When one purchases an extremely long range, as in more than about 400 km range EV, they carry a lot of batteries, and those batteries are very heavy, and as a result, these cars have severely limited tire life.
I would have thought that this was a no-brainer, but people are surprised by this:
In case you missed it, there's been a lot of discourse surrounding electric vehicles and tires lately. Not only do EVs wear through their rubber and roads quicker because of their relatively extreme heft, but the instant power they put down also accelerates the process. Owners are shocked to learn this firsthand because, as J.D. Power reports, their daily drivers chew through tires like they're going out of style. And not only that, but many were supposedly never told this would happen.
That bit about instant power is kind of silly. Everyone knows that each time you do a burnout, you are reducing tire life something on the order of 1500 km.
On the other hand, the fact that something like a Cybertruck weighs about 3½ tons results in much shorter tire life is less obvious to the non-engineering types out there:
………
Now, big-name OEMs like Michelin and Goodyear sell rubber specifically for battery-powered cars. Marketing is one reason, of course, but so are the legitimately different requirements of EV tires. They must strike a different balance of strength, weight, and resiliency without hampering vehicle range or causing excessive noise. That's a tall task when you're dealing with 6,000-pound sedans and "midsize" trucks that weigh as much as a dually pickup.
Automotive dealer software company CDK Global published a lengthy study about EV service in late 2023. In it, one respondent said that “when it comes to EVs, tires are the new oil change." We published a story last August about Rivian R1Ts needing new rubber after as few as 6,000 miles. Not all EV owners deal with such egregious wear, but considering most service shops recommend oil changes every 5,000 miles on gasoline-powered cars, the comparison checks out in that case.
One solution for this is to get a less expensive car with shorter range. Shorter range means less batteries, which means less battery weight, which means less tire wear.
If if you are charging from a 120VAC plug at your home, if you are commuting 50 miles a day each way, you should not suffer from range anxiety from a 200 mile range EV.
Or you could buy a plug in hybrid, which typically have a range on the order of 40-50 miles, but can continue after that using an internal combustion engine that gets around 50 MPG.
Parts pairing is the use of digital signatures to prevent the re-use of parts and the use of compatible 3rd party parts.
Printer ink and HP are a classic example of using this tactic to maximize their profits at the expense of their users:
Oregon Governor Tina Kotek today signed the state's Right to Repair Act, which will push manufacturers to provide more repair options for their products than any other state so far.
The law, like those passed in New York, California, and Minnesota, will require many manufacturers to provide the same parts, tools, and documentation to individuals and repair shops that they provide to their own repair teams.
But Oregon's bill goes further, preventing companies from implementing schemes that require parts to be verified through encrypted software checks before they will function. Known as parts pairing or serialization, Oregon's bill, SB 1596, is the first in the nation to target that practice. Oregon State Senator Janeen Sollman (D) and Representative Courtney Neron (D) sponsored and pushed the bill in the state senate and legislature.
………
Oregon's bill isn't stronger in every regard. For one, there is no set number of years for a manufacturer to support a device with repair support. Parts pairing is prohibited only on devices sold in 2025 and later. And there are carve-outs for certain kinds of electronics and devices, including video game consoles, medical devices, HVAC systems, motor vehicles, and—as with other states—"electric toothbrushes."
This is a major step forward.
Unfortunately, the DMCA and WIPO make further progress more difficult.
He rose to prominence by defeating the last decent Republican in the Senate™, Lowell Weiker in 1988 with enormous help from movement nutjob right wing Republicans like William F. Buckley.
Once he entered the Senate, he spent most of the time stabbing his Democratic colleagues in the back, culminating in his behavior in the 2000 election, when, as Al Gore's running mate, he blithely supported the theft of the election in Florida in the hope that he could be the nominee in 2004.
Along the way, he made the PATRIOT act worse, neutered environmental regulation, worked to prevent a public option in healthcare, opposed lowering the Medicare eligibility age, supported the Iraq war until the bitter end, and routinely accused people who disagreed with him of being traitors.
He abandoned all pretense of being a Democrat after his failed bid for the Democratic nomination in 2004, and lost the Senate primary in 2006, but refiled as an independent and ran as an independent and won the general election.
He was a smarmy sanctimonious, holier than thou hypocrite, but by exiting this world he has finally done something to make this world a better place.
*Yiddish, meaning, "An embarrassment to the Jews before the rest of the nations of the world." †Hebrew, meaning, "May his name be obliterated."
Specifically, the CFA Franc currency allowed the existing colonial economics to continue, where this allowed France to extract raw materials and import them at below market cost, and allowed them to sell finished goods at above market prices.
This was compounded by the installation of puppet governments post colonial independence, sabotage and destruction of infrastructure of uncooperative governments, and configuring corporate deals which would mean that all the profits (beyond what bribes went to corrupt leaders) ended up in France.
This looting has been central, arguably essential, to France's post colonial economic success, and the economic failures of these former colonies.
As a result of this, the coups in in the former French possessions in the Sahel have been aggressively anti-French, and have eagerly accepted Russian offers of security assistance.
So, once again, initial unemployment claims fell, beating forecasts, falling by 2,000 to 210,000 while continuing claims rose by 24,000 to 1.8 million.
The number of Americans signing up for unemployment benefits fell slightly last week, another sign that the labor market remains strong and most workers enjoy extraordinary job security.
Jobless claims dipped by 2,000 to 210,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday. The four-week average of claims, which smooths out week-to-week ups and downs, fell by 750 to 211,000.
Overall, 1.8 million Americans were collecting unemployment benefits the week that ended March 16, up 24,000 from the week before.
Applications for unemployment benefits are viewed as a proxy for layoffs and a sign of where the job market is headed. Despite job cuts at Stellantis Electronic Arts, Unilever and elsewhere, overall layoffs remain below pre-pandemic levels. The unemployment rate, 3.9% in February, has come in under 4% for 25 straight months, longest such streak since the 1960s.
Meanwhile, GDP was revised up by .2% for the 4th quarter of 2023.
With all of this, I'm thinking that the Fed will put off rate cuts for another meeting. (Somehow skyrocketing profits are not subject to the same level of concern as mildly improving wages)
It's been clear for some time that someone in senior management at the
New York Times hates trans people.
They have been churning out poorly reported anti-trans propaganda for at least
the last two years, and
Media Matters has the numbers:
A new report from Media Matters and GLAAD finds that The New York Times
excluded the perspectives of trans people from two-thirds of its stories
about anti-trans legislation in the year following public criticism for its
handling of the topic.
Media Matters previously reported that
the Times
helped fuel
a right-wing anti-trans panic in 2022 by platforming anti-trans extremists,
painting rising transgender identification as a social contagion, and
fearmongering about the costs of transgender acceptance.
In
February 2023, the paper received two separate open letters: one from a
coalition of
150+ organizations and leaders, including GLAAD, and a separate letter signed by
hundreds of Times contributors that
criticized the outlet's contributions to a
deadly
anti-LGBTQ culture war. The newspaper attempted to
conflate
both efforts, dismissing all criticisms of its coverage as merely “protests
organized by advocacy groups.”
Between February 15, 2023, when
those letters were separately delivered to the Times, and February 15, 2024,
the Times published at least 65 articles that mentioned U.S. anti-trans
legislation in either their headline or lead paragraphs. We counted how
often the paper quoted openly trans or gender-nonconforming sources, cited
anti-trans misinformation or talking points without context or adequate
fact-checking, and accurately represented the records of anti-trans figures
mentioned in its stories. Our findings:
66% of the articles did not quote even one trans
or gender-nonconforming person.
18% of the articles quoted misinformation from
anti-trans activists without adequate fact-checking or additional
context.
6 articles obscured the anti-trans background of
sources, erasing histories of extremist rhetoric or actions.
There is a timeline at the link.
I do not know who is responsible for this, but it is someone senior.
If you put a gun to my head, I would say that it was probably the publisher, AG "Dash" Sulzberger, but I have nothing at all to back this up.
This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.
It's pretty simple: There was no concern for the truth nor accuracy. It was an exercise in mindless and dishonest contrarianism in the interest in selling books/clicks.
I noted this in 2009, when the folks at Freakonomics tried to argue that solar power would result in more heating than coal because they are black, and absorb heat.
To do this they had to:
Assume that coal power was far more thermally efficient than it actually is. (You cannot burn coal in a turbine and use the exhaust to boil water for a steam turbine, which is the most efficient form of fossile fuel power. It only works for liquid and gaseous fuels)
Assume that solar panels do not reflect or re-emit any heat (Black body radiation), and that their efficiencies are lower than were achievable then.
That the Earth is a perfectly reflective sphere. (It's not it's albedo is 0.39, as any Vangelis fan could tell you)
Ignore that home solar panels are most often put on roofs, which are also black.
Ignores the greenhouse effect in its entirety, which dwarfs thermal emissions of all power generation on the planet earth.
Freakonomics did not transform economics because it was a humbug promulgated by snollygosters.
Judge Yvette Roland also suspended his right to practice law three days from now, and a final decision on a permanent ban on his ability to practice law will be dealt with by the California Supreme Court.
There is a line from the movie The Firm, where Gene Hackman's character asks, " Do you think l'm talking about breaking the law?" and Cruise responds, "No, I'm just trying to figure out how far you want it bent," that appears to apply here.
Lawyers are supposed to be zealous advocates for their clients, but they are not supposed to descend into blatant illegality to do so.
Eastman has been on the side of unethical and illegal behavior for years in support of his batsh%$ insane ideology.
The only travesty here is that it took so long for the legal profession to recognize and sanction this:
A California judge recommended that conservative attorney John Eastman be disbarred in the state over his role in developing a legal strategy to help President Donald Trump stay in power after his 2020 election loss.
State Bar Court of California Judge Yvette Roland issued the recommendation in a 128-page ruling on Wednesday, ordering that Eastman’s law license be put on “involuntary inactive” status effective three days after her ruling. The California Supreme Court will issue a final ruling on the matter, which Eastman can appeal. Along with the recommendation for disbarment, Roland recommended that Eastman be ordered to pay $10,000 in monetary sanctions to the State Bar of California Client Security Fund.
“The court rejects Eastman’s contention that this disciplinary proceeding and Eastman’s resultant discipline is motivated by his political views or his representation of President Trump or President Trump’s Campaign,” Roland’s ruling said. “Rather, Eastman’s wrongdoing constitutes exceptionally serious ethical violations warranting severe professional discipline.”
………
Along with the effort to be disbarred in California, Eastman, a former law school dean, has been embroiled in other legal cases related to election interference.
Eastman faces criminal charges in a Georgia case accusing Trump and his allies of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results in the state. He’s also one of the unnamed co-conspirators described in an election interference case brought by the Justice Department, although he doesn’t face charges.
Eastman's behavior has been an affront to the legal ethics and to the reputation of the legal profession since almost his first day passing the bar, which is an awfully high bar to clear.
It's not just that he has defended the indefensible, it has been that his lying about the law has been central to his entire career.
It's nice that the wheels of justice have finally turned on him.
She accomplished this miracle by focusing on Republicans eating their constituents faces, specifically on how Republican abortion criminalization legislation led to the shutdown of both abortion and IVF services in the state.
A special election in Alabama on Tuesday proved one thing for Democrats: Abortion is a winning issue.
Democratic candidate Marilyn Lands defeated her Republican opponent, Madison City Council member Teddy Powell, for a state House seat in a deep-red district after she made abortion and in vitro fertilization access a cornerstone of her campaign.
………
Lands secured a whopping 63 percent of the vote—a 26-point lead—by aggressively going against the grain, telling voters she supports a repeal of Alabama’s abortion bans while sharing her own experience with abortion two decades ago, when she received a devastating diagnosis: a genetic defect called trisomy.
“Twenty years ago I was able to get the care I needed. My three doctors told me this is the procedure I needed, that my life was at risk. I was able to go to my own hospital with my own doctor there, I didn’t have to leave my community,” Lands told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent. “And to think we’ve gone 20 years backwards. I can’t believe that. I’ve seen, in my lifetime, women make great strides in many areas. And, I’m just, I’m outraged that 20 years later women do not have the same freedoms and protections that I had.”
It's really very simple. Republicans want to kill women like Marilyn Lands and like my wife.
Suddenly, the staunch anti-abortion activists realize that the Handmaiden's Tale will apply to good Christian white people like them, and suddenly they are looking for another proxy for racism.*
*The history is abundantly clear here, the origins of the abortion crimilization movement grew from racial bigotry, not abortion. They were upset that their segregation academies lost their tax exempt status.
A North Texas school teacher and U.S. Army veteran has legally changed his name to Literally Anybody Else and announced he is running for U.S. president. https://t.co/D5f2DCKd2X
According to the story, he is a middle school teacher, which makes him qualified to deal with Congressional Republicans, at least the more mature ones, but my guess is that he does standup comedy on the weekends, and this is his attempt to get on Colbert. (I'm cynical that way)
Specifically, Angus Deaton, recipient of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel* who has unloaded on members of his profession, whom he excoriated for ignoring the power issues in economics and inequality:
Angus Deaton is the economic doyen from central casting. The bow-tie-wearing econometrician was born in Scotland, did a PhD at Cambridge and has been at Princeton for the last 40 years. He’s currently the Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs Emeritus. He won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2015. And he’s just dropped an almighty bucket of sh%$ on his entire profession.
(%$ mine)
Where Deaton published it is almost as interesting as the contents: at the International Monetary Fund, that institution once seen as the standard-bearer of neoliberal orthodoxy, but which has in recent years developed a curiosity about the real-world impacts of the hardline policies it once imposed upon or prescribed to countries.
Deaton lobs a series of truth bombs at his own profession, the result, he says, of “changing my mind, a discomfiting process for someone who has been a practising economist for more than half a century”. These include: “We have largely stopped thinking about ethics and about what constitutes human well-being”.
If “economists should focus on efficiency and leave equity to others, to politicians or administrators… the others regularly fail to materialise, so that when efficiency comes with upward redistribution — frequently though not inevitably — our recommendations become little more than a license for plunder”.
“Historians, who understand about contingency and about multiple and multidirectional causality, often do a better job than economists of identifying important mechanisms…”
Far from being “a nuisance that interfered with economic (and often personal) efficiency”, unions “once raised wages for members and nonmembers, they were an important part of social capital in many places, and they brought political power to working people in the workplace and in local, state, and federal governments. Their decline is contributing to the falling wage share, to the widening gap between executives and workers, to community destruction, and to rising populism.”
“I am much more sceptical of the benefits of free trade to American workers and am even sceptical of the claim, which I and others have made in the past, that globalisation was responsible for the vast reduction in global poverty over the past 30 years”.
Immigration contributes to inequality.
But Deaton’s main point is a recognition of how power distorts policy: “Our emphasis on the virtues of free, competitive markets and exogenous technical change can distract us from the importance of power in setting prices and wages, in choosing the direction of technical change, and in influencing politics to change the rules of the game.”
One does wonder what took him so long to reach this decision.
It's been obvious since (at least) John Maynard Keynes.
*It's not really a Nobel Prize, even if this were called the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), a conservative firebrand acquitted last year in a historic impeachment trial, has reached an agreement with prosecutors to avoid trial on long-standing state felony securities fraud charges.
Paxton was charged nearly a decade ago, accused of defrauding investors at a Dallas-area tech company by not disclosing that he was paid by the company to recruit them. The case has been delayed for years by pretrial disputes over the trial’s location and special prosecutors’ fees.
Under the agreement reached in Harris County District Court on Tuesday, prosecutors will dismiss felony charges against Paxton if he successfully completes 100 hours of community service and 15 hours of legal ethics classes and pays restitution of $271,000 by September. Paxton, who was a state legislator when some of the alleged actions occurred, had previously pleaded not guilty.
Restitution, community service, and ethics classes? It's a f%$#ing plea deal.
She bankrolled his Suberb Owl ad, and has something on the order of about a billion dollars in the bank as a result of her divorce from Google founder Sergei Brin.
Needless to say, this juxtaposition of incompetent candidates and large quantities of money will have political consultants salivating, particularly those chasing signatures for ballot access.
Needless to say, Republicans are claiming that she was fired because she was a Republican, but they are completely full of crap on this.
She was alibiing for insurrection and blatantly and egregiously lying to reporters in her role as RNC chair.
This is different from, for example, Donna Brazile who spent a career spinning reporters, but in a way that has been done by partisan actors for decades.
The former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel is on her way out of NBC less than a week after joining the network, NBC announced in a memo from NBCUniversal News Group chair Cesar Conde.
Conde said he had listened to “the legitimate concerns” of many network employees. “No organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned,” he wrote. “Over the last few days, it has become clear that this appointment undermines that goal.”
………
But she also claimed it was “fair to say there were problems [in elections in battleground states] in 2020” and said that while she did “not think violence should be in our political discourse”, she supported Donald Trump’s election fraud lie, which ultimately stoked the deadly January 6 attack on Congress, as a way of “taking one for the whole team” .
When complete tool Chuck Todd unloads a can of whup ass on a Republican, someone has screwed up.
………
A procession of senior NBC and MSNBC hosts followed Todd in protesting the McDaniel hire on air, from the popular husband-and-wife morning show team of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski to Jen Psaki, Nicolle Wallace, Joy-Ann Reid, Lawrence O’Donnell and Rachel Maddow.
One hopes that senior management will be flipping burgers in the near future.
The ship, the MV Dali was, if you cannot tell by the prefix, a diesel powered
container ship, 300m long, and about 116,000 tons, so it was almost as long as
a Ford Class carrier, and had about 15% more mass.
From this video, it appears that there was some sort of power failure, and a
loss of steering, with the lights going off at least 3 times.
It is known that the ship sent out a Mayday before hitting the bridge.
That, and the voluminous smoke from the stack before impact, which implies
that they tried to reverse to slow down, seems to reinforce this.
BTW, there is a lot of kinetic energy in play here, it looks like it was doing
about 7 knots (3.6m/s) and at maximum weight, you are looking about 682 mJ of
energy. Given that TNT has a an energy contendt of 4.184 MJ/kg, this
means that the impact was likely equivalent to somewhere around 100-160 kg of
TNT applied directly to the bridge support.
That bridge was going down after that.
The bridge is toast, and at least 6 construction workers are missing and
presumed dead:
A massive container ship adrift at 9 mph issued a “mayday” early Tuesday as
it headed toward the iconic Francis Scott Key Bridge, losing power before
colliding with one of the vital support columns. As the 984-foot vessel
struck the bridge in the middle of an otherwise calm night, it caused a din
that woke people ashore and immediately toppled an essential mid-Atlantic
thoroughfare into the frigid waters.
The effects were immediate
and catastrophic: Authorities began searching for six construction workers
who had been repairing potholes on the Interstate 695 bridge at the time of
the collapse. By Tuesday evening, their employer said they were presumed
dead, and the Coast Guard said it was ending rescue efforts.
The
ship, a Singapore-flagged vessel named Dali with thousands of containers on
it, departed the Port of Baltimore around 1 a.m., then quickly ran into
trouble. It’s unknown what, precisely, caused the collision at 1:27 a.m.,
but the ship reported losing power just before it struck the bridge. The
National Transportation and Safety Board is investigating the accident —
which authorities said does not appear to be intentional nor an act of
terrorism — but had not boarded the vessel to collect evidence, such as
recorders, as of Tuesday afternoon.
It did not want to disturb
the more pressing matter: search efforts led by the U.S. Coast Guard. But
Tuesday night, Rear Adm. Shannon Gilreath said the rescue efforts would be
suspended.
“Based on the length of time that has gone on in the
search, the extensive search efforts that we’ve put into it, the water
temperature, at this point we do not believe we are going to find any of
these individuals still alive,” Gilreath said.
The water temperature in the bay at this time of year is around 47°F/8°C, so
the it's hihgly unlikely that anyone would have survived in that water for
more than an hour.
Two people — one who was briefly hospitalized and another who declined a
trip to a hospital — were rescued, authorities said.
Who the f%$# decides, after falling 180 feet into Baltimore Harbor, not to go to
the hospital?
Oh, yeah, the ambulance probably wasn't covered by their health
insurance. (F%$# private healthcare)
………
As for the bridge itself, which opened in 1977 after five years of construction, Federal Highway Administration records indicate the bridge had been considered in “good” or “fair” condition going back at least three decades. A 2023 Maryland Transportation Authority inspection found the bridge to be in “overall satisfactory condition.”
[Maryland Governor Wes] Moore said the bridge was “fully up to code” and Benjamin W. Schafer, a Johns Hopkins professor of structural and civil engineering who reviewed video of the incident, said he didn’t see anything that immediately stood out as a “red flag” in regard to the bridge’s structural integrity. He called the collapse “more of an acute event.”
The bridge had two supports holding it up; if you take one away, “it’s not a bridge anymore,” he told The Sun.
The company that chartered the cargo ship that destroyed the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore was recently sanctioned by regulators for blocking its employees from directly reporting safety concerns to the U.S. Coast Guard — in violation of a seaman whistleblower protection law, according to regulatory filings reviewed by The Lever.
Eight months before a Maersk Line Limited-chartered cargo ship crashed into the Baltimore bridge, likely killing six people and injuring others, the Labor Department sanctioned the shipping conglomerate for retaliating against an employee who reported unsafe working conditions aboard a Maersk-operated boat. In its order, the department found that Maersk had “a policy that requires employees to first report their concerns to [Maersk]... prior to reporting it to the [Coast Guard] or other authorities.”
Federal regulators at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which operates under the Labor Department, called the policy “repugnant” and a “reprehensible and an egregious violation of the rights of employees,” which “chills them from contacting the [Coast Guard] or other authorities without contacting the company first.”
Maersk’s reporting policy was approved by company executives, federal regulators found in their investigation into the incident.
There is at this time, there are no indications that this contributed to whatever failures led to the accident, but I would not be at all surprised to find that Maersk's official (!) policy of retaliation contributed to whatever went wrong.
He lost the case, and the rules in New York are very specific as to the timing and amount of the bond that must be posted, but for reasons that are unclear from the ruling (PDF) the judges have appeared to have bailed him out:
An appeals court panel in New York said Monday that former president Donald Trump would be allowed to post a $175 million bond to stave off enforcement of a nearly half-billion-dollar civil judgment against him and his business.
The order was a significant win for Trump, who was otherwise facing a massive cash crunch and the prospect of New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) moving to seize some of his assets as soon as this week.
However, while the five state judges on the panel eased the financial strain on Trump, they did not erase it entirely. They gave Trump 10 days to come up with the reduced bond of $175 million, saying they would only delay enforcement of the full amount if he put up that lower figure within this window — and it is not immediately clear how he will come up with the money.
………
Trump’s attorneys have said he could not finance an appeal bond of more than $450 million. They said his team had contacted 30 companies, none of which would take real estate — which accounts for most of Trump’s wealth — as collateral. Instead they required he put up cash or investment accounts. Securing such a large bond in cash is a “practical impossibility,” Trump’s lawyers argued.
The appeals court panel on Monday did not reduce the initial judgment, only the amount Trump needs to put up for a bond while appealing. His deadline for securing the bond is next Thursday, April 4. The extra 10 days may not be enough of an extension for Trump to turn his real estate into cash, as it typically takes weeks or months to sell properties such as golf courses or hotels.
………
Although the appeals court gave no reasoning for its decision, Adam Pollock, an attorney who formerly served as assistant attorney general in New York, said the decision could indicate that it might consider permanently reducing the judgment against Trump on appeal.
“It’s extraordinary because the law is clear that you have to post a bond in the full amount, and it additionally suggests that there may be concern that the underlying judgment is itself excessive,” said Pollock.
The appellate court did indicate that it wants to keep the case moving based on the schedule it laid out, legal experts said. The order requires Trump to appeal in time for the court’s September term. That requires that his appeal be prepared by July 8, according to Pollock. “Here what they’re saying is, ‘You’re not going to get to drag this out,’” Pollock said.
In addition to reducing the amount Trump must put up for his appeal bond, the panel also said it would stay other parts of Engoron’s decision.
Among other things, the panel said it would block Engoron’s decree that Trump and his company be prohibited from getting loans from any New York financial institution for three years. The panel also said it would block Engoron’s orders barring Trump from serving in a top position at a New York corporation for three years or his sons — Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump — for two years. An appeals court judge had granted temporary stays on those measures last month, though it remained unclear whether the full panel would maintain or change that.
The panel said some of Engoron’s other moves, including his directive installing an independent director of compliance for the Trump Organization, should stand.
It's going to get interesting when that independent monitor issues a report saying, "Same sh%$, different day," because without corrupt business practices, the Trump Org would have no business at all.
Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl whose escape from the Central Park Zoo and life on the loose captivated New York, had enough rat poison and pigeon virus in his system to kill him even if he had not died after apparently striking an Upper West Side building last month.
The finding, from a necropsy conducted by Bronx Zoo pathologists after Flaco’s death on Feb. 23, validated widespread concerns about the hazards he faced living as a free bird in Manhattan for just over a year. He would have turned 14 this month.
“Flaco’s severe illness and death are ultimately attributed to a combination of factors — infectious disease, toxin exposures and traumatic injuries — that underscore the hazards faced by wild birds, especially in an urban setting,” the Wildlife Conservation Society, which operates the Central Park and Bronx Zoos, said in a statement on Monday.
Initial necropsy findings released the day after what onlookers described as a deadly building strike suggested Flaco had sustained an acute traumatic injury to his body, with signs of substantial hemorrhage under his sternum and in his back near his liver.
………
In confirming the role of traumatic injuries, those tests found he had a severe pigeon herpesvirus, which the conservation society attributed to his eating feral pigeons.
Donald J. Trump is all but certain to become the first former American president to stand trial on criminal charges after a judge on Monday denied his effort to delay the proceeding and confirmed it would begin next month.
The trial, in which Mr. Trump will be accused of orchestrating the cover-up of a simmering sex scandal surrounding his 2016 presidential campaign, had originally been scheduled to start this week. But the judge, Juan M. Merchan, had pushed the start date to April 15 to allow Mr. Trump’s lawyers to review newly disclosed documents from a related federal investigation.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers had pushed for an even longer delay of 90 days and sought to have the case thrown out altogether. But in an hourlong hearing Monday, Justice Merchan slammed their arguments, rejecting them all.
After a midmorning break, the judge returned to the courtroom, said that the former president had suffered no harm from the late disclosure of the documents and made the April 15 trial date final.
“Defendant has been given a reasonable amount of time,” the judge said crisply.
Personally, I do not think that Trump's trial will actually start on the 15th, but I would be delighted if I were wrong about this.
You may be wondering how the FTC gets involved in such things, as its purview does not generally extend to patents and other forms of exclusivity offered to pharmaceutical manufacturers.
It turns out that its what is squarely in its purview is criminal actions in furtherance of anticompetitive goals, like lying to the FDA about the patent protections on certain medications.
The FTC went after all three, and the costs of their inhalers have been lowered, and they are now open to generic competition:
………
But I want to start with something different. This week, GlaxoSmithKline announced it will cap out-of-pocket expenses to $35 for a device for its entire line of asthma inhalers, likely due to significant policy action by the Federal Trade Commission. This move will help millions of people, and it speaks to the kind of opportunities lying around for assertive policymakers.
GlaxoSmithKline’s line of inhalers is the most prescribed in the United States, and this corporation’s cut to patient costs follows two other giant corporations - AstraZeneca and Boehringer Ingelheim - who recently did the same thing.
Despite being a very old type of product that is sold inexpensively abroad, inhalers are a big business in America, generating $178 billion in revenue between 2000 and 2021. Three firms - AstraZeneca, GSK, and Teva - had revenue of $25 billion in the past five years from this line of business. The high revenue is a result of high cost, with the list price of inhalers as somewhere between $200 to $600. A cut, therefore, is a big deal, especially for people with high deductible health care plans.
Why are inhalers so profitable? And why have three giant firms decided to forego this money? The short story is that pharmaceutical companies have been committing an extremely boring form of fraud that enabled them to maintain illegal monopoly protection for their products, and no one in government bothered to stop it. Last year, Chair Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission stepped up with some clever lawyering and removed their monopoly protection. And so these firms are preemptively choosing to cut what patients have to pay.
Here’s the slightly longer version. While you’d think that a drug patent expiring would be simple and allow new entrants to come in and make an off-patent drug cheaply, in practice pharma companies often have many patents for a single drug, and frequently file for new second generation patents for an old drug. So bringing a generic competitor to market, with all the approvals and manufacturing costs, is risky unless you know it’s legal to sell it. In 1984, Congress passed a law called Hatch-Waxman, which was designed to lower drug prices by setting up a process to let generic drug companies enter markets. It essentially created a litigation period before any production started, where the brand and generic producers would fight, and a judge would decide whether the drug’s patents had expired. Once that judge ruled for the generic producer, it would then put the expensive into factories, distribution, and so forth.
The law worked, and as a result, today, most drugs we take are cheap generics, while most of the money we spend on drugs are for the small number of newer branded drugs that still have patent protections. (The situation though has slowly gotten worse, and a lot of the same problems have re-emerged in new forms, which is why everyone hates big pharma. But most drugs are generic and quite cheap.)
Hatch-Waxman included a litigation-heavy process for challenging a drug patent, involving something called the Orange Book, which is a list of FDA approved medicine that have been deemed safe and effective, as well as their patents. That’s the guide the FDA and generic companies use to tell if an expensive drug can be challenged. According to Hatch-Waxman, when a drug company lists a patent in the Orange Book, the FDA is prohibited by statute from letting any generic into the market for 30 months to let the process of challenging a branded patent play out.
And here’s where the fraud comes in. Pharmaceutical companies have been, well, lying. They list patents in the Orange Book that aren’t valid for the medicine associated with them. That’s illegal. It’s actually a crime, a form of fraud. You’re not allowed to list patents on medical devices, but they do that. And no one has cracked down on illegal Orange Book patent listing in decades. The FDA, HHS, and the FTC all thought it was someone else’s job, until Orange Book fraud became a routine way that everyone just thought, well that’s how business works.
Lina Khan is NOT a, "Someone else's job," kind or regulator, and so the FTC drafted a statement making it clear that this was a crime, and sent out letters to a number of pharmaceutical companies saying that they were breaking the law.
………
So basically, what’s happening is that the inhaler and epipen markets are about to get a lot more competitive, and prices are going to come way down, perhaps even lower than the $35 out of pocket some of these firms are promising. It won’t even require government action for much longer, because generic pharmaceutical firms are going to take up the enforcement on their own. That’s how you create markets. And when there’s generic competition with a bunch of sellers, it means we won’t have to depend on brand companies to choose to lower out-of-pocket costs. And that’s the ultimate solution.
No. The ultimate solution is to jail executives who preside over such schemes.
This is not just a civil infraction, and it is a crime, and even if they have to lower their prices now, they have generated billions in profits over the past few decades, so they still win.
Still, Lina Khan cannot criminally prosecute criminal pharma execs, and she is doing what she can.
He's calling bullsh%$, noting the obvious, that while TikTok may be a privacy hellscape, it is no worse, and in some cases arguably better, than the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™, Ecch (Twitter), Google, Amazon, Apple, or any one of a dozen or so American companies.
It should be noted that at the time of my writing this, there have been no classified document leaks on TikTok, as opposed to, for example, War Thunder discussion boards.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has criticized the US government's targeting of TikTok, saying it is hypocritical to single out one social media platform for tracking users and not apply the same rule to all.
In an interview with news channel CNN, Woz was asked about Apple's so-called "walled garden" approach to protecting users, and in response he said he was glad for the protection that he gets, and that Apple does a better job in this respect than other companies.
"And tracking you - tracking you is questionable. But my gosh, look at what we're accusing TikTok of, and then go look at Facebook and Google and that's how they make their businesses," he added. "I mean, Facebook was a great idea. But then they make all their money just by tracking you and advertising, and Apple doesn't really do that so much."
"That much," huh? That word is getting an awfully hard workout here. (Not a fan of Apple. The only reason that Tim Cook is not the biggest psychopath to have run Apple is because his immediate predecessor was Steve Jobs.)
"I don't understand it, I don't see why," commented Woz. "What are we saying? We're saying 'Oh, you might be tracked by the Chinese.' Well, they learned it from us."
The hypocrisy behind the bill is stunning, of course, but that hypocrisy is at the core of what the United States calls the, "Rules based order," which boils down to, "The US makes the rules, bitches."
(Full disclosure, I do not have a TikTok account, and avoid using it in my blog, because I cannot figure out how to stop it from auto-playing videos.)
It has become increasingly apparent that Medicare Advantage, the private and heavily taxpayer subsidized private for profit variant of health insurance for the elderly, does not work.
It is designed to draw people in with things like paying for gym, memberships, but when the healthcare sh$# hits the fan, you face limited networks and denial of essential care.
This is not a surprise. The goal was to create a constituency for the program and aggressive lobbying by the industry, which would eventually lead to the dismantling of the second most efficient and effective healthcare system in the United States. (The most efficient is the VA)
A story in Rolling Stone last month offered an ominous prediction about our nation’s health care. “The right-wing policy agenda written for a new Donald Trump presidency would ‘greatly accelerate’ efforts to privatize Medicare,” Andrew Perez wrote.
That story should be seen by the millions of seniors who might not read Rolling Stone but who have traditional Medicare coverage with a supplemental policy that pays for virtually every medical bill when they get sick. Those are the people who have not yet been enticed into Medicare Advantage plans with promises of groceries and gym memberships but with little or no notice about the delays in care and the up-front, out-of-pocket costs common in many plans.
As I pointed out in an earlier story, there are roadblocks to care that have been reported by hospitals that were no longer accepting Medicare Advantage plans from some companies. The CEO of the Brookings Hospital System in Brookings, South Dakota, was candid: MA plans “pay less, don’t follow medical policy, coverage, billing, and payment rules and procedures, and they are always trying to figure out how to deny payment for services,” he said
.......
Stories in Stat by Bob Herman and Casey Ross have carefully dissected what patients with Medicare Advantage plans have had to endure to get needed care. As I pointed out in a post about their work, patients often struggle to get the care they need. In one story about UnitedHealthcare, the largest Medicare Advantage company, the reporters noted that the insurer’s stunning financial success was driven by “brazen behavior,” such as cutting off payments for seriously ill patients and “denying rehabilitation care for older and disabled Americans as profits soared.” UnitedHealth is far from alone in using such tactics to boost profits. Herman and Ross told of the struggle of a sick, 80-year-old North Carolina woman whose plan with Humana, the second largest Medicare Advantage company, would pay only for cheaper care in a nursing home instead of in a long-term acute-care facility.
Until the polity in the United States acknowledge that health insurers are the problem, and NOT the solution, this sort of profit driven rat-f$#@ery will only get worse.
Given the rather obvious ties between Covid-19 and immune dysregulation, this is not a surprise.
Out of everything Regina Featherstone remembers about shingles, it's the nerve pain that stands out.
"I would take one step … the pain sears up," she recollected.
In December 2022, the 31-year-old developed shingles on her scalp and face, a time when she was both rundown and exhausted.
Initially, it was a small red lump on Ms Featherstone's neck, something she thought was an infected hair follicle. Her GP agreed with her assumption — shingles is more often seen in older people. So, Ms Featherstone was prescribed antibiotics.
But that same GP rang Ms Featherstone the next day to say that, having done some research after her appointment, this lump — which had now grown into multiple lumps — was actually shingles.
Something the GP casually said next is another memory that stands out for Ms Featherstone: That shingles cases are increasing, with COVID being one factor as to why.
"She said we have seen a rise [in shingles since COVID], especially in young people, because your immune system is just so compromised that you're more susceptible to your body just attacking itself."
………
One emerging question is whether COVID can increase the chance of shingles.
In 2022, a paper published by Oxford University Press reported that COVID was linked to an increased risk of shingles in patients over 50.
Coincidentally, some data suggests shingles cases have increased across age groups in parts of the country since 2020.
Once again, let me state, wear your f%$#ing mask.
Covid-19 is a particularly nasty disease, and notwithstanding the various treatments available, it has a very real potential to cripple or kill you.
It appears that it all burnt down in a fire, but its unique location resulted in an extremely preserved site:
A half-eaten bowl of porridge complete with wooden spoon, communal rubbish bins, and a decorative necklace made with amber and glass beads are just a handful of the extraordinarily well-preserved remnants of a late Bronze Age hamlet unearthed in eastern England that’s been dubbed “Britain’s Pompeii” and a “time capsule” into village life almost 3,000 years ago.
The findings from the site, excavated in 2015 to 2016, are now the subject of two reports, complete with previously unseen photos, published this week by University of Cambridge archaeologists, who said they cast light onto the “cosy domesticity” of ancient settlement life.
“It might be the best prehistoric settlement that we’ve found in Britain,” Mark Knight, the excavation director and a co-author of the reports, said in an interview Thursday. “We took the roofs off and inside was pretty much the contents,” he said. “It’s so comprehensive and so coherent.”
The reason for the rare preservation: disaster.
The settlement, thought to have originally consisted of several large roundhouses made of wood and constructed on stilts above a slow-moving river, was engulfed by a fire less than a year after being built.
During the blaze, the buildings and much of their contents collapsed into a muddy river below that “cushioned the scorched remains where they fell,” the university said of the findings. This combination of charring from the fire and waterlogging led to “exceptional preservation,” the researchers found.
Definitely on my list of places to visit in the UK.
The opposition to the subsidies arising from IP absolutism has been deepening and broadening, because more and more people, throughout the ideological spectrum, have become aware that rather than, "Promot[ing] the Progress of Science and useful Arts," as the Constitution states, they are instead extreme forms of rent seeking and extortion:
Third parties are increasingly funding patent litigation in the U.S. in exchange for some of the proceeds. This practice was nearly nonexistent as recently as 2010 but now appears to account for about 30% of the country’s infringement lawsuits. The government doesn’t know who pays for or controls these suits. That could allow foreign adversaries to profit from our legal system and threaten U.S. national security.
In 2019 VLSI Technology alleged that some of the tech in Intel’s microprocessors infringed on its patents. In at least two lawsuits VLSI has been awarded some $3 billion in damages, some since reversed and remanded. Thanks to what’s known as the NHK-Fintiv rule—under which the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office refuses petitions for review if the relevant patents and parties are already involved in litigation—the agency hasn’t taken up Intel’s challenges.
When OpenSky, another party, challenged the same patents in 2021, the office’s review confirmed what Intel alleged: VLSI’s patents were invalid because they claimed features of semiconductor design that were obvious.
………
If a foreign adversary wanted to weaken the U.S., it could hardly do better than wage the type of legal warfare that VLSI has brought against Intel. As former Attorney General Michael Mukasey has noted in these pages, this practice is a direct threat to America’s security.
What is VLSI and are foreign governments involved in its campaign against Intel? We don’t know. VLSI Technologies Inc., a semiconductor manufacturer in the 1980s and ’90s, has been defunct for more than two decades. The current VLSI makes no products and has no relation to the old VLSI. It appears to have appropriated the name to obscure itself, a common tactic among nonpracticing patent-litigation entities.
VLSI’s parent company is Fortress Investment Group, a hedge fund owned in large part by interests in Abu Dhabi. The group is also a member of the International Legal Finance Association, an organization that lobbies against litigation-finance disclosure. VLSI has resisted revealing the identities of the investors in its litigation against Intel. When Colm F. Connolly, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for Delaware, ordered VLSI to disclose who was funding its litigation in August 2022, the company agreed to dismiss its case with prejudice. (Fortress didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
It appears that even right wing pig-felching bastards like Matal and Mukasey are getting disgusted with the excesses of the current patent process.
"F%$# the patent trolls," is something that we can agree with.
Once again we see that industry self reporting is an invitation to deceptive practices, and that all cable companies are bastards:
An Internet service provider that admitted lying to the Federal Communications Commission about where it offers broadband will pay a $10,000 fine and implement a compliance plan to prevent future violations.
Jefferson County Cable (JCC), a small ISP in Toronto, Ohio, admitted that it falsely claimed to offer fiber service in an area that it hadn't expanded to yet. A company executive also admitted that the firm submitted false coverage data to prevent other ISPs from obtaining government grants to serve the area. Ars helped expose the incident in a February 2023 article.
.........
We also published reports in February 2023 detailing false broadband claims made by Comcast, which initially insisted that the false data it submitted to the FCC was correct. It's not clear yet whether Comcast will face any punishment.
Last week's FCC order said that Jefferson County Cable initially reported serving 8,178 addresses for the commission's June 30, 2022, data collection. It then reduced that number to 6,605 addresses in the FCC's next round of data collection for December 31, 2022.
Even the second, lower number was higher than Jefferson County Cable's actual coverage. After a letter from the FCC Enforcement Bureau in March 2023, "Jefferson County Cable corrected its inaccurate submissions for both data filings by removing these approximately 1,500 locations from each of the relevant data filings on May 19, 2023," the FCC order said.
A $10K fine is a barely noticeable cost of doing business.
This was deliberate fraud by the company. The fine should be many times that.
Also, senior executives should have been from marched or of their offices in handcuffs.
I did not comment about it here, but on some of the social media platforms and BBS's that I frequent, I had made the observation that Elon musk's counterintuitive and stupid user interface choices on Tesla cars was probably responsible for the freak accident that claimed the life of Angela Chao, Mitch McConnell's sister in law.
She mistook reverse and forward and backed up into a pond on her ranch and drowned.
I had assumed that this was, at least in part, a consequence of Tesla's egregiously bad touchscreen centric user interface.
At that level of intoxication, it would be rather mendacious to suggest that the car maker's poorly thought out ergonomics was responsible.
On the other hand, the death of Tesla employee Hans von Ohain, who relied on Musk's lies about the self-driving capability of his car to get him home when he was drunk is a direct result of Musk's psychopathic marketing.
In case you are wondering, he was a direct descendant of That Hans von Ohain. (I am not going to make the obvious joke, "Hey look Ma, no Hans!")
"Poor, poor pitiful me": Was Martin Kulldorff fired by Harvard? (RESPECTFUL INSOLENCE) Eugenicist co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration got fired by Brigam and Women's Hospital, which ended his participation in Harvard Med School programs. So no, Harvard did not fire him, and good for his being fired. He is directly responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of people.
Interesting look at the erasure of Brythonic around 500 CE: (Spoiler, it's just the high status language displacing the low status one, not ethnic cleansing)
Federal Courts are finally moving to moving to shut down to judge shopping, a process, particularly favored by right wing legal activists, of arranging the filing to guarantee that the case finds its way to a particularly deranged judge:
This took way too long, but it appears that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and the Judicial Conference have finally decided to crack down on the serious problem of judicial shopping in the federal courts. They’ve set a new policy that will hopefully result in a more random allocation of cases to judges.
Jurisdiction shopping has been a problem for quite some time. You could argue that the creation of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) was a response to patent litigation that involved repeated jurisdiction shopping. Of course, rather than fixing the underlying problem, they just set up a single appeals court that would hear all patent cases, which resulted in a weird sort of “judicial capture” of the Federal Circuit.
And, rather than fix it, the judicial shopping just shifted a bit after CAFC was created. Specific district courts, initially in East Texas (first Marshall, then Tyler), established themselves as patent-friendly court jurisdictions, leading to all sorts of shenanigans. This included frequent patent litigants buying a skating rink and a literal bull to ingratiate themselves with the judges and juries. The Supreme Court tried to put a stop to this, though it took a few tries to sorta get it to work.
………
And, by then, we saw that this kind of judicial shopping was happening beyond just the patent realm. Over and over again we’ve seen cases — especially cases involving culture war or politically charged topics — being filed in courts with just a single, or a very small number of judges, hoping to get one of the batshit crazy judges who will bless anything. Indeed, there are now a few judges, such as Terry Doughty, Matthew Kacsmaryk, and Aileen Cannon, whose names regularly show up in discussions about judicial shopping.
It’s becoming bigger and bigger news as the public is learning more and more about this type of judicial shopping, which undermines respect in the rule of law, as well as respect of the judicial system itself.
So, now, finally, years later, the Judicial Conference has said it’s going to start making a change. In certain types of cases, they will be randomly assigned to judges across the entire district, rather than limiting judicial assignments just to the specific court where the case was filed. This will increase (sometimes significantly) the pool of judges who might be assigned the case:
The Judicial Conference of the United States has strengthened the policy governing random case assignment, limiting the ability of litigants to effectively choose judges in certain cases by where they file a lawsuit.
The policy addresses all civil actions that seek to bar or mandate state or federal actions, “whether by declaratory judgment and/or any form of injunctive relief.” In such cases, judges would be assigned through a district-wide random selection process.
The key here is the “district-wide” random selection, as opposed to just in the specific court within that district.
It's good that the Judicial Conference is addressing this, but it's clear that self-regulation does not work.
Under the Constitution, Congress has wide ranging authority to supervise how the courts conduct their business, and the court cannot be trusted to police it self. (**cough** Clarence Thomas **cough** **cough** Samuel Alito **cough)
A few days ago, the Supreme Court allowed Texas to continue to enforce its anti-immigrant law, and yesterday, the 5th Circuit issued a new injunction against the law:
A federal appeals
court late Tuesday night stopped a state law allowing Texas police to
arrest people suspected of illegally crossing the Texas-Mexico border —
hours after the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed it to go into effect.
Earlier in the
day, the high court had allowed the law to go into effect after it sent
the case back to the appeals court, urging it to issue a ruling
promptly. The appeals court soon scheduled a hearing for Wednesday
morning. And on the night before hearing oral arguments the appeals
court issued an order to let a lower court's earlier injunction stopping
Senate Bill 4 stand, according to a filing.
The Supreme
Court earlier Tuesday let SB 4 go into effect but stopped short of
ruling on the law's constitutionality, which has been challenged by the
Biden administration.
………
SB 4 seeks to make
illegally crossing the border a Class B misdemeanor, carrying a
punishment of up to six months in jail. Repeat offenders could face a
second-degree felony with a punishment of two to 20 years in prison.
The law also
requires state judges to order migrants returned to Mexico if they are
convicted; local law enforcement would be responsible for transporting
migrants to the border. A judge could drop the charges if a migrant
agrees to return to Mexico voluntarily.
The 5th Circuit is arguably the most conservative circuit in the United States, and it just sounds like they threw some MAJOR shade at the Supreme Court.
It appears to me that this is actually in accordance with Supreme Court precedent, though I am pretty sure that the Neanderthal majority on the did not foresee this:
A judge this month dropped gun charges against an illegal migrant in Illinois, sparking further debate about the rights associated with the Second Amendment.
U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Coleman of the Northern District of Illinois referenced lower court rulings in dismissing firearm possession charges against Heriberto Carbajal-Flores, who was illegally or unlawfully in the United States when he possessed a handgun in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago on June 1, 2020.
"The Court finds that Carbajal-Flores' criminal record, containing no improper use of a weapon, as well as the non-violent circumstances of his arrest do not support a finding that he poses a risk to public safety such that he cannot be trusted to use a weapon responsibly and should be deprived of his Second Amendment right to bear arms in self-defense," Coleman, who was appointed under President Barack Obama, wrote in her eight-page ruling filed March 8.
………
The court previously denied two motions by Carbajal-Flores to dismiss charges. The first time was on April 13, 2022, and the second on December 19, 2022—about six months after the U.S. Supreme Court voted 6-3 to strike down a 100-year-old New York law requiring that individuals show "proper cause" to get a license to carry a firearm outside a home, stemming from the 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. et al v. Bruen, Superintendent of New York State Police, et al.
It's Thursday, and the new unemployment numbers are out, initial claims fell by 2,000 to 210,000 as versus the predicted increase to 213,000, and continuing claims were unchanged at 1.81 million.
Initial applications for US unemployment benefits held near historically low levels last week, underscoring the resilience of the labor market.
Initial claims decreased by 2,000 to 210,000 in the week ended March 16, according to Labor Department data released on Thursday. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists called for 213,000.
Continuing claims, a proxy for the number of people receiving unemployment benefits, were also little changed at 1.81 million in the week ended March 9.
………
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday said the labor market remains strong and initial claims are “very, very low.” With hiring growth slowing, some have argued that if layoffs were to increase, unemployment would rise as well fairly quickly. “That is something we’re watching, but we’re not seeing,” Powell said at a press conference after the US central bank left interest rates unchanged at a two-decades high.
I think that the Fed will hold off raising rates for at least one more meeting.
Residents of North Carolina began noticing the mysterious billboards days before this month’s Super Tuesday primaries.
Across Winston-Salem, Charlotte, Greensboro, and beyond, digital posters displaying the smiling faces of former President Donald Trump and his old friend, the notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, greeted drivers as they traveled highways and busy intersections.
Soon after, the Trump-Epstein signs popped up in Georgia.
“I live in this little tiny Trump town and there’s one person here that I want to be friends with,” said liberal Jeff Wagenius in a TikTok documenting the enigma. He added, “Cuz this right here deserves the best beer we have in town on me, I swear to God.”
It appears that the advertisements have been paid for by a group calling itself, "ProtectChildrenQ LLC," which is listed on the attribution statement attached.
Someone needs to find whoever did this, and hire them to manage their campaign.
You may have heard of Glassdoor, a web site that allows it's users to anonymously post about working conditions and pay at their jobs.
It appears that this description of the site in now inoperative, at least the anonymous part.
Current and past users are going to be outed by the company, which will now attach real names to previously anonymous accounts.
They are pinky swearing that this will never be released to the public or employers, though with their recent purchase of, and integration of, the professional networking app Fishbowl into their service, that ties real names to the account and links those names to Fishbowl and has requiring identity verification.
Additionally, they are using third party data to involuntarily attach names to accounts.
While this information is not (yet) public, this information is just one data beach or subpoena away.
Glassdoor, where employees go to leave anonymous reviews of employers, has recently begun adding real names to user profiles without users' consent, a Glassdoor user named Monica was shocked to discover last week.
"Time to delete your Glassdoor account and data," Monica, a Midwest-based software professional, warned other Glassdoor users in a blog. (Ars will only refer to Monica by her first name so that she can speak freely about her experience using Glassdoor to review employers.)
Monica joined Glassdoor about 10 years ago, she said, leaving a few reviews for her employers, taking advantage of other employees' reviews when considering new opportunities, and hoping to help others survey their job options. This month, though, she abruptly deleted her account after she contacted Glassdoor support to request help removing information from her account. She never expected that instead of removing information, Glassdoor's support team would take the real name that she provided in her support email and add it to her Glassdoor profile—despite Monica repeatedly and explicitly not consenting to Glassdoor storing her real name.
Although it's common for many online users to link services at sign-up to Facebook or Gmail accounts to verify identity and streamline logins, for years, Glassdoor has notably allowed users to sign up for its service anonymously. But in 2021, Glassdoor acquired Fishbowl, a professional networking app that integrated with Glassdoor last July. This acquisition meant that every Glassdoor user was automatically signed up for a Fishbowl account. And because Fishbowl requires users to verify their identities, Glassdoor's terms of service changed to require all users to be verified.
While users can remain anonymous, this change raises some potential concerns about data privacy and anonymity, Aaron Mackey, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told Ars.
The entire reason that people used this service was because of its anonymity.
No one in their right mind reveals their remuneration or discusses the down side of a workplace on a public forum if the have to give personally identifiable information that will automatically be shared on a social media site, (Fishbowl) and if an employer, or a potential employer sees that you are on Fishbowl, they can assume that you are on Glassdoor.
F$#@ that, and f$#@ then.
They have deep pockets, they are owned by Indeed, but I expect the site as well as the e associated media network to be a ghost town in the next month or so.
This blog is a place to put my stream of consciousness thoughts about life, politics, technology, and cats.
It's a posting ground for my more-or-less annual personal newsletter, 40 Years in the Desert.(PDF's available at link)
I find that if I wait until year's end I miss stuff from earlier in the year.
40 Years is put out the old fashioned way, it's printed out on ledger sized paper with 4 pages and mailed to people, total circulation of about 100.
I'm just not the holiday card kind of guy.
A warning, if you comment here, I may use it in my paper publication.
You will get credit, and if I can get your postal adress, you will get at least the issue where you are quoted (probably a lot more, I rarely trim my list).
If someone actually wants to pay for an issue...I don't know, I guess a buck, but you can get the PDF's free.
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