John Burck, aka The Naked Cowboy, entertained sanitation truck and city bus drivers on Times Square as the snow fell heavily around him pic.twitter.com/b614nG8LTQ
— Reuters (@Reuters) February 2, 2021
Wut?!
I’m not sure if this is laudable, demented, or both.
Forget it Jake, it’s Times Square.
In @JohnFetterman announcement email: “When the people of Pennsylvania demanded a Gritty statue made of butter, I got them a Gritty statue made of butter. 😆” https://t.co/YcBJO4yBkb
— Krystal Ball (@krystalball) February 8, 2021
I want my Gritty statue made of butter.
Also, honestly, John Fetterman is just plain cool.
Only a few years ago, it would have been unthinkable for someone at a major political publication, even a liberal one like The Nation, to suggest that IP protections need to be relaxed for the good of society, and now we are seeing this.
IP law is literally for the public interest, in the US at least, as is explicitly stated in Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution, “To promote the progress of science and useful arts.”
IP is not property, it is a way to benefit society, not a way to allow rent-seeking to dominate our society:
The explosion of inequality over the past four decades is appropriately a major focus of the political agenda for progressives. Unfortunately, policy prescriptions usually turn to various taxes directed at the wealthy and very wealthy. While making our tax structure more progressive is important, most of the increase in inequality comes from greater inequality in before-tax income, not from reductions in taxes paid by the rich. And, if we’re serious about reversing that trend, it is easier, as a practical matter, to keep people from getting ridiculously rich in the first place than to tax the money after they have it.
While the Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump tax cuts all gave more money to the rich, policy changes in other areas, especially intellectual property have done far more to redistribute income upward. In the past four decades, a wide array of changes—under both Democratic and Republican presidents—made patent and copyright protection both longer and stronger.
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The effect of these changes was to transfer money from the bulk of the population to the relatively small group of people in a position to benefit from them, either because of their skills in software, biotechnology, and other areas, or because of their ownership of stock in companies that benefit from these rules.
The upward redistribution of wealth arising from intellectual property (IP) is typically disguised in public debates as being the result of “technology.” But blaming technology attributes it to an impersonal force. When we point out that it is due to intellectual property, we make it clear that inequality is a policy choice.
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By my calculations, the amount of money transferred from the rest of us to those in a position to benefit from IP comes to more than $1 trillion annually. This transfer comes in the form of higher prices for prescription drugs, medical equipment, software, and many other products. This amount is almost half the size of all before-tax corporate profits, and roughly one-third larger than the current military budget. In other words, it is real money.
Intellectual property does serve an important economic purpose in providing an incentive for innovation and creative work. But we can make patent and copyright monopolies shorter and weaker while still supporting innovation and creativity, instead of going the route of longer and stronger, as we have actually done over the past four decades.
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Most of the public money goes to finance basic research, but sometimes the government supports the actual development process, as was the case with Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine. The government paid Moderna $483 million for its research and Phase 1 and 2 trials. It then coughed up another $472 million to cover the cost of Phase 3 trials. Incredibly, the Trump administration still allowed Moderna to have patent monopolies on its vaccine, even though the government had covered the development costs and taken the investment risk. If the vaccine had proven to be ineffective, the government would have borne the cost, while Moderna still would have been paid.
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We need to keep this example in mind as the Biden administration develops its foreign policy agenda, especially its relationship with China. Biden has already complained about China’s stealing “our” intellectual property. This sets the stage for potential conflicts that are not at all in the interest of the vast majority of the American people.
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While there may be cases where the failure to honor intellectual property can cost some middle-income jobs (for example, if China uses technology to which Boeing has patent rights), the impact is likely to be comparatively small. Arguing that we should protect Boeing’s IP on this basis would be like arguing that we should not tax Jeff Bezos because reducing his income could lead him to lay off some well-paid servants. The benefits that the relatively affluent and very wealthy get from IP protections are vastly greater than the higher wages that some workers may get as a result of working for Boeing or another company with large IP claims.
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The rules on intellectual property are a major part of the story of upward redistribution of the past four decades. Contrary to what is typically claimed, they have likely been a major obstacle to technological progress, especially in the areas of health and climate technologies. It would be tragic if the protection of IP was a major cause of a cold war with China. It would be even more tragic if progressives were leading the charge.
The author, Dean Baker, has been saying this for years, and now he is getting a real hearing on this in the court of public opinion. Huzzah.
Better, but still not good initial unemployment claim numbers, 793,000 claims:
The labor market is offering signs the economy is starting to mend from a steep winter slowdown.
Worker filings for unemployment benefits—while still high—decreased to 793,000 last week, well below an early January peak that exceeded 900,000. Employers resumed hiring in January after payrolls fell at the end of 2020, and job openings picked up, driven by growth in industries that have weathered the pandemic relatively well.
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One catalyst for the recent labor market improvement is the latest round of government aid, including small-business loans intended to help employers keep and rehire workers, said Ms. Markowska. Another is the relaxation of pandemic-related business restrictions in California and the Northeast.
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Unemployment filings remain above the pre-pandemic peak of 695,000, pointing to the long road ahead for the recovery. About 4.5 million Americans were collecting unemployment benefits through regular state programs in the week ended Jan. 30. So-called continuing claims are well below pandemic highs but still more than double the levels seen a year ago.
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Many workers are experiencing long spells of joblessness. About 4.8 million Americans who exhausted their regular state benefits were drawing on extended benefits through one of the federal pandemic programs in the week ended Jan. 23, a jump from 3.6 million a week earlier.
At the very least, Biden and the Democrats, unlike Obama in 2009, recognize the risk is in doing too little, and not too much to ameliorate the situation.
Once again, we have hand wringing from the “Very Serious People” that a declining population is the end of the world.
This time; it’s China, and this time, according to the appropriately hysterical tech reporter, population decline will destroy the country.
In fact, they don’t say HOW this would destroy the country, it just self-evidently bad.
While it is true that having more elderly people and fewer working age people places demands on the funding of old age benefits, if there are fewer working age people, their pay goes up, because there is a smaller supply of labor.
That is why (as I have not infrequently noted) the black death was followed by skyrocketing wages and productivity from most of the population of Europe.
The continued drop in new births is a ticking time bomb for Beijing. Fewer births means less labor force supply, which in turn adds to the pressure on a pension system that relies on contributions from the working population. China had 254 million elderly residents aged 60 or above in 2019, according to the statistics bureau—that’s 18% of the whole population of 1.4 billion.
That number is expected to expand to 300 million by 2025, according to China’s ministry of civil affairs. Some research suggests a bleak conclusion: China’s state pension scheme could run out of funding by 2035 due to the shrinking workforce. That would be a huge issue for the Party, whose top priority is to maintain social stability.
The workers’ pension payments go up by 10%, and their wages go up by 20%, and everyone, wins, except, perhaps for Foxconn and its ilk, who see wage pressures cut into their profits.
Certainly, there are accommodations to be made, like making the workplace friendlier to older workers in addition to increasing taxes, but it’s not the end of the world.
For decades, the Fed comported itself as an expert witness for deficit hawks on Capitol Hill.
Now, under the leadership of a Republican banker, the Fed is using its technocratic credibility to bolster big stimulus (and marginalize Larry Summers)https://t.co/LyyZxcssS8
— Eric Levitz (@EricLevitz) February 11, 2021
Because he is NOT an Economist
Specifically, he put Jerome Powell in charge of the Federal Reserve, whose background is as an investment banker rather than an economist, and because of this, he has not dedicated himself to fighting invisible mythical inflation preemptively, nor has he attempted to create prosperity by invoking the equally mythical confidence fueled austerity fairy.
It turns out that there is a profession more useless than that of the investment banker, it is that of the economist.
While Trump always found him too hawkish on monetary policy, he has been the most dovish Fed chair in at least 30 years, largely because he is not comparing penis size with other economists:
For most of the past four decades, the Federal Reserve has comported itself as a corroborating witness for deficit hawks on Capitol Hill, and a security system for anti-inflation paranoiacs on Wall Street.
In the late 1970s, stubbornly high inflation taught the central bank that the conflict between its dual objectives — to promote full employment and price stability — was fiercer than it had previously thought. Specifically, the Fed decided that it would need to preemptively cool the economy when unemployment got too low, so as to snuff out inflationary spirals before they took hold. This was because tight labor markets allowed workers to hold their employers hostage to unreasonable wage demands; with no reserve army of the unemployed to draw new hires from, bosses were forced to placate existing staff. Thus, employers ended up overpaying their workers and then trying to compensate by overcharging consumers. Workers, being consumers themselves, responded to such price hikes by extracting even higher wages from their employers, causing employers to enact even more extortionate price increases, setting off a vicious inflationary cycle. Therefore, central banks had to proactively preserve slack in the labor market — both by slowing economic growth through interest-rate hikes when unemployment got too low, and by encouraging Congress to rein in deficit spending lest it spur excessive demand for labor.
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But times have changed — and so has the Fed.
Under Jerome Powell, the central bank has brought American monetary policy into belated alignment with federal law and empirical economics. Instead of attempting to preempt high inflation by sustaining a cushion of unemployment, Powell has waited for inflation to actually show itself before deliberately cooling the economy, a posture he has justified by emphasizing the myriad economic and social benefits of maximizing employment.
As a result, the Fed’s role in America’s fiscal policy debates has flipped. This week, Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus plan took on some friendly fire from center-left economists Larry Summers and Olivier Blanchard. While both endorsed the necessity of significant stimulus spending, they suggested that Biden’s package was excessively large, and would risk “overheating” the economy — which is to say, the stimulus would risk injecting more demand into the economy than the nation can satisfy, given the size of its labor force and the productive capacity of its capital stock. And when demand outstrips supply, the result is inflation.
On Wednesday, the Fed effectively intervened in this debate on Biden’s behalf. In remarks to the Economic Club of New York, Powell argued that America’s actual unemployment rate is not 6.3 percent (as official data suggest) but 10 percent, once classification errors are accounted for; that it will take “continued support from both near-term policy and longer-run investments” to restore maximum employment; and that had the pandemic not intervened, there is “every reason to expect that the labor market could have strengthened even further without causing a worrisome increase in inflation.” That last statement is key. Not only does it suggest that Powell believes the U.S. economy can support an unemployment rate significantly below the 3.5 percent we saw in early 2020, the statement also implicitly rebukes the Congressional Budget Office’s official estimate of how much more demand the economy can accommodate without overheating. Which is significant, since Summers built his “overheating” argument around the CBO’s (historically unreliable) estimate of that figure.
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The Federal Reserve’s authority over monetary policy — and technocratic credibility on questions of spending — gives it considerable power to shape the economic paradigm within which democratic politics operates. In the late 1970s, the central bank used this power to consolidate a reactionary turn in American economic policymaking. In 2021 — under the leadership of a Trump-appointed, Republican investment banker — it is doing its darnedest to consolidate a progressive one.
IMHO, Trump got it right by mistake, but he got this one very right.
This is beautiful:
And in the process, throw some serious shade at their former coalition members, the Liberal-Democrats.
We now have a report that 10 Downings Street is looking at rolling back changes made to the National Health Service in 2012 that promulgated privatization of the system.
This is not a surprise. Increasing the role of the private sector in healthcare never produces better results.
What is interesting though is that the plan, which has been leaked, seems to have been couched in language pointing the finger at the Lib-Dems, probably because the Tories see them as more of a threat than Labour: (See other prominent mentions of the Lib-Dems here and here as well)
The Conservative Government is planning a major overhaul of the NHS by reversing some of the controversial privatisation plans introduced by the Tory-Lib Dem coalition, according to a leaked white paper.
The draft document suggested that Prime Minister Boris Johnson wants to reduce the role of the private sector in the NHS by reducing competition and competitive tendering and replacing it with collaboration between health providers.
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The changes would effectively rollback some of the 2012 reforms of David Cameron’s Government with his Health Secretary Andrew Lansley that saw the establishment of NHS England to run the health service as well as the creation of GP-led clinical commissioning groups to organise local services.
The leaked proposals, published by Health Policy Insight, acknowledged the “unprecedented test to health and care services” caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, along with the “urgent” need for a “broader approach to health and care”.
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It set out how England’s Health Secretary would assume “enhanced powers of direction” over a newly merged NHS England and NHS Improvement, to set direction in a more “agile” way.
Privatization has always been the worst possible approach to potential problems with a public health system, and it has always been unpopular.
The Covid-19 pandemic has made further movement in this direction untenable, and so the Tories are reversing course, and trying to leave their former coalition members holding the bag.
I’ve made a lot of mention of the Ukraine’s Holocaust denial, antisemitism, and Neonazi predilections, on this blog, and while many former Eastern Bloc nations might respond with the equivalent of, “Hold my beer,” it appears that Poland and its judicial system has gone that extra contemptible mile, declaring historians to be criminals, and requiring a formal apology by them for pointing out the Nazi
On Tuesday, a Polish court found Professors Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski, two of the most renowned historians of the Holocaust in Poland, guilty of defamation and spreading “inaccurate information.” The two historians had been sued by the niece of Edward Malinowski, the mayor of a Polish town during World War II, for a passage that appears in their 1,700 page Night Without End about the genocide of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. In the 2018 volume, testimonies are quoted which suggest that Malinowski was implicated in the local massacre of Jews by German soldiers. Engelking and Grabowski were ordered to write an apology to the niece for allegedly defaming her uncle and “providing inaccurate information.”
The trial represents a new milestone in the assaults on historical truth and democratic rights by the Polish state and the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS). In addition to the trial against Engelking and Grabowski, a journalist, Katarzyna Markusz, is threatened with a three-year prison sentence for “defaming the Polish nation,” because of a passage she wrote on Polish complicity in the Holocaust.
These actions are part of a state-orchestrated campaign, aimed at promoting anti-Semitism and far-right forces. In 2018, the Polish government passed a law criminalizing any mention of Polish collaboration in the Holocaust. Since then, historians have faced increasing pressure, including threats of lawsuits, along with hate mail and death threats from far-right forces which feel so emboldened that they often do not even hide their names anymore. While the lawsuit against Engelking and Grabowski was brought by Filomena Leszczyńska, it was heavily backed and driven by the Polish League against Defamation, a far-right outfit that is directly funded by the state. For many years, the League has been harassing Holocaust historians with threats of lawsuits.
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The two-volume Night Without End (2018), which they edited together and which formed the basis of the trial, provides an extensive analysis of the life and fate of 140,000 Polish Jews in the countryside in the Nazi-occupied General Government of Poland. The work highlights, in particular, the role played by the Polish police (“Blue police”), a force that the Polish right has long sought to whitewash.
Poland has criminalized publishing the accounts of Holocaust survivors.
The people of Poland, or the Ukraine, or Germany, or the Baltic States are not responsible for the horrible things that some of their ancestors when the enthusiastically supported Hitler’s “Final Solution.
However, they are responsible for promulgating lies and antisemitism, as well as aggressively condoning, to the point of erecting statues, of the worst of the collaborators criminals who did this.
What they are doing NOW is a stain on their national honor, and makes genocide more likely in the future.
Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine, has died at 78.
A self described, “Smut peddler and 1st Amendment activist,” he was profoundly sleazy, but a significant part of the judicial precedent on free speech.
Also, where the rubber met the road, he had integrity, arguing against the execution of the man who shot and paralyzed him, and famously offered a million dollar bounty on sexual misconduct of members of Congress.
I have mixed emotions about him.
Beccause of the rather odd structure of the US Post Office, cannot fire the incompetent vandal Louis DeJoy as Postmaster General, only the board can do that.
However, Biden can place people who don’t want to kill the Post Office on the board, and this is what he is doing.
Well played:
President Joe Biden this week took what could be the first steps necessary to replace USPS Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.
In a statement on Monday, the White House explained that the president has moved to fill vacancies at the postal service’s Board of Governors, which has the power to name a new Postmaster General.
“Only the Board of Governors of the US Postal Service has the power to replace the Postmaster General,” the statement said. “The President can, however, nominate governors to fill vacancies on the board pending Senate confirmation.”
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“President Biden’s focus is on filling these vacancies, nominating officials who reflect his commitment to the workers of the US Postal Service — who can deliver on the post office’s vital universal service obligation,” the White House added.
Now. bring back the Postal Bank so that poor people locked out of the banking system have an alternative to larcenous check cashing firms and the like.
Trump’s Crack Impeachment Lawyers Misspelled ‘United States’—Again
Former President Trump’s legal team seems to think proofreading is overrated.
Hardly a week after submitting a legal brief for Trump’s looming Senate impeachment trial that misspelled the words “United States,” they made exactly the same blunder again on Monday in the pre-trial brief laying out their defense.
The 78-page brief referred to the country Trump used to lead as the “Unites States” on page 7. While falling short of perfect, the misstep still marked something of an improvement from their last go, when the team screwed up the name of the country twice, including on the first page.
“President’s Trump speech on January 6, 2021, was not an act encouraging an organized movement to overthrow the Unites States government,” the new document reads.
This is so surreal that Salvador Dali is shaking his head.
Despite Amazon’s calls for a delay, and in person voting, the NLRB has ruled that the vote to unionize its Bessemer, Alabama warehouse is beginning now via mail.
Truth be told, Alabama is one of the least union friendly states in the nation, both by law and by culture, but it appears that Jeff Bezos and his merry band of psychopaths have been awful enough for long enough that there is a decent chance that the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) will win this.
Of course, even if they do, I expect Amazon to keep this in court for years:
It might be the most tracked shipment in Amazon history: 5,800 mail ballots are being sent out to the union-eligible workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama, fulfillment center on Monday. In the coming weeks they’ll be used to decide the largest US union election at the 26-year-old company, the country’s second-largest employer. It’s an unlikely vote, coming from an unlikely site, but if the labor organizers win, the Bessemer warehouse, not yet a year old, will become the country’s first unionized Amazon facility and potentially a bellwether for the industry nationwide.
Alabama isn’t exactly known as a hotbed of labor organizing; it’s a right-to-work state with a union membership rate of 8 percent, nearly three points below the national average (itself near an all-time low). The Birmingham suburb of Bessemer, however, has a deep history of strong unions that haven’t been shy about striking. The Amazon facility sits atop land once owned by US Steel, a major employer in the region until the industry’s decline in the latter half of the 20th century. Workers at the mills there belonged to United Steelworkers, the largest industrial union in North America.
These days, the state is home to 12,000-plus poultry workers represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. When the pandemic hit, the RWDSU became a regular feature of local news reports about the safety protections it won for its workers. The group from Amazon who first contacted the RWDSU over the summer included workers who had been union members at previous jobs; some had friends and family in the RWDSU. “I truly believe that if we win,” says Joshua Brewer, an RWDSU organizer in Alabama who’s working on the Bessemer campaign, “it will be because grandparents and uncles and parents talked to these young folks who work out here and said, this helped me, and it’s a good thing.”
Employees at Amazon fulfillment centers are tasked with retrieving products from miles of shelves and quickly packing them into boxes that eventually make their way to customers’ doors. Part of the job stress, workers say, stems from the company’s highly automated tracking system. Cameras blanket the warehouses, and the company’s Time Off Task (TOT) system tracks every second workers aren’t picking, packing, and stowing to meet quotas, or “make rate.” Too much TOT is grounds for termination. Workers fear that if a family member falls ill or some bad lunch meat necessitates extra bathroom breaks, that could be it for their job. Human frailty seems “like a kink in their system,” says Brewer. Grievance procedures, which would allow workers due process and union representation in responding to discipline, rank high on workers’ list of demands, as do more frequent, scheduled rest periods.
I really hope that they win, but Amazon is going to the wall over this, so I am pessimistic.
“Nebraska, you’re going to hear, is a quite a judicial-thinking place.”
— Bruce Castor, Trump impeachment defense attorney pic.twitter.com/aADiTCivq2
— The Recount (@therecount) February 9, 2021
This Could be a Baseline for a Song
OK, the impeachment has started, and it appears that the inanity, and the inSanity, of the Trump legal team continues unabated.
These guys are a complete mind-f%$#. (I miss profanity)
It’s like mainlining Tang and bat guano through a refrigerated metal straw up your nose.
I can’t even.
In a world* where Covid-19 ravages the world, and no one can see a way out beyond giving taxpayer funded research to rent-seeking pharmaceutical companies, one nuclear armed nation’s vaccing manages to turn in good numbers without looting by private actors.
By, “One nuclear armed nation,” I do not mean the United States. The idea of creation and distribution of medications without government subsidies is completely beyond the pale in this country.
I am referring to Russia, where the Sputnik vaccine is not showing effectiveness in excess of 90%, at a lower cost and without the handling issues of the mRNA vaccines being rolled out in the United States.
There is a precedent, the widespread popularity of the AK-47, which occurred because anyone could make it without IP concerns:
President Vladimir Putin’s announcement in August that Russia had cleared the world’s first Covid-19 vaccine for use before it even completed safety trials sparked skepticism worldwide. Now he may reap diplomatic dividends as Russia basks in arguably its biggest scientific breakthrough since the Soviet era.
Countries are lining up for supplies of Sputnik V after peer-reviewed results published in The Lancet medical journal this week showed the Russian vaccine protects against the deadly virus about as well as U.S. and European shots, and far more effectively than Chinese rivals.
At least 20 countries have approved the inoculation for use, including European Union member-state Hungary, while key markets such as Brazil and India are close to authorizing it. Now Russia is setting its sights on the prized EU market as the bloc struggles with its vaccination program amid supply shortages.
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Its decision to name Sputnik V after the world’s first satellite whose 1957 launch gave the Soviet Union a stunning triumph against the U.S. to start the space race only underlined the scale of the significance Moscow attached to the achievement. Results from the late-stage trials of 20,000 participants reviewed in The Lancet showed that the vaccine has a 91.6% success rate.
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Sputnik V uses a platform based on the adenovirus, which causes the common cold, and has been studied in vaccine development for decades, though its effectiveness is yet to be proven. AstroZeneca’s is similar, while drugs developed by Moderna and Pfizer and BioNTech rely on a new technology, which uses genetic instructions in a nucleic acid molecule called mRNA to program a person’s cells to make the viral protein itself, triggering an immune response.
Unlike the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, Sputnik V can be stored in a fridge rather than a freezer, making it easier to transport and distribute in poorer and hotter countries. At around $20 for a two-shot vaccination, it’s also cheaper than most Western alternatives. While more expensive than AstraZeneca, the Russian inoculation has shown higher efficacy than the U.K. vaccine.
The take-away here is not that Russia is some sort of biotech super-power, it clearly is not.
The take-away here is, or at least should be, that the US model, taxpayer financed research leading to private profits through additional government subsidies (patents) is not necessarily the best model to develop medical treatments.
*To quote Don LaFontaine.
Republican Ron Wright of Texas has died of Covid-19.
He is the first Congressmen to die of the disease, and as one of the Congressmen who voted to reject the Electoral Vote count, one of the more deserving of such a fate..
In the 2019 they used 11 studies, and found the median “directly affected employment” elasticities (closely related to the own-wage elasticity of employment) of around -0.25. Then they multiplied by 1.5 to capture “long run” effects, getting -0.38. pic.twitter.com/thBqW6t0Cj
— Arindrajit Dube (@arindube) February 8, 2021
The Twitter thread gets wonkier. Short version: The CBO juiced their report
The Republican hack running the CBO just released a report saying that raising the minimum wage would create unemployment.
That’s news to me, since the overwhelming majority of studies show no such effect.
The CBO report also disappointed people whose studies were actually used in that report.It also people who study this for a living, who note that the CBO report is complete sh%$: (I miss profanity SO much)
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Michael Reich, a prominent minimum-wage expert at the University of California at Berkeley whose work is cited by the CBO, disputed the report’s more pessimistic estimates.
“Studies have found that wage floors have minimal to low effect on level of jobs or for inflation,” he said on a call with reporters. “Minimum-wage increases are generally paid for by small price increases, mostly in restaurants, but restaurants have increased sales….When low-wage workers get a wage increase they put it to good use — to improve living standards of themselves and their families.”
Reich did his own estimate of the minimum-wage proposal earlier this month, which found that instead of creating a budget deficit, it would increase federal tax revenue by $65 billion a year. This was due largely to increases in payroll taxes from higher wages and a reduction in government spending on safety net programs such as food stamps, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which are heavily used by people earning below minimum wage and living in poverty.
The problem is not that the CBO is full of crap now, it is that it is ALWAYS full of sh%$, and this is by design.
The CBO and the power that it is given by the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) through PAYGO rules is not, and has not, fulfilled its stated purpose, to give Congress accurate and timely budget projections and information.
Rather it is a place where bills that might inconvenience fat-cat donors go to die.
Finally, a court has ruled that in order for a DNA test to be admitted as evidence, the source code must be made available to the defense.
To my mind, any software used for prosecutions should be publicly available for review:
A New Jersey appeals court has ruled that a man accused of murder is entitled to review proprietary genetic testing software to challenge evidence presented against him.
Attorneys defending Corey Pickett, on trial for a fatal Jersey City shooting that occurred in 2017, have been trying to examine the source code of a software program called TrueAllele to assess its reliability. The software helped analyze a genetic sample from a weapon that was used to tie the defendant to the crime.
The maker of the software, Cybergenetics, has insisted in lower court proceedings that the program’s source code is a trade secret. The co-founder of the company, Mark Perlin, is said to have argued against source code analysis by claiming that the program, consisting of 170,000 lines of MATLAB code, is so dense it would take eight and a half years to review at a rate of ten lines an hour.
MATLAB is a pretty high level language, so if you have 170,000 lines of code in it, you are writing bloated code.
Also, if you have 170,000 lines of code in it, I guarantee that there are bugs, and likely substantial ones, because most of those lines of code are there to handle edge (unlikely) cases, where the programmer has to make broad assumptions about the data.
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On Wednesday, the appellate court sided with the defense [PDF] and sent the case back to a lower court directing the judge to compel Cybergenetics to make the TrueAllele code available to the defense team.
“Without scrutinizing its software’s source code – a human-made set of instructions that may contain bugs, glitches, and defects – in the context of an adversarial system, no finding that it properly implements the underlying science could realistically be made,” the ruling says.
Kit Walsh, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, hailed the appellate ruling. “No one should be imprisoned or executed based on secret evidence that cannot be fairly evaluated for its reliability, and the ruling in this case will help prevent that injustice,” she said in a blog post. If TrueAllele is found wanting, presumably that will not affect the dozen individuals said to have been exonerated by the software.
It should be noted that the studies “validating” TrueAllele have been conducted by Mark Perlin, and as such are suspect.
Also, though these are slightly different application, we already know that algorithms used for health care software, Zoom face detection, educational evaluations, and criminal sentencing are all explicitly racist.
It is no stretch to assume that an algorithm explicitly developed for police and prosecutors would be biased in their favor.
That is how you make sales.
Someone has come up with a Jewish Space Laser Agency T-shirt:
Only S20.00 on Teepublic.
I am amused.
It’s good that we have people such as protecting our morality.
If they weren’t busy supervising our morals, they might actually be practicing theirs on a larger scale:
A former Republican Senate staffer was arrested in Washington on Friday on federal child pornography charges in what investigators said was a crackdown on an online group that traded numerous illicit files and videos in recent months.
Ruben Verastigui is accused of receiving and possessing child pornography between last April and this month, according to a criminal complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
The 27-year-old was arrested Friday evening at his apartment in Northeast Washington, where police executed a search warrant. Investigators said they found “several files of child pornography” on his cellphone, along with a chat conversation in which he allegedly discussed exchanging the files and videos. During an interview with investigators, Verastigui admitted to receiving some of the files, according to the complaint.
Verastigui worked as a digital strategist for the Senate Republican Conference as recently as last July.
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In one conversation in April, Verastigui allegedly told a user identified as “S-1” that pornography involving “babies” was his “absolute favorite.” The user later sent him a graphic video of child abuse, court records show, followed by nine more illicit clips the following day. During the same conversation, Verastigui asked that the user come to Washington “for the purpose of sexually abusing a minor,” records show.
Investigators said they identified Verastigui from a naked photo he took in his kitchen and sent to the chat. They said the details of the room and a tattoo visible on his left arm matched a picture from his Instagram account.
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Verastigui was active in Republican politics, most recently working as a communications manager for the nonprofit Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, which supports Republicans who back clean-energy legislation. He was no longer employed at the organization as of Saturday, according to a statement provided by spokesman Ross Gillfillan.
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He also worked as a digital strategist for the Senate Republican Conference as recently as July, meaning some of his alleged offenses took place while he was a congressional staffer. A conference spokesperson told The Washington Post in an email: “We have just learned about this investigation and arrest. The individual has not worked at SRC since July 2, 2020.”
Before that, congressional records show that Verastigui worked as a digital director for the GOP staff of the U.S. Joint Economic Committee in 2018. A spokesperson for former committee chairman Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
A LinkedIn page for Ruben Verastigui says he also worked as a senior designer for the Republican National Committee in 2017 and 2018, designing social media ads for the Trump Make America Great Again Committee and Donald J. Trump for President. A committee spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
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According to the LinkedIn page bearing the name Ruben Verastigui, the user was involved in several antiabortion rights organizations before his work in government, including March for Life, Students for Life America and Live Action.
Well, with THIS guy, we know why he wants more babies born, he wants more explicit photos. **shudder**
Students for Life confirmed Verastigui worked there from Sept. 5, 2014, to Dec. 2, 2016, after he was a student involved with the group.
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At the 2013 March for Life rally, Verastigui was introduced as the president of his college’s Students for Life group, according to a C-SPAN video of the antiabortion rights event.
“We are the generation that has been led to believe that the killing of innocent pre-born children is okay,” he told the crowd. “How many of us are missing brothers, sisters, cousins, friends because of abortion?”
We’ve hears a lot of reports of fowl foul play among Republicans, and this one is worse, though tragically less strange than the auto-asphyxia death of a Jerry Fallwell ally a few years back.