at the same time, according to New York magazine, McKinsey is also working for the Trump administration. The firm has contracts with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Veterans Affairs, and was at one point even involved in Jared Kushner’s coronavirus task force. And it’s not just for public health, either. According to ProPublica and the New York Times, when the Trump administration in 2017 directed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to ramp up detentions, McKinsey consultants allegedly suggested that the agency save money by cutting spending on food and medical care for detainees. These recommendations were a bridge too far even for ICE, according to ProPublica and the Times, and the agency did not pursue them.
Their prescriptions were too inhumane for la Migra. Think about that for a second.
This was exactly what DNS over HTTPS was supposed to prevent.
Comcast has agreed to be the first home broadband internet provider to handle secure DNS-over-HTTPS queries for Firefox browser users in the US, Mozilla has announced.
This means the ISP, which has joined Moz’s Trusted Recursive Resolver (TRR) Program, will perform domain-name-to-IP-address lookups for subscribers using Firefox via encrypted HTTPS channels. That prevents network eavesdroppers from snooping on DNS queries or meddling with them to redirect connections to malicious webpages.
………
At some point in the near future, Firefox users subscribed to Comcast will use the ISP’s DNS-over-HTTPS resolvers by default, though they can opt to switch to other secure DNS providers or opt-out completely.
………
Incredibly, DNS-over-HTTPS was heralded as a way to prevent, among others, ISPs from snooping on and analyzing their subscribers’ web activities to target them with adverts tailored to their interests, or sell the information as a package to advertisers and industry analysts. And yet, here’s Comcast providing a DNS-over-HTTPS service for Firefox fans, allowing it to inspect and exploit their incoming queries if it so wishes. Talk about a fox guarding the hen house.
ISPs “have access to a stream of a user’s browsing history,” Marshall Erwin, senior director of trust and security at, er, Mozilla, warned in November. “This is particularly concerning in light of the rollback of the broadband privacy rules, which removed guardrails for how ISPs can use your data. The same ISPs are now fighting to prevent the deployment of DNS-over-HTTPS.”
Comcast is pinky swearing that it won’t misuse the data, which means about as much as their statement about when their service tech is supposed to show up.
A number of California police departments are ignoring the law and refusing to information about their surveillance technology documents, claiming copyright.
Let me the first to call bull sh%$:
California police are refusing to release documents about the surveillance technology it uses, despite a new law that requires their release.
On January 1, SB 978 went into effect, which requires the Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) to “conspicuously” publish all law enforcement agency training materials. The agency has said that it will not comply on copyright grounds.
Any attempt to download training materials concerning facial recognition technology or automated license plate readers (ALPRs), as well as materials relating to courses on the use of force, lead to a Word document that reads “The course presented has claimed copyright for the expanded course online.”
This is complete crap.
They don’t want the public about the technological terror that they have created, because they are afraid that the public will want to take away their new toys.
The police can go Cheney themselves.
*Credit to the author, P.C. Hodgell’s from her novel Seeker’s Mask.
Lol. Really the only way it would look right: pic.twitter.com/ed1zkRjbTT— Laleh Khalili (@LalehKhalili) June 30, 2020
In and of itself, this tweet may justify the existence of Twitter.
I am not a fan of Bill DiBlasio, he has capitulated to police, real estate developers, and that bully from the third grade, but his decision to paint, “Black Lives Matter,” on the 5th Avenue in front of the Trump Towers is something I can get behind.
Needless to say, Donald Trump is completely losing his sh%$ over this, because he is a complete whiny baby:
President Trump on Wednesday said painting “Black Lives Matter” on New York’s Fifth Avenue would be “a symbol of hate” and wind up “denigrating” the street outside Trump Tower, as he ratcheted up objections to a plan that he suggested the city’s police could stop.
Trump’s comments, in morning tweets, were his latest volley directed at New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D), who last week ordered that the tribute to the Black Lives Matter movement be painted in large yellow letters in a move designed in part to antagonize the president. De Blasio responded to Trump’s tweets Wednesday by calling them “the definition of racism.”
I call this your feel good news of the day.
