Expecting a Long Night Tomorrow

I hope for a Harris win, but I do not expect a Harris landslide.

I still have to decide if I want to cover this sober or not.

More of This

Columbus police officer Adam Coy has been convicted of murder for his shooting of Andre Hill.

Hill was following police instructions when Coy lost his sh%$ and emptied his gun into him.

This is a good thing.  When police are held criminally liable for their crimes, they are less likely to commit crimes:

A Franklin County jury has found a former Columbus police officer guilty of murder and other charges in the December 2020 fatal shooting of an unarmed Black man.

Adam Coy, 48, is guilty of murder, felonious assault and reckless homicide in the December 2020 shooting death of 47-year-old Andre Hill, the Common Pleas Court jury decided Monday.
Karissa Hill, daughter of Andre Hill, reacts as the jury's verdict finding former Columbus police officer Adam Coy guilty of murder and other charges is read Monday in Franklin County Common Pleas Court. Coy was convicted of murder, felonious assault and reckless homicide in the Dec. 22, 2020, shooting death of 47-year-old Andre Hill.

Judge Stephen McIntosh will sentence Coy on Nov. 25, but the only sentence McIntosh can impose is life in prison without the possibility of parole for at least 15 years.

………

The unprecedented conviction marks the first time a Columbus police officer has been found guilty of murder for a death that occurred in the line of duty. Coy and his defense attorneys argued he believed his life was in danger when he shot and killed Hill, believing a silver key ring in Hill's hand was a revolver.

Yeah, his defense was that he is an abject coward and so should be excused for shooting a man to death.

………

Coy went to Oberlin Drive around 1:30 a.m. on Dec. 22, 2020, after a neighbor had called the Columbus police nonemergency number about a silver SUV parked there that had been running on and off for about three hours.  

Coy arrived and spoke with the SUV driver, now known to be Hill. Evidence in the case showed Hill had shown Coy a cellphone and said he was waiting on someone. Coy testified he saw Hill walk up to the door of a neighboring home on Oberlin and knock on the door with no response from inside.  Hill walked back to the SUV, rummaged inside, and returned to the front door of the home, knocking again with no response.  

Coy told the jury that when another officer, Amy Detweiler, arrived on the scene, Coy told her that the situation seemed off, and the two began walking up the driveway and approached the home, where the garage door was open.

Evidence from the trial showed the officers saw Hill inside a vehicle inside the open garage, which had no lights on, and Coy told Hill to come out and show himself.  

As Hill came out of the garage, he had his left hand up holding a lit cellphone. Coy suddenly yelled, “Gun, gun, he has a gun!” before drawing his firearm and firing at Hill four times. Coy testified he saw silver metal in Hill’s right hand.

The metal was Hill’s key ring. He was unarmed.  

Officer Detweiler testified that she raised her gun but did not shoot because she did not see a gun.

Neither Coy nor Detweiler had their body cameras on at the time of the shooting, but they caught the shooting with no audio through a 60-second look-back feature.  

Columbus police fired Coy less than a week after the shooting.  

Jurors in the case did not hear evidence or see body camera footage about how Coy or other officers did not provide Hill any medical aid for about 10 minutes after the shooting because Coy was not facing any charges related to what happened after the gunfire.

Columbus City Council later passed Andre’s Law, requiring city police officers to provide medical aid to someone they wound on or injure while awaiting medics to arrive. Columbus also enhanced police officers’ body cameras, including a two-minute look-back feature that captures audio and video.

Of course, the head of the police union implied that the police will basically engage in a sit-down strike in response, but that's par for the course for police union reps.

Even if you don't think that Coy should be held criminally liable, it is a good thing that he will no longer carry a gun and a badge, because incompetent cowards do not serve the public good.

Get Your Cardboard and Tape Somewhere Else

The Uihleins are big Republican donors, and they own Uline, a company that sells things like boxes, tape, and other packing materials.  

They are one of the giants in the space.

I'm not a fan of their politics, but that's not why I suggest that you shop elsewhere.

I'm suggesting that you shop elsewhere because the Uihleins are conservative rat-f%$#s, but because because they illegally asked their employees how they would vote, and by implication are pressuring their employees to vote the way that the Uihleins want them to vote:

The Republican mega-donors Dick and Liz Uihlein, who are the third largest donors in this year’s US presidential election, have sought information about who employees at their company Uline will be voting for in Tuesday’s ballot.

A screenshot seen by the Guardian shows how employees at the private Wisconsin paper and office products distributor were asked to take part in what was called an anonymous survey to track who the employees were voting for on 5 November.

………

While the button employees are meant to click says the survey is anonymous, the webpage also says that employees “may be asked to sign in”. “This is solely to verify you are a Uline employee and to ensure one submission per person. Your name is not tracked, and your answers remain anonymous.”

Public records show that Dick Uihlein has donated almost $80m to the Restoration Pac in the 2024 cycle, which supports the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, and other Republican candidates.

………

The voter survey is particularly significant because Uline’s operations are headquartered in the critical swing state of Wisconsin, which is one of three so-called “blue wall” states that are seen as necessary for Kamala Harris to win the White House. While Joe Biden won Wisconsin in the 2020 race for the White House, Trump took it in 2016, solidifying its status as a swing state.

………

Danielle Lang, senior director of voting rights at the Campaign Legal Center, said she did not believe the request was benign.

“Employers should know to be very careful around pressure on employees, about whether they vote and certainly who they vote for,” Lang said. 

………

“I think that is an implicit recognition of how much power employers can have over employees and the undue influence they can wield,” Lang said.

In Wisconsin, it is also criminal to solicit a person to show how their vote is cast.

A spokesperson declined to answer the Guardian’s question about the results of the survey, which were due by 25 October.

I would also argue that their behavior is a federal crime as well.

Do not patronize Uline.

To quote Billie Ray Valentine from Trading Places, "You know, it occurs to me that the best way to hurt rich people is by turning them into poor people."

Ecch (tweet) of the Day

Busy, cold night at Stonehenge as we move the stones backwards an hour... pic.twitter.com/V1f3Ws712r

— Papa Woof und Krampus und Bleaken (@woofknight) November 2, 2024

Have I mentioned that I hate Daylight Savings Time with a burning passion?

You May Be Able to Get Your McFlurries Again

The USPTO has ruled that McDonald’s restaurants will be allowed to fix their ice cream machines.

Previously, the manufacturer of the notoriously unreliable machines have been using the DMCA to prevent store owners from diagnosing or repairing their machines.

McDonald’s often maligned, seemingly perennially-broken ice cream machines could soon become a thing of the past.

On Oct. 25, the United States Copyright Office granted a copyright exemption that gives restaurants like McDonald's the “right to repair” broken machines by circumventing digital locks that prevent them from being fixed by anyone other than its manufacturer.

The Golden Arches’ vanilla cones, sundaes and McFlurries are all made in machines from Taylor Company, as they have been for nearly 70 years. Back in 1956, future McDonald’s CEO Ray Kroc made a handshake agreement with Taylor to supply milkshake machines as McDonald’s exclusive supplier.

The Taylor company holds a copyright on its machines, and in the past that has meant that if one broke, only its repair people were legally allowed to fix it, according to a 2021 Wired article. This is due to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a 1998 law that criminalizes making or using technology, devices or services that circumvent the control access of copyrighted works.  

………

The exemption granted by the United States Copyright Office went into effect on Oct. 28 and was jointly petitioned for by repair-focused website iFixIt and advocacy group Public Knowledge. In 2023, iFixit documented its teardown of McDonald’s machines and said it spat out multiple “nonsensical, counterintuitive, and seemingly random” error codes, but it couldn’t do anything to repair it.

Although the full request wasn’t granted, retail-level commercial food preparation equipment received an exemption that will allow third parties to bypass digital locks on machines for repairs.

Meredith Rose, senior policy counsel at Public Knowledge, said that the Copyright Office’s decision will lead to an “overdue shake-up of the commercial food prep industry.”

The DMCA is a horrible law, it serves primarily to reinforce the corrupt and monopolistic practices of bad actors in our economy, whether it be Taylor, or HP preventing the use of 3rd party toner in HP products, or John Deere's horrible repair policies.

Repeal it.

osh%$

When one talks about potential zoonotic disease transfer, there is one animal that figures prominently, and that is the pig.

So the fact that bird flu has been found in pig is the proverbial big f%$#ing deal:

H5N1 bird flu virus has been found in a pig on a farm in Oregon, the first time the virus has been seen in a pig in the United States, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported Wednesday. A second pig may also have been infected, Oregon authorities later revealed.

………

Pigs are sometimes called a “mixing vessel” for flu viruses, because they can be infected with both bird flu viruses and human flu viruses. If the animals are co-infected at the same time with two or more viruses, the viruses can swap genes, potentially creating a hybrid virus that is better able to spread to and among people than bird flu viruses typically are. This phenomenon, called reassortment, is what gave rise to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic.

Because pigs can play this role, flu experts have been worried that the H5N1 virus currently spreading in cows in the United States could make its way to pigs — though any version of the H5N1 virus in pigs would be an unwelcome development.

Best evidence right now is that the 1918 influenza strain originated from bird that was subjected to a porcine "Shake and Bake" before jumping to humans.

This is not good.

Damn

I have been following the story of this technology for over 40 years, and it looks like the liquidation of Reaction Engines has put a steak in the heart of pre-cooled hypersonic engines.

The short version is that there is an heat generated when supersonic flow is slowed down to subsonic speeds in an engine inlet, and at around Mach 5, the air becomes too hot to burn.

One solution is supersonic combustion, but another, first pursued as HOTOL in the 1980s, the idea was to use the cryogenic temperatures in the fuel to cool down the intake air to manageable temperatures.

At higher altitudes, it would transition to a conventional rocket motor.

Given the higher fuel efficiency of the air breathing engines, on the order of a factor of at least 10, this could promise better performance and potentially a single stage to orbit platform.

Well, I thought that it was cool, but it's gone now:

Aerospace specialist Reaction Engines has gone into administration, potentially taking with it the dreams of hypersonic aircraft powered by its hybrid air-breathing rocket engine tech.

The company is a privately owned engineering research biz that operated for more than 30 years. Its major focus was the development of SABRE (Synergetic Air Breathing Rocket Engine), said to combine the fuel efficiency of a jet engine with the power and high speed offered by rockets.

It had been hoped that SABRE would lead to a new generation of hypersonic spaceplanes, but on October 31, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) was appointed as administrator after the company was unable to secure further funding.

………

SABRE is an exotic design, described as an air-breathing rocket engine. It allows an aircraft to take off from a runway as normal, then travel at velocities of about five times the speed of sound in the atmosphere. Switching over to liquid oxygen, a spaceplane using SABRE engines was envisioned as accelerating to Mach 25 to go beyond the atmosphere and into orbit.

The innovative precooler technology, one of the three core building blocks of SABRE, was tested in 2019. This is necessary because the air entering the engine would otherwise be hot enough to melt steel, thanks to the effects of friction and compression. Testing of the core engine components and preburner took place during 2020 and 2021.

Visitors to the Reaction Engines website will find the home page redirects to PwC, but the rest of the site still appears to be up, including pages on the SABRE engine technology.

 

It's 2 November

And I am sitting outside in Centerville, Maryland, and it is 61°F, and the sky looks

Like this:

Yeah, That Will Fix Their Problems

I am not a big fan of most DEI programs.  This is not because I think that anti-discrimination policies are unimportant, but because I think that such policies are very important.

I think that most DEI programs are ineffective, the training does not make people less bigoted, so all they serve to do is provide employment for DEI professionals within the company and contracts for DEI consultants from outside the company.

From an organizational perspective they are more about checking boxes to reduce liability than anything else.

An effective DEI program is not about training, nor is it about raising awareness.  An effective DEI program should be punitive in nature, because potentially harassing and abusive employees will behave properly if they believe that there is a credible possible of negative consequences, firing and demotion.

It should be about deterrence, not about trying to make everyone love each other.

That being said, the decision by Boeing's CEO to shut down their Diversity Equity and Inclusion office is about as close to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic as one could get.

Boeing Co. has dismantled its global diversity, equity and inclusion department, making it the latest high-profile corporation to make changes to its DEI policy as its new top leader oversees a broader revamp of the company’s workforce.

Staff from Boeing’s DEI office will be combined with another human resources team focused on talent and employee experience, according to people familiar with the matter. Sara Liang Bowen, a Boeing vice president who led the now-defunct department, left the company on Thursday.

“The team achieved so much — sometimes imperfectly, never easily — and dreamed of doing much more still,” Bowen wrote in a farewell post on LinkedIn.

Boeing’s new Chief Executive Officer Kelly Ortberg is streamlining the planemaker’s operations and trimming its executive ranks as part of a broader 10% reduction in headcount. The shift also comes as large US companies face increasing pressure from conservative activists to dismantle or downplay their efforts on diversity, equity and inclusion.

The problem at Boeing is white MBAs from Harvard and Stanford and Yale and Princeton 

This is a bullsh%$ action by a bullsh%$ CEO who won't accomplish sh%$ at Boeing.

If he wanted to change things, he'd be firing senior managers, and not posturing over what HR is doing.

First Friday of the Month ╭∩╮（︶︿︶）╭∩╮

Jobs added


Relative Weather Impact


Unemployment RateWhile the unemployment rate was unchanged, there were only 12,000 new non-farm payroll jobs created last month, well under the 125,000-150,000 needed to account for natural workforce growth.

The consensus estimate of 100,000 was also under the replacement level, but not near as bad. 

Obviously, the Boeing strike and hurricanes Helene and Milton had a lot to do with this, but these are very weak numbers:

Job growth slowed sharply last month, with workers sidelined by hurricane effects and the Boeing strike. The report, released just four days before the presidential election, could play a key role in how people view the economy as they head to the polls.

The Labor Department on Friday reported that the U.S. economy added a seasonally adjusted 12,000 jobs in October, versus a September gain of 223,000. That wildly missed even the muted expectations of economists, who had forecast 100,000.

Still, the unemployment rate stayed steady at a historically low 4.1%. That was in line with economists’ expectations.

Hurricanes Helene and Milton put thousands of people out of work across the Southeast, while the Boeing strike took more people off the job. Economists generally reckoned that the bulk of October’s downdraft was temporary, and didn’t affect the larger dynamics of the market. Wages, for example, continued to rise.

………

Still, the report’s timing four days before the election isn’t great for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign.

Gee, ya think? 

Absolute crap jobs numbers 4 days before the election might be a problem for the incumbent?

………

Over the last several months, the general pace of job growth appeared to be slowing. Then, the September report released a month ago blew past expectations. Economists are now trying to figure out which is the one-off and which is the trend. The noise in Friday’s report makes it difficult to interpret.

Economist Brian Bethune of Boston College estimated that without the effects of the fall hurricanes, the Boeing strike and further adjustments, the October job-creation figure would have been 130,000, instead of the 12,000 the government reported.

Mr. Bethune's number would basically be treading water.

………

The unemployment rate is based on a separate survey of households. Respondents who say they had jobs but weren’t at work because of bad weather are still counted as employed. The same goes for workers with jobs who are on strike.

Some context:

The Boeing strike began in mid-September. The Labor Department’s monthly report on strike activity, released last week, said that there were 33,000 Boeing workers on strike for the entire pay period that included Oct. 12. Friday’s report showed a loss of 46,000 manufacturing jobs, driven by a decline of 44,000 jobs in transportation equipment manufacturing that the Labor Department said “was largely due to strike activity.”

To some degree, the hurricanes’ effects have already dissipated. Initial claims for unemployment insurance moved notably higher in early October, but last week they slipped to their lowest level in months.

Meanwhile, the economy has continued to grow solidly, with the Commerce Department reporting Wednesday that gross domestic product grew at an inflation-adjusted 2.8% annual rate in the third quarter.

Those last two numbers are good.

Now I wonder what the f%$# the Federal Reserve will do when it makes its interest rate decision 2 days after the election. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

………

Even though the economy and the labor market appear poised to keep buttressing one another, there are also limits to how many jobs the U.S. can sustainably keep adding without driving unemployment down to the point that wages start running too hot, noted Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM US. Immigration added to the pool of available workers for much of this year. But with the number of people entering the U.S. down sharply since the spring, that supply has been curtailed.

Meanwhile, with population growth slow, more people reaching retirement age, and the share of Americans aged 25 to 54 who are employed near its highest level in a quarter-century, finding qualified workers is no easy chore for companies looking to hire.

That all suggests to Brusuelas that the economy might only need to gain somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 jobs each month to keep the unemployment rate steady.

I do not know what this means for the economy, nor do I know what it means for the Federal Reserve, but it ain't good political news.