Year: 2021

I’ll Take Deeply Racist Company Culture for $500, Alex

No Comments

I’m referring, of course, to the Chocolate Factory, AKA Google, who has shuttered a diversity training program because the graduates were systematically underpaid, and too many of the quit.

This is racism presented as performative anti-racism:

Google has scrapped a scheme designed to train and hire engineers from diverse backgrounds – after people who made it through the program to become Googlers complained they were screwed over in pay.

The engineering residency program, known as Eng Res, has run since 2014. It’s aimed at those who don’t quite qualify as entry-level engineers; these folks are then trained up in various departments in the Chocolate Factory, and after a year they’re either hired as a proper developer or dropped.

The idea is to identify and top up the skills of people who show potential but have not had the same opportunities as others to learn and grow, or have faced unfair career-limiting hurdles, prior to applying for a role at Google. Newbie coders get a place at one of the world’s biggest names in tech, and Google gets a workers from a diverse range of backgrounds.

But after completing the program, alumni are given lower salaries, smaller bonus payments, and no stock units compared to their peers, a group of over 500 current and former Googlers have claimed.

Over time, this pay gap creates “systemic pay inequities,” according to presentation given to the web giant’s top brass by Eng Res graduates, Reuters reports.

Now, Google has dropped Eng Res altogether. A spokesperson told The Register a new program will be put in place.

It appears that the salary/bonus/stock option deficit was on the order of tens of thousands of dollars, and followed them throughout their careers.

I gotta figure that this blatant racism is central to Google corporate culture.  They think that “Those People” should be grateful for having a place at Google, and that this justifies underpaying them.

Guck Foogle.

Bipartisan is a Synonym for Scam

No Comments

Why am I not surprised that the “Bipartisan” Senate infrastructure plan is primarily about giveaways to politically connected operators through privatization.

Privatization is where private operators are paid to take ownership of public assets.  (Think Chicago parking meter deal fiasco)   

It’s always about sacrificing the public weal to the altar of private profit:

………

But the really scary piece is labeled “Public private partnerships, private activity bonds, and asset recycling.” In the name of building world-class infrastructure, these lawmakers would sell it off in fire sales to private financiers. We have lots of experience with infrastructure privatization that strongly suggests it should be avoided.

There was a time when Democrats did oppose such schemes; it was during the Trump administration. To the extent that Trump had an infrastructure vision, it was rooted in privatization. Wilbur Ross and Peter Navarro, who would each take high-level jobs in the Trump administration, wrote a paper before the 2016 election outlining their vision: $1 trillion in investment provided by private bond buyers, who would be guaranteed a tax credit to buy the bonds, interest on the debt, and an equity stake with dividends (with up to a 10 percent profit margin). It adds the usual song and dance about how private enterprise is so much more efficient than the public sector, therefore saving money overall.

It takes about two seconds to recognize how ridiculous this is. The government doesn’t require a 10 percent margin on equity, tax credits, and interest payments. That’s a layer of profit that gets built into the expenditure. Governments usually contract out design and construction to private contractors, but there are only two ways for these companies to reduce ownership and operation costs below what the public sector would spend, while still being profitable. They can cut back, either on safety or labor or maintenance; or they can extract a lot of profit from users of the infrastructure (think toll roads). If the infrastructure isn’t inherently profitable, like a bridge in New York City or a toll road in southern California might be, the upgrade probably won’t get built.

Democrats rightly and loudly objected to giving up public assets to private investors at the time. The biggest money-makers would be favored, they said, and less lucrative projects in rural or impoverished areas shunned. Governments would not only lose ownership but democratic control over roads, water systems, electrical grids, and who knows what else. As companies manage costs, it could lead to less resilient, more dangerous infrastructure. And the public would have a high likelihood of being gouged.

Bipartisanship is most often a beard used to defraud the taxpayers,

C%$# Suckers

No Comments

Mitch Mcconnell and Evil Minions™ just filibustered the”For the People” act, because if there is anything that Republicans agree on, it’s that N*****s should never vote:

Senate Republicans banded together Tuesday to block a sweeping Democratic bill that would revamp the architecture of American democracy, dealing a grave blow to efforts to federally override dozens of GOP-passed state voting laws.

The test vote, which would have cleared the way to start debate on voting legislation, failed 50-50 on straight party lines — 10 votes short of the supermajority needed to advance legislation in the Senate.

Republicans, particularly Senate Republicans, are not the opposition, they are the enemy, and must be treated as such.

118°F (48°C) Above the Arctic Circle

1 Comment

It happened in Verkhojansk, Eastern Siberia today.

Anthropogenic climate change is a bitch:

Newly published satellite imagery shows the ground temperature in at least one location in Siberia topped 118 degrees Fahrenheit (48 degrees Celsius) going into the year’s longest day. It’s hot Siberia Earth summer, and it certainly won’t be the last.

………

The 118-degree-Fahrenheit temperature was measured on the ground in Verkhojansk, in Yakutia, Eastern Siberia, by the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel satellites. Other ground temperatures in the region included 109 degrees Fahrenheit (43 degrees Celsius) in Govorovo and 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius) in Saskylah, which had its highest temperatures since 1936. It’s important to note that the temperatures being discussed here are land surface temperatures, not air temperatures. The air temperature in Verkhojansk was 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius)—still anomalously hot, but not Arizona hot.

But the ground temperature being so warm is still very bad. Those temperatures beleaguer the permafrost—the frozen soil of yore, which holds in greenhouse gases and on which much of eastern Russia is built. As permafrost thaws, it sighs its methane back into the atmosphere, causing chasms in the Earth.

………

The same region also suffered through a heat wave that led to a very un-Siberian air temperature reading of 100 degrees Fahrenheit(38 degrees Celsius) exactly a year ago to the day from the new freak heat. It’s the hottest temperature ever recorded in the region. It was also in the 90s last month in western Siberia, reflecting that the sweltering new abnormal is affecting just about everywhere. And it’s not just the permafrost suffering; wildfires last year in Siberia pumped a record amount of carbon dioxideinto the atmosphere, ensuring more summers like this are to come.

Even if we do all the right things, this is going to end up very poorly in the near to medium term, and we are doing NONE of the right things, so we are looking at a truly apocalyptic scenario.

How Convenient

No Comments

It turns out that Uber and Lyft were paying community groups to act as AstroTurf in favor of the Gypsy cab companies.

Hoocoodanote?

At the end of February, an impassioned op-ed appeared in The Chicago Crusader, a well-established Black newspaper in the city. Titled “Why Independent Workers Want to Stay Independent,” the op-ed argued that gig economy companies like Uber and Lyft are a “lifeline” to communities of color by providing “a flexible way to work.”

One week later the exact same op-ed was published in the bilingual El Dia Newspaper. Two months later, a version of it appeared again in Crain’s Chicago Business newspaper.

Similar articles and op-eds riffing on the theme of “protecting” independent work have popped up in local publications all over the country, from Colorado to Massachusetts to New Jersey to New York.

In some of these states the articles have a common thread: Their authors represent organizations that serve communities of color and have received recent donations from Lyft, and in some cases Uber or DoorDash.

The op-eds are one facet of a multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign aimed at fighting regulations that would require the companies to treat drivers and delivery workers as full-fledged employees. Over the past several months, news outlets have detailed political action committees set up by Uber and Lyft in New York and Illinois. The Markup found that the practice was even wider spread, occurring in other states and often involving alliances with local community groups.

It’s not an alliance, it’s prostitution.

About F%$#ing Time

No Comments

Finally, the courts are starting to rule against the modern-day slavery ring that is the NCAA.

It’s a fairly limited ruling, (9-0) simply stating that their limits of scholarships that the NCAA places on athletes are a violation of antitrust law, but it’s a start:

The Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Monday that the N.C.A.A. could not bar relatively modest payments to student-athletes, a decision that underscored the growing challenges to a college sports system that generates huge sums for schools but provides little or no compensation to the players.

The decision concerned only payments and other benefits related to education. But its logic suggested that the court may be open to a head-on challenge to the ban by the National Collegiate Athletic Association on paying athletes for their participation in sports that bring billions of dollars in revenue to American colleges and universities.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh seemed to invite such a challenge.

“Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote. “And under ordinary principles of antitrust law, it is not evident why college sports should be any different. The N.C.A.A. is not above the law.”

While this is good for athletes, it might be better for students in general, since the top schools openly collude on financial aid awards and tuition for students more generally, which should be targeted by antitrust authorities.

I think that this could be a precedent for this as well.

I Can’t Even

No Comments

A street fair celebrating diversity and food trucks was canceled after a furor over their banning a food truck operated by Israeli immigrants.

That’s kind of like banning a Chinese food truck because of the PRC’s treatment of the Uighurs, or a Turkish one because of the treatment of the Kurds, or an Indian one for the treatment of the Muslims in India, or an Irish one for their status as a tax dodge, etc.

This is inexcusable, it is bigotry, pure and simple, and the BDS crowd in Philadelphia is really, really stupid.

To quote (not) Tallyrand, “This is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.”

 A decision to disinvite a food truck selling Israeli food from a Philadelphia food festival scheduled for Sunday drew public criticism and dismay that resulted in the cancellation of the event.

Moshava Philly, a mobile Israeli food business, was supposed to participate in Taste of Home, billed as an “event celebrating diversity through food, art, entertainment, community,” presented by nonprofits Eat Up the Borders and Sunflower Philly.

On Saturday, Moshava posted on Instagram that the organizers told the food truck not to come because of rumors of a protest because of the Israeli business’ presence and that they opted to “uninvite us for fear that the protesters would get aggressive and threaten their event.”

With ongoing backlash, Sunflower Philly, one of the North Fifth Street event sponsors, announced Sunday on social media that the entire fair was canceled.

“Due to the ongoing situation with one of our events partners @eatuptheborders and @moshava_philly we have decided to cancel the ‘Taste of Home’ event,” said the group Facebook post.

The only people who win here are the proprietors of Moshava Philly, who are going to do a land office business over the next few weeks.

It’s Officially Juneteenth

No Comments

This is the first Juneteenth that is an official Federal holiday, thanks to the legislation recently passed by Congress and signed into law.

Juneteenth celebrates the arrival of Union troops in Galveston, freeing the slaves in Texas.

Most of the mainstream media describe as something to the effect of, “Informed the slaves of their freedom,” but this is not true.

The slaves knew that they had been freed for years, their owners however, continued to use terrorist tactics to keep them enslaved, and the Union troops enforced the newly freed slaves freedom at the point of a bayonet pointed at the heart of their white former owners.

Even after losing the war, Southern slave holders tried to keep blacks as property, and had to be disabused of that notion by the threat of lethal force: (H/T Bear who Swims for the link)

………

My change in emotion comes after learning from historian friends that the oft-repeated tale of Union soldiers arriving in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865 to inform enslaved African Americans that they were free is pure fiction. Not because they weren’t legally freed 2-½ months earlier when Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Or technically freed 2-1/2 years before when President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring slavery null and void in areas under rebellion, very much including Texas.

Rather, I now know, the big lie is the incessantly repeated canard that Galveston’s po’ ignant Black folks didn’t know they was free, and that U.S. Major Gen. Gordon Granger had to read a proclamation to spell it out for them.

In fact, they most certainly did know.

………

If Galveston’s Blacks already knew they were free, obviously so too did their slaveholders, who nonetheless kept them in bondage — not by cunning or deceit or ignorance, but by the brute force and tactics of dehumanizing torture they had been using for 200 years.

Gen. Granger didn’t bring liberation by words on a scroll but by troops with fixed bayonets.

………

On the outside chance that Down’s 2015 essay may have been superseded by new historical research, I spoke with him this week. It hasn’t been, he said, reiterating; “It’s not that Gen. Granger was giving information to the enslaved people. He was giving it to the masters” — at the barrel of a gun.

………

None of this is to say that African Americans, or all Americans, shouldn’t celebrate the well-intentioned holiday to Black freedom just created. But if you’re still clutching to any vestige of the popular myth, consider that well before Lee’s surrender, with the Confederacy clearly losing the war, slaveholders from throughout the South relocated their human property to Texas in advance of Union troops to preserve slavery for as long as they could.

………

 For them, I’ll explain: It’s called teaching what actually happened, and what didn’t. And what happened in Galveston on June 19, 1865, is that Gen. Granger arrived to forcibly liberate Black people from intransigent slaveholders who everyone knew were free.

That’s the true history of Juneteenth — along with a message that somehow has eluded the South and their white supremacist inheritors today:

You lost the damned war. Surrender already.

You lost. Get over it.

Even after surrendering, the South needed to be forced not to be evil at the barrel of a gun.

This lesson should be remembered, and perhaps emulated.

Also, in this case, (for once) I agree with John Roberts:  Remedial measures should not be limited to the former states of the Confederacy, but instead should be extended nation wide.

It’s time to pry their guns from their cold, dead hands.

Busy Day

No Comments

The water heater gave up the ghost today.

It didn’t stop heating water, but it started to leak.

Had to call a plumber to locate the valve, and I’m now working with a wet-dry vac on the basement.

No hot water in the house until it is replaced this Monday.

Data Point of the Day

No Comments

Did you know that about 90% of Californians have lower taxes than Texas?

It’s true.  Texas, and this applies to a lot of so-called “Low Tax Jurisdictions”.

They are not low tax states for the bulk of their population, they are just low tax states for rich people and large corporations.

This certainly matches the experiences of two people I know/knew, an author and an artist.

The former found his taxes and fees lower in Maryland than in Pennsylvania, and the latter found the same case for New Hampshire and Massachusetts:

………

These statistics are relevant, though, to any discussion of why so many people have been leaving California. Taxes often dominate public discussions of such trends, thanks in part to the unrelenting efforts of Republican policy entrepreneurs Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore, whose 14th annual, mostly tax-based economic competitiveness report for the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council is out this month. But it’s awfully hard to argue that taxes have been the main thing driving the California exodus, given that (1) it has been concentrated among the less affluent, (2) their No. 1 destination has been Texas, according to 2010-2018 Internal Revenue Service data that I tallied up early last year and (3) lower-income and middle-income people face higher effective tax rates in Texas than in California.

………

Middle-class taxes are lower in Nevada, the No. 2 beneficiary of net migration from the Golden State, but for a household at the 2019 California median income of $75,235 the 1.8 percentage point difference in effective tax rate adds up to $1,354 whereas the difference in average annual rent for an apartment or house between metropolitan Los Angeles and metro Las Vegas is $6,336, according to Apartment List’s April estimates.

For those in the top 1% of the income distribution, who in California in 2018 had adjusted gross incomes that started at $680,687 and averaged $2.2 million, the story is much different.

I’m thinking that people who protest against inequality should try to address things like states tax codes, particularly those with no income tax, like Washington, Texas, and Florida, and those with flat income tax rates, like Massachusetts, Illinois, and Pennsylvania.

Soaking the rich is popular right now, and the number of people who actually relocate for tax purposes is very small.

About F%$#ing Time

No Comments

The House of Representatives has voted to repeal the 2002 Authoriziation of Use of Military Force (AUMF) used to invade Iraq, which is a good, if meager, first step.

It would be excellent policy to do this, so don’t expect that the Republicans will even allow a vote in the Senate:

The House voted on Thursday to revoke the authorization it gave in 2002 to invade Iraq, a step that would rein in presidential war-making powers for the first time in a generation.

The bipartisan action reflected growing determination on Capitol Hill to revisit the broad authority that Congress provided to President George W. Bush following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks through measures that successive presidents have used to justify military action around the world.

The 2002 authorization was repeatedly applied well beyond its original intent, including in a campaign much later against the Islamic State in Iraq and for the killing of the Iranian general Qassim Suleimani last year.

The vote was 268 to 161, with 49 Republicans joining 219 Democrats in favor of the bill. The debate now moves to the Senate, which is expected to take up similar legislation as the United States military completes its withdrawal from Afghanistan after nearly two decades of fighting there.

………

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said on Wednesday that he would put a similar measure on the Senate floor. A blueprint written by Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, and Senator Todd Young, Republican of Indiana, will be considered next week by the Foreign Relations Committee.

President Biden said this week that he backed the House measure, making him the first president to accept such an effort to constrain his authority to carry out military action since the war in Afghanistan began 20 years ago. Mr. Biden’s decision came on the heels of announcing a full troop withdrawal from the country.

This is the minor AUMF in the scheme of things though.  It’s the post 911 one that is the one where the vast bulk of military deployments have found legal justification.

Even if the Senate joins the House in repealing the 2002 authorization, Congress would still leave in place a much broader authorization, passed three days after the Sept. 11 attacks, on approving the use of force against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Successive presidents have cited the 2001 authorization to justify operations against “associated forces,” and critics say it has given presidents excessive latitude to wage “forever wars” without further congressional approval in the Middle East and beyond.

Until now, the Senate has refused to bring up legislation to repeal the authorization of military force, and the House has done so only as an amendment to broader legislation that never went anywhere.

The 2002 AUMF has not been used in over a decade, but the 2001 AUMF is still being used today.

Baby steps, I guess.

The Dog Ate My Homework

No Comments

So now, Amazon is blaming social media for the plague of false reviews on its site.

If they have the resources to dedicate to tracking their shoppers’ habits, and the resources to surveil and harass their employees at the slightest whiff of a unionization effort, they have the resources to fix this:

Amazon today said it can’t stop fake product reviews without help from social media companies, and it blamed those companies for not doing more to prevent solicitation of fake reviews.

In a blog post, Amazon said its own “continued improvements in detection of fake reviews and connections between bad-actor buying and selling accounts” has led to “an increasing trend of bad actors attempting to solicit 

fake reviews outside Amazon, particularly via social media services.”

Amazon doesn’t handle the fake review problem because they don’t want to.  Anything near a full accounting would reveal just how badly they are screwing their customers, and they make a lot of money by screwing these same customers.

That’s also why they are so lackadaisical about pursuing counterfeit product in their market.

Initial Jobless Claims Went Up

No Comments

Initial Unemployment Claims rose by 37,000 to 412,000, though the 4-week moving average continued its downward trajectory:

Worker filings for initial unemployment benefits rose last week for the first time since late April but remained near a pandemic low as the labor market continues to heal from the impact of Covid-19.

Initial jobless claims rose by 37,000 to 412,000 in the week ended June 12. Despite the increase, the four-week moving average, which smooths out week-to-week volatility, reached a new pandemic low of 395,000. This was the lowest average level since March 2020, when the pandemic first took hold in the U.S. 

………

Thursday’s claims report also showed unemployment rolls shrank late last month. The number of ongoing benefit claims—a proxy for those receiving payments—fell by more than 500,000 to 14.8 million the week ended May 29. That includes those tapping benefits through pandemic-specific programs introduced last year, including those for self-employed workers.

I wonder how much all the news about ‘Phant governors terminating benefits might be behind the drop in ongoing claims.

The stimulus from extended employment benefits are tapering off, and this will adversely effect the recovery.

The only question is how much this will effect the recovery.

What a Bunch of Whiny Snowflakes

No Comments

A police officer in the Portland (Oregon) Police Bureau “Rapid Response Team” (Goon Squad) was caught on video wailing a journalist, and when he finally forced her to the ground, he continued to strike her with his night stick in her head.

Today, for the first time in the history of Portland, Oregon, an officer was indicted for his actions in suppressing a protest.  

It was only 4th degree assault, a misdemeanor, but in response, the PPB Goon Squad voted to disband, because they are afraid of the rule of law.

They are still on the force, but the “Rapid Response Team” is now shut down.

Considering their behavior, I would say, “Good Riddance,” because they are a bunch of bad cops who should not be allowed close to a water pistol, but Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler is (once again) taking the side of the abusive cops, even as more evidence piles up against other members of the unit:

Portland’s public safety landscape has undergone tectonic shifts in under 72 hours.

On June 15, the day after the Portland Police Association filed for closed-door mediation to hash out its contract with the city, the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office announced that a grand jury had indicted Portland police officer Corey Budworth on one count of assault in the fourth degree for his use of force at an Aug. 2020 protest.

Budworth, now on administrative leave, was a part of the police bureau’s Rapid Response Team, a 50-member unit most known for its management of protests. RRT members, whose assignment on the team is voluntary, receive specialized training in “crowd psychology and behavior [and] team formations and movements,” according to PPB.

Hours after Budworth’s indictment, news broke that Erik Kammerer, a squad leader for RRT who is also a homicide detective for the police bureau, is under review by the Oregon Department of Justice for potential criminal prosecution. (WW has reported extensively on complaints alleging Kammerer used excessive force during protests.)

………

In response, Mayor Ted Wheeler—who said he learned of the RRT dissolution late Wednesday night—has activated mobile law enforcement units in PPB and requested assistance from Oregon State Police.

………

Wheeler also said that he heard directly from RRT members during an impromptu Thursday morning Zoom meeting between the mayor’s office and law enforcement.

“I want to acknowledge the toll this past year has taken on them and their families—they have worked long hours under difficult conditions,” Wheeler said. “I personally heard from some of them today, and I appreciate their willingness to share their concerns about managing the many public gatherings that often were violent and destructive.”

It is a disgrace that this piece of sh%$ mayor is still in office. (He’s also in the pocket of real estate developers)


………
Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, a longtime advocate of police reform in Portland, called the RRT resignations “an opportunity to commit change.”

“We should formally disband the RRT, but through Council action,” Hardesty said in a statement Thursday. “The good old boy network is crumbling and we can either be a part of the change or part of the status quo—but the arc of justice is bending quickly and it’s imperative that the Portland City Council lands on the right side of history.”

Hardesty went on to describe the RRT members as “staging their own protest” through their resignations, which she said occurred “the moment there is a possibility for accountability for inappropriate and potentially illegal conduct.”

This is my assessment too.

The fact that the police are SO shocked that they are held accountable is a mark of just how bad the culture of policing in Portland is right now.

Until some police officers are disabused of the notion that they can act with impunity, and their fellow cops are disabused of the notion that it is OK for them to look the other way, it will never be fixed.

Not Enough Bullets

No Comments

The banksters are fighting the debt relief plan for Black farmers who have been harmed by government and bank racism because early pay-offs will reduce their profits.

F%$# you.

You benefited from a system which sucked resources from Black farms for more than 100 years, and now you are whining about having their loans paid off early.

Let me repeat, f%$# you:

The Biden administration’s efforts to provide $4 billion in debt relief to minority farmers is encountering stiff resistance from banks, which are complaining that the government initiative to pay off the loans of borrowers who have faced decades of financial discrimination will cut into their profits and hurt investors.

………

Now, three of the biggest banking groups — the American Bankers Association, the Independent Community Bankers of America and National Rural Lenders Association — are waging their own fight and complaining about the cost of being repaid early.

Their argument stems from the way banks make money from loans and how they decide where to extend credit. When a bank lends money to a borrower, like a farmer, it considers several factors, including how much interest it will earn over the lifetime of the loan and whether the bank can sell the loan to other investors.

By allowing borrowers to repay their debts early, the lenders are being denied income they have long expected, they argue. The banks want the federal government to pay money beyond the outstanding loan amount so that banks and investors will not miss out on interest income that they were expecting or money that they would have made reselling the loans to other investors.They also want other investors who bought the loans in the secondary market to get government money that would make up for whatever losses they might incur from the early payoff.

I will shed no tears over any money lost by these parasites.

They benefited and actively participated in the racism that destroyed over 90% of Black owned farms in the United States, and now they want more blood money.