Year: 2020

Tweet of the Day

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This is unbelievably true:

I’ve been thinking about the movie Johnny Mnemonic lately, and how it turns out that that the most unrealistic thing about that movie is corporations giving a damp shit about data security.

— “Observing A Whole Lot of Anti-Chinese Racism” Cat (@No_X_in_Nixon) February 13, 2020

Whenever you hear of a computer hack, know that it is far more likely the result of shortsighted and parsimonious policies from companies than it is a super hacker.

Until there is personal jeopardy for executives who are reckless without data, this will continue.

Well, This Might Justify Tesla’s Stock Price

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Even if you think that Tesla will be a tremendously successful, the auto business is relatively low margin and highly competitive, and there is no reason for their stock price to to be more than ford and GM combined.

Unless, of course, Tesla can find a way to extract more money from its customers by forcing them to pay over, and over, and over again, because nothing says automobile ownership like, “You don’t own this, you just have a license, until we change out minds.”

Specifically, Tesla is disabling premium features on resold cars, which means that they are going to charge people for features that have already been paid for.

Somehow, I do not think that going the route of Oracle corporation is not going to be a good look for them:

One of the less-considered side effects of car features moving from hardware to software is that important features and abilities of a car can now be removed without any actual contact with a given car. Where once de-contenting involved at least a screwdriver (or, if you were in a hurry, a hammer), now thousands of dollars of options can vanish with the click of a mouse somewhere. And that’s exactly what happened to one Tesla owner, and, it seems many others.

Alec (I’ll withhold his last name for privacy reasons) bought a 2017 Tesla Model S on December 20 of last year, from a third-party dealer who bought the car directly from Tesla via auction on November 15, 2019. The car was sold at auction as a result of a California Lemon Law buyback, as the car suffered from a well-known issue where the center-stack screen developed a noticeable yellow border.

When the dealer bought the car at auction from Tesla on November 15, it was optioned with both Enhanced Autopilot and Tesla’s confusingly-named Full Self Driving Capability; together, these options totaled $8,000. You can see them right on the Monroney sticker for the car:

………

Tesla officially sold the car to the dealership on November 15, a date I’ve confirmed by seeing the car’s title. On November 18, Tesla seems to have conducted an “audit” of the car remotely. The result of that audit was that when the car’s software was updated to the latest version in December, the Enhanced Autopilot and Full Self Driving Capability (FSD) were removed from the car.

This sort of crap is why I am not bullish on Tesla.

They, and by that I mean Elon Musk, simply do not understand the auto market.

Bloomberg Should Just Drop the N-Word and Be Done with It

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�� New Podcast! “Episode 807 | Bloomberg’s Racist, Classist Past | What Happened To Pete? | Moderates for Bernie” on @Spreaker #biden_ad #bloomberg #notmeus #wallstreetpete https://t.co/FSNJj87h1s

— Benjamin Dixon (@BenjaminPDixon) February 10, 2020

Because the NY Times NEVER Links to the folks who break the stories

Michal Bloomberg has now disavowed the stop and frisk policies that he evangelized for when he was Mayor of New York.

I am inclined to believe that his change of heart was not sincere, particularly since we now have him tape saying that most of the crime in a city comes from young black men.

Unbelievably racist, though still better than Pete Buttigieg:

A recording of Michael R. Bloomberg in 2015 offering an unflinching defense of stop-and-frisk policing circulated widely on social media Tuesday, signaling that the former New York City mayor is about to face more intensive scrutiny as he rises in the polls as a Democratic presidential candidate.

While Mr. Bloomberg apologized for his administration’s law-enforcement tactics in November just before he entered the race, he had previously spent years insisting that the policy was justified and effective, showing no indication that he had developed serious misgivings about stop and frisk. The policing tactic was used disproportionately against black and Latino people across New York City for years.

He offered a particularly blunt defense at the Aspen Institute in 2015: The Aspen Times reported then that Mr. Bloomberg said that crimes were committed overwhelmingly by young, male minorities, and that it made sense to deploy police in minority neighborhoods to “throw them up against the wall and frisk them” as a deterrent against carrying firearms.

An audio clip of those comments was posted on Twitter Monday by Benjamin Dixon, a progressive podcaster, who highlighted it with the hashtag #BloombergIsARacist.

“Ninety-five percent of your murders — murderers and murder victims — fit one M.O.,” Mr. Bloomberg said in the recording. “You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16 to 25. That’s true in New York, that’s true in virtually every city.”

If the Democratic Party Presidential nominee is a racist, it will depress the minority vote at all levels.

Any political official who thinks that the Democrats can win the Presidency and pick up seats when the top of the ticket is a racist needs to change his career to the food service industry.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

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A teen had an excused absence from high school to go to his orthodontist, but the school cop didn’t believe him, so he threatened to shoot the child.

The Teen was suspended, and then expelled, but the cop is still on the job:

As William Miller tried to drive out of the high school parking lot, two adults stopped him, blocking the exit lane with a golf cart.

A school resource officer employed by the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office and a school discipline assistant told him he couldn’t leave the campus in New Port Richey, Fla., on the morning of Dec. 17 or he’d be classified as truant and suspended. William, 17, had just dropped off a friend at River Ridge High School before heading to a morning orthodontist appointment. The boy told the adults he had an excused absence and would return later in the day with a note. After arguing for several minutes, he tried to pull his gray Ford F-150 around the golf cart to leave.

“You’re going to get shot, you come another f—— foot closer to me,” the deputy said. “You run into me, you’ll get f—— shot.”

The tense interaction played out on a body camera video that William’s mother, Nedra Miller, shared on Facebook last month. Miller told the Tampa Bay Times on Friday that she had called the school to excuse her son’s absence in advance and that he didn’t want to interrupt her at work.

The school suspended William from Dec. 17 to Jan. 9, his mother said. Then, River Ridge High School expelled him permanently.

Despite the dire consequences for William, the two adults involved in the interaction have faced few repercussions. A school district spokesman told The Washington Post in a statement that it is not investigating the incident. The sheriff’s office opened an internal review to determine whether the deputy, who has not been named, violated any policies. However, a spokeswoman for the sheriff’s office told the Post the deputy has not been suspended and continues to work at the high school.

And cops wonder why so many people call them pigs.

Bye Felecia Andrew

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Cue Queen

Andrew Yang has suspended his presidential campaign:

Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur with no previous political experience who evangelized a universal basic income and warned of the perils of automation, ended his longer-than-long-shot bid for president on Tuesday night after a yearslong campaign that endured even as those of members of Congress and governors dropped out.

Speaking to supporters inside a ballroom as New Hampshire’s primary results were coming in, Mr. Yang said “endings are hard” and that he had intended to stay in the race until the end.

“I am the math guy, and it’s clear from the numbers we’re not going to win this campaign,” he said. “So tonight I’m announcing that I am suspending my campaign.”

His campaign never cought fire, and I thought that has attempts at breaking through were clownish in a game-show sort of way, but he did have his fans, and unlike some **cough** Bloomberg and Buttigieg **cough** he did not appear to be particularly evil.

New Hampshire

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We have the results now, with Bernie Sanders finishing first, with Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar close behind.

They all should qualify for deleg for some delegates.

Neither Elizabeth Warren (4th) and Biden (5th) qualified for any delegates.

I think that both Warren and Biden are done.

Warren had much the same sort of advantages that Sanders did in New Hampshire, and finished very poorly, and Biden’s excitability argument has been left with more holes than Donald Trump’s cerebral cortex.

This leaves Bernie and 3 potential challengers, Klobuchar Buttigieg, and Bloomberg, who has not participated in the early primaries, because he is trying to buy the nomination.

I’m not sure if Klobuchar will have staying power, she was boosted by the New York Times half endorsement and the full endorsement of the Manchester Union-Leader, but the contests are moving to states that are less lily white, and both Buttigieg and Bloomberg have pretty egregious records of hostility to minorities.

South Carolina should be interesting.

Schadenfreude Much?

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The food delivery firm DoorDash requires its employees to sign an arbitration agreement, which among other things, prevents class action suits, largely so that it can pretend that they are independent contractors.

A lawyer has taken about 5,000 of of these employees as clients, and filed about 5,000 arbitration claims, which will cost DoorDash about $12,000,000 in arbitration costs.

So, DoorDash attempted to get a judge to move this to a class action suit to save money, and Federal Judge William Alsup called bullsh%$ on this:

Rejecting claims that the legal process it forced on workers is unfair, a federal judge Monday ordered food-delivery service DoorDash to pay $9.5 million in arbitration fees for 5,010 delivery drivers’ labor demands against the company.

“You’re going to pay that money,” U.S. District Judge William Alsup said in court. “You don’t want to pay millions of dollars, but that’s what you bargained to do and you’re going to do it.”

Barred from filing labor suits in court under the terms of a required arbitration contract, 6,250 DoorDash drivers brought their claims to an arbitrator. Last fall, the American Arbitration Association found each worker met the minimum requirements for filing a claim and ordered DoorDash to pay $12 million in fees. The workers paid $1.2 million in filing fees, or $300 per case.

DoorDash refused to pay its share of fees, arguing the workers failed to specify how much money they were seeking or prove they had a valid arbitration deal with the company.

In response, the delivery drivers filed two motions to compel arbitration, which landed in Alsup’s court. DoorDash told Alsup the company shouldn’t have to pay those fees because the petitioners’ law firm, Chicago-based Keller Lenkner, failed to properly vet its clients’ claims or prove it had an attorney-client relationship with each worker.

………

Despite those problems, Alsup said he would not deny relief to the majority of petitioners on that basis.

“Out of those 6,000 there probably are a few people where you pulled the wool over my eyes, but I think the vast majority of these are legit,” the judge said. “I’m not going to hold up that relief just because there are going to be a few glitches.”

………

In total, Keller Lenkner sought to compel arbitration for 5,879 workers. Alsup said he would grant the motion for 5,010 workers who submitted valid declarations affirming that they worked for DoorDash and signed a valid arbitration contract with the company. At $1,900 per case, DoorDash must pay $9.5 million.

In May 2019, the company was valued at $12.6 billion.

Attorney Warren Postman, of Keller Lenkner, described Alsup’s decision as a major victory for gig economy workers misclassified as independent contractors and fighting for minimum wage.

“They’ve been shut out of every forum for months, and in some cases years,” Postman said. “I’m glad our clients will have their day to have their claims heard.”

Late last year, Alsup allowed the petitioners to investigate claims that DoorDash worked with a new arbitrator to concoct rules that would benefit DoorDash while disadvantaging workers.

DoorDash introduced new arbitration terms on Nov. 9, which workers must agree to before they can log onto the DoorDash app to work and get paid. The new terms require workers arbitrate disputes through the International Institute for Conflict Prevention and Resolution (CPR). Under the CPR rules, only 10 arbitration cases can proceed at once when more than 30 cases are filed. The rules also mandate 90-day mediation sessions and other conditions, which the petitioners say could delay their cases for years.

DoorDash and CPR both maintain the new rules were created in response to mass arbitration demands, but they say multiple stakeholders were involved in the development of a “fair and neutral process” that expedites a small number of “test” or bellwether cases followed by a mediation process that encourages resolution of all claims.

On Monday, Alsup said he would deny motions to seal communications between DoorDash’s law firm, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, and CPR, adding he will give DoorDash 14 days to appeal his decision.

“There’s a public interest in the world at large knowing that someone like CPR that holds itself out to be an impartial agency is actually being guided by the employer side,” Alsup said.

So, it is highly likely that the plaintiffs will get access to communications between DoorDash and the arbitration firm, and this will almost certainly reveal that the arbitration firm is working for DoorDash, and not a neutral actor, which would open up both to damages under things like RICO which mandate large punitive damages.

Hopefully, this tactic will spread to the other “Gig Economy” fraudsters.

No.

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Of course they can’t.

They were the ones who spent tens of billions of dollars on stock buybacks instead of investing in new aircraft as a part of a systematic plan to allow upper management to loot the company through stock options:

In December, when Boeing’s board of directors fired CEO Dennis Muilenburg, some corporate governance experts and investment analysts wondered what took so long.

………

Investigations, lawsuits and news stories revealing festering internal problems had piled up. Muilenburg faced public grillings and calls for his resignation during Congressional hearings. Revenues and stock values plummeted. Worst of all, Boeing’s once sterling reputation for quality and safety was badly tarnished.

The prolonged hesitance to fire Muilenberg in the face of spiraling crises underscores concerns about the board’s oversight of the company, even as it faced the most troubling period of its 103-year history. It also raises questions about the board’s culpability in the tragedies and its ability to reestablish confidence in the company among regulators, Wall Street and the flying public.

“Nine months is a long time — it’s a forever in business for a crisis like this,” said Charles Elson, a professor of finance and head of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. “So, the question is, where was the board during that time? If they only came around ‘late in the game,’ well why is that?”

Because the board of directors are largely a creature of corrupt upper management whose goal is get their vigorish before the whole house of cards collapses.

Cue Alanis Morissette

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Or maybe not, because unlike her song, the news that hackers took over Facebook’s Twitter account is actually ironic:

An otherwise slow Friday afternoon has been spiced up by a hacker crew that managed to temporarily take control of Facebook’s official Twitter account. OurMine did not say how it got into the Social Network’s Twitter account, but it did take the opportunity to blast Zuck and Co.’s security practices:

This is certainly one way to ruin a Friday afternoon for someone in Menlo Park

Facebook's Twitter feed was hijacked. pic.twitter.com/Ioh58NibIZ

— The Register (@TheRegister) February 7, 2020

It should be noted that these are the people who have collected massive amounts of data on you in the hope of selling your soul to advertisers.

OK, He’s Completely Lost It

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When pressed by a woman at a campaign about his poor showing in Iowa, Biden called her a, “Lying dog-faced pony soldier.”

It appears to have been meant as a joke from a John Wayne movie (it’s probably from a Tyrone Power movie*), this sort of behavior is insane:

Madison Moore warned Joe Biden that the question she was about to ask was going to be a bit mean.

 Then the 21-year-old student at Mercer University in Georgia launched into a version of what’s been asked of the former vice president since his disappointing fourth-place finish in the Iowa caucuses:

 “How do you explain the performance in Iowa, and why should voters believe that you can win the national election?”

 What happened next left her a little shaken, Moore said.

 Biden said it was legitimate question, but then turned the spotlight back on her, asking: “Iowa’s a caucus. Have you ever been to a caucus?”

 When she indicated yes, he rebuked her “No, you haven’t. You’re a lying dog-faced pony soldier.”

 The phrase was an allusion to a line in a John Wayne movie that Biden had used before. But Moore said she was flummoxed at his reaction to what she thought was a legitimate question.

Yes, this would tend to flummox one.

Biden has always been an odd duck, but I think that he’s crossed the line into bat-sh%$ insane.

*Specifically the 1952 film Pony Soldier, where Tyrone Power plays a Mountie.

Mixed Emotions

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These Are All Hideous Dehumanizing Crap


Boston City Hall


Royal Ontario Museum


Vitra Design Museum


J.Edgar Hoover Building

Donald Trump has issued new architectural guidelines for government buildings, specifically calling for new buildings to be designed in a “Classical” style.

I have mixed emotions about this.

The first, and most obvious area of concern is that this should not be a decision made by the President.   Standards on buildings and the like should be driven at the staff level by technical issues.

Additionally this decision has clear echoes to Adolph Hitler’s (and Albert Speer’s) edicts on buildings during Germany’s Nazi era.

On the other side, every single, “Innovative,” public building that I have seen has been complete sh%$ from an aesthetic perspective, and the functionality has frequently been complete pants as well.

Ever since improvements in architectural materials have removed many constraints from buildings, high end architecture has increasingly been an exercise in mental masturbation:

In 1962, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant secretary at the Labor Department, prepared a memo on the use of federal office space for President John F. Kennedy. Into this document he tucked a succinct yet deeply considered set of recommendations for the design of U.S. government buildings. These “Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture” were adopted as official policy shortly thereafter and are seen as axiomatic by American architects and planners.

Moynihan wrote that federal buildings must testify to “the dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability of the American government.” But he was silent about which styles would best express those qualities—deliberately so. “An official style must be avoided,” he cautioned. “Design must flow from the architectural profession to the government and not vice versa.”

That flow may soon be reversed. As first reported by Architectural Record and confirmed by The New York Times, the Trump administration is considering an executive order that will direct that U.S. government buildings with budgets greater than $50 million be designed in classical and other traditional styles. A draft document retains Moynihan’s ringing phrase about “dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability,” but stipulates that “the classical architectural style shall be the preferred and default style.” All federal courthouses and federal buildings in and around Washington, D.C., would have to follow the work of Greek and Roman architects and their emulators in subsequent centuries. The late-20th-century Brutalist and Deconstructivist styles, meanwhile, would essentially be banned from the federal projects covered by the order. The restriction would apply to renovation and expansion projects as well as new buildings.

Brutalism’s monumental concrete forms and the fractured geometries of Deconstructivism have attracted many other detractors, of course. But for the federal government to categorically discourage any architectural style is startling—and an utter misunderstanding of how architecture works.

The American Institute of Architects issued a statement saying it “strongly opposes” the move. Most architects today support using a range of styles for new buildings, as Moynihan did. But the AIA doesn’t speak for the cadre of die-hard classicists with whom the document originated. The National Civic Art Society (NCAS), a small Washington nonprofit, prioritizes the classical tradition in design and argues that contemporary architecture “has created a built environment that is degraded and dehumanizing.”

Contemporary architecture is crap, and even when it works functionally, it is corrosive to the very soul.

Gonna Leave a Mark

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When the Columbia Journalism Review writes an article about your paper, it can frequently be uncomfortable.

When the CJR title is, The Post’s Masthead Will Have to Accept That It Is Not God, you know it is going to be an unpleasant read for the WaPo editorial staff.

The problem here is not one of technology. It is one of politics. The attempt of prestige newspapers like the Post to cast themselves as perfect sentinels of objectivity standing outside the tawdry world of political judgment is, as honest journalists have long realized, absurd. And impossible. The Post’s current social media policy forbids posting anything “that could objectively be perceived as reflecting political, racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism.” 

Consider the assumptions inherent in such a standard. It posits, first, the existence of someone capable of telling hundreds of journalists with hundreds of different sets of life experiences covering a complex nation of 330 million citizens what “objectively” is political or racial bias. (Maybe God is up to that job, but Marty Baron is not.) We see in practice that what is ruled to violate this standard is a reporter noting a history of sexual assault in a recently deceased celebrity, or a reporter saying that the Tea Party was motivated by racism. Are these observations “objectively” evidence of some sort of “bias?” No. They are, instead, evidence that it is a fool’s errand for the management of the Post to act as though they alone have insight into objective truth.

Oh, snap!

Of Course They Did

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The Federal Communications Commission’s broadband data dramatically underestimates the number of Americans without access to home Internet service, a new study has found. The actual number of people lacking home-broadband access is about twice as high as the FCC estimate, the study found.

The FCC has said that 21.3 million Americans live in areas without access to fixed broadband with 25Mbps download and 3Mbps upload speeds. But FCC data is widely known to be flawed, because it counts an entire census block as served even if only one home in the census block can get service. Census blocks have an average of 4,000 residents.

The real number of Americans without access to wired or fixed wireless broadband is 42.8 million, slightly more than double the FCC estimate, according to the study released yesterday. The study was conducted by BroadbandNow, a company that provides an online tool for checking broadband availability.

The free market mousketeers at the FCC are desperate to show that their policy of subsidies without accountability to the likes of Verizon, Comcast/Xfinity, Frontier, CenturyLink, AT&T, and Satan* will create a broadband utopia.

It’s bullsh%$, of course, which is why the US has the poorest performing and the most expensive internet service in the world, but this is an ideological position, not a fact based one.

The Good People of California Need to End Xavier Becerra’s Career

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The California state Attorney General has continued to flout the law making law enforcement disciplinary records public.

This is simple: You either follow the law, and work for the public, or you are a corrupt coward who should not be dog catcher:

A California appeals court has just handed Attorney General Xavier Becerra a second defeat in his quest to keep police misconduct records out of the public’s hands.

Becerra first stepped up to defend bad cops from transparency and accountability shortly after a new law went live, giving Californians access to police misconduct and use of force records for the first time ever. Becerra claimed (without legal support) the law was not retroactive, an assertion contradicted by the crafter of the bill.

No courts agreed with this contention, even when it was made by police unions and department public records reps. The law applies to all misconduct records, not just those created after the law’s enactment. Some departments saw this coming and purged older records prior to enactment. Others complied quietly. A few sued to block enforcement of the law.

Xavier Becerra made the dubious legal assertion the state’s Department of Justice didn’t need to turn over records because it wasn’t the original source. He made this assertion despite the DOJ being the agency that routinely investigates misconduct and use of force complaints, which means the DOJ should have plenty of responsive records on hand.

The First Amendment Coalition and public media outlet KQED sued after Becerra refused to turn over records. Becerra asked the appeals court to tell him he was right to refuse to comply with the law. The appeals court says that’s not the way the law works. The state DOJ holds records on police misconduct and the public can directly approach the DOJ for these records, rather than filing requests with numerous different agencies. (via Courthouse News)

Becerra is lawless Attorney General who is likely kowtowing to corrupt cops because he wants to run for Governor one day.

Bad cops are one of the most corrosive actors in society, and ignoring the law is beyond contempt.

Breaking News from the Gulf of Tonkin

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My bad, it’s not the Gulf of Tonkin, it’s the Persian Gulf, but given that it looks like we are dealing with yet another false report that could lead to war, the similarities are uncanny.
The rocket attack on the military base that eventually led to the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani was probably executed by Daesh, not an Iranian backed militia:

The white Kia pickup turned off the desert road and rumbled onto a dirt track, stopping near a marsh. Soon there was a flash and a ripping sound as the first of the rockets fired from the truck soared toward Iraq’s K-1 military base.

The rockets wounded six people and killed an American contractor, setting off a chain of events that brought the United States and Iran to the brink of war.

The United States blamed an Iraqi militia with close ties to Iran and bombed five of the group’s bases. Angry Iraqis then stormed the American Embassy. The United States then killed Iran’s top general. Iran then fired missiles at American forces and mistakenly shot down a passenger jet, killing 176 people.

But Iraqi military and intelligence officials have raised doubts about who fired the rockets that started the spiral of events, saying they believe it is unlikely that the militia the United States blamed for the attack, Khataib Hezbollah, carried it out.

………

American officials insist that they have solid evidence that Khataib Hezbollah carried out the attack, though they have not made it public.

Bullsh%$.

If they had evidence, we would have heard it.

They wanted to get their war on, facts be damned.

………

The rockets were launched from a Sunni Muslim part of Kirkuk Province notorious for attacks by the Islamic State, a Sunni terrorist group, which would have made the area hostile territory for a Shiite militia like Khataib Hezbollah.

Khataib Hezbollah has not had a presence in Kirkuk Province since 2014.

The Islamic State, however, had carried out three attacks relatively close to the base in the 10 days before the attack on K-1. Iraqi intelligence officials sent reports to the Americans in November and December warning that ISIS intended to target K-1, an Iraqi air base in Kirkuk Province that is also used by American forces.

And the abandoned Kia pickup was found was less than 1,000 feet from the site of an ISIS execution in September of five Shiite buffalo herders.

These facts all point to the Islamic State, Iraqi officials say.

The repercussions for this bit of insanity will be playing out for decades, and they will not be good for us.