F%$# Zuck

Once again, Mark Zuckerberg takes something that sounds like a good ideal, aork from home, and turns it evil, announcing that if you are working remotely, and end up in an area that is not as expensive as the Bay Area, they will cut your pay, and they will spy on you, and if they catch you living some place less expensive, they will fire you:

Mr. Zuckerberg said that location would affect employee compensation, both for new hires and for those who relocate. He said that Facebook will monitor employees’ locations and those who mislead the company would face “severe” penalties.

“If you live in a place where the cost of living is dramatically lower, then salaries do tend to be somewhat lower,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.

Seriously, they saving you office costs, and you have to find another way to screw with your employees.

What, did Jeff Bezos beat you at the International Association of Evil Bastards picnic sack race last year o or something?

Go Sweden!

Sweden's handling of the Coronavirus is so bad that its neighbors are considering strengthening a cordon sanitaire around the Nordic nation:

Denmark, Finland and Norway are debating whether to maintain travel restrictions on Sweden but ease them for other countries as they nervously eye their Nordic neighbour’s higher coronavirus death toll.

Sweden has the highest mortality rate per capita at this stage of the epidemic, according to a Financial Times tracker that uses a seven-day rolling average of new deaths. It has overtaken the UK, Italy and Belgium in recent days.

Frode Forland, specialist director in infectious diseases at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, told the Financial Times keeping borders closed had “a certain infectious-disease logic” while a big difference in infection rates remained between countries. “The situation is quite different now between Norway and Sweden,” he said.

………

“Norway, Denmark and Iceland have managed to stabilise their situation, but in Sweden the situation is more alarming,” she said last week.

The Swedes are now doing worse than the UK.

Your actions make Boris Johnson look smart by comparison.

What the f%$# is wrong with you?

What, Another Silicon Valley Sharing Economy Scheme Revealed to be a Fraud?

Inspector Renault Says………

Round up the usual suspects, it turns out that food delivery companies are using their piles of venture capital money to dominate the market, and then they will be able to extract monopoly rents:

Ranjan Roy has a great article on Substack about DoorDash and “pizza arbitrage”: Roy’s friend was first annoyed to discover that DoorDash was providing delivery services for his nondelivery pizzeria: taking web orders without his knowledge, phoning in for takeout and sending a DoorDash delivery worker to pay and pick up the food, and often delivering to a customer who would be annoyed that the pizza arrived cold. And then he was surprised to see DoorDash was selling his $24 pizzas for only $16. This meant he had an arbitrage opportunity: Order his own pizzas at $16, sell them to DoorDash for $24 each, and pocket the difference. This worked even better if he didn’t put real pizzas in the delivery boxes. But how on earth was DoorDash ever supposed to make money selling his pizzas at a loss?

Delivery via smartphone is one of those venture-funded sectors where business executives appear to have taken seriously the old joke about “losing money on every transaction but making it up on volume.” Normal rules of capitalism about maximizing profits do not apply. This has led to a strange situation where restaurants feel squeezed by the fees charged by delivery services (when, unlike Roy’s friend, they participate voluntarily on a delivery platform) and yet the delivery services themselves manage to keep losing money. Why is this even happening?

………

I think the missing element for profitability is different: productivity. The hope with a lot of business models that bring app intermediation to a preexisting element of the economy like ride services or food delivery is that technology will make workers more productive. You can see instances where this is obviously true: a Peloton instructor who teaches a class to tens of thousands of people is more productive than a SoulCycle instructor who can only teach about 60 people at a time. But with a lot of apps, the promised boost to productivity never materializes. The worker still has to render personal service to one customer at a time, and the app doesn’t do much to reduce the worker’s downtime or help him or her complete the task faster. As such, the productivity boost that is needed to make the financial model pencil — paying the worker a high enough hourly rate while charging a fee the customer is willing to pay and still having a positive profit margin — does not materialize.

Consider a few examples. In the traditional model, restaurants use their own employees to deliver food. DoorDash and its competitors offer a different approach: DoorDash contracts with the delivery person, sending him or her to whatever restaurant has orders at any moment. In theory, this should lead to better matching of labor to work: Restaurants don’t get backed up with too many orders, because DoorDash can send over extra staff as necessary; the restaurant also never has to pay a worker to sit around and not deliver food. But there are offsetting disadvantages to this outsourced model. A restaurant-employed delivery person knows the menu and can tell quickly whether a bag appears to contain what is listed on a receipt. He has a rhythm with the staff he’s picking up from. He knows the neighborhood and knows the addresses of frequent customers. He has the right equipment — if he’s delivering pizza, he has an insulated bag so the pizza is hot when it gets to the customer. A third-party delivery person is more likely to screw these things up: slower, less accurate, lower-quality delivery. At the very least, this mutes the productivity gains from better staff matching; it could offset them entirely.

………

But what if the main reason the value proposition for these services has changed is that a third party is weirdly willing to lose money on the transactions? That doesn’t seem like a sustainable situation — and yet it has been sustained for years at this point. If it ends, if investors in app-based service companies start demanding profits, then we should expect the size of the personal-service part of the economy to contract. Some restaurants that came to rely on app-based delivery may find it makes sense to take delivery in-house. But others may find delivery isn’t worth it if they actually have to employ the delivery person. And then customers, revealed to be unwilling to pay the true economic cost of having their food delivered, may have to go pick it up.

What is going on here is that eventually, one of these companies will be the last one standing, and then they hope to extract even more from fees, with the threat that if your restaurant isn't a customer, then they will deliver cold pizzas stuck to the top of the boxes and ruin your reputation, because they will hijack your Google and Yelp listing anyway.

This is not innovation, this is a f%$#ing Ponzi scheme.

2.4 Million Initial Jobless Claims

That is 4 times worse than the record before this all started byt it's seen as a sign of hope, which means that were screwed.

Something that I didn't realize though, was that in addition to the 37.1 million initial claims since this all started, there is an additional 1 million claims that were through a federal program than had not been counted:

The numbers: More than 2.4 million unemployed Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week using the traditional method of reporting initial claims, but the real number was almost 1 million higher if applicants made eligible through a new federal relief program are included.

First-time filings for unemployment insurance totaled 2.44 million last week on the traditional seasonally adjusted basis. While still way above pre-coronavirus levels, new claims have declined for seven straight weeks following the apparent peak of 6.9 million seen in late March.

………

What happened:Since the coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns started in mid-March, some 35.5 million people have applied for jobless benefits through their states, based on actual or unadjusted totals.

Roughly 8.1 million new claims have been filed via a new federal program that has made self-employed workers and independent contractors such as writers or Uber drivers eligible for the first time ever.

Total new claims since mid-March: almost 44 million.

We are f%$#ed.

Now is Not the Time to Apologize

With Trump's hydroxychloroquine insanity, where he is claiming to take the drug, and doctor is almost certainly giving him sugar pills, Nancy Pelosi let loose the following take-down:

He’s our president, and I would rather he not be taking something that has not been approved by the scientists, especially in his age group, and in his, shall we say, weight group: ‘Morbidly obese,’ they say.

Nancy Pelosi just said to Republicans, "Yo President so fat ………," and the SJWs on the net are complaining that she is, "Fat shaming," Trump.

Bullsh%$.  She is TROLLING Trump, and this is well calculated to make his orange head explode.

Nancy Pelosi should not apologize, and if someone confronts her about this, she should tell them to kiss her ass, and if they complain about THAT she should reply, "I'm a Democrat, I'm not going to tell you to kiss my elephant."  (Credit Frank Mankiewicz for that last bit.)

Trump is overweight, and the overweight are at higher risks of complications from the malaria drug.  That is an objective fact.

If you have a problem with that, get the f%$# off of the internet, and out of the gene pool.

Getting Your Priorities Straight

In order to deal with public health issues relating to the pandemic, the government is buying mass quantities of riot gear and related weapons, because, after all, you have to protect the top 1% from their victims:

The federal government has ramped up security and police-related spending in response to the coronavirus pandemic, including issuing contracts for riot gear, disclosures show.

The purchase orders include requests for disposable cuffs, gas masks, ballistic helmets, and riot gloves, along with law enforcement protective equipment for federal police assigned to protect Veterans Affairs facilities. The orders were expedited under a special authorization “in response to Covid-19 outbreak.”

………

The CARES Act, the $2.2 trillion stimulus legislation passed in late March, also authorized $850 million for the Coronavirus Emergency Supplemental Funding program, a federal grant program to prepare law enforcement, correctional officers, and police for the crisis. The funds have been dispensed to local governments to pay for overtime costs, purchase protective supplies, and defray expenses related to emergency policing.

The CESF funding may be used for a range of coronavirus response efforts by law enforcement, including medical personal protective equipment, overtime for police officers, training, and supplies for detention centers. The grants may also be used for the purchase of unmanned aerial aircraft and video security cameras for law enforcement. Motorola Solutions, a major supplier of police technology, has encouraged local governments to use the new money to buy a range of command center software and video analytics systems.

It's a matter of priorities.

If you are a Republican, or a Neoliberal Democrat, there is, to quote Margaret Thatcher  (יש"ו), "No society," so the only purpose of the state is to protect the wealthy looters.

Prehistoric Percussion Proficiency

Archaeologist Dr. Jean-Loup Ringot specializes in prehistoric music, here he demonstrates a Lithophone. 🔊 pic.twitter.com/xqaov8Q8LZ

— Daniel Holland (@DannyDutch) May 16, 2020

A stone vibrophone. My percussionist son was impressed.

Tweet of the Day

I'll just remind you that the same tech community that hasn't been able to solve simple computer virus issues for the last 35 years, or create secure systems, or usable crypto, or even keep their shit running consistently isn't likely to swoop in and fix an actual virus.

— Quinn Norton (@quinnnorton) May 19, 2020

It does seem to me that people who make money by breaking the law (Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Lime, Bird, PayPal), overselling AI (Tesla, Uber, Lyft, Waymo), spying on people and claiming that they don't (Google, Facebook), or actually engage in fraud about their medical technology (Theranos), are not well equipped to save us from a pandemic.

Finally, CDC Excess Death Data

Excess Deaths Chart Porn

Here.

I have been saying for some time that the best metric for Covid-19 deaths is excess deaths, which is made from counting total deaths, and comparing to historical data to show how many deaths might result from a particular massive disaster.

You can go to the link, and get excess death numbers, generate charts, and download the underlying data.

The data is incomplete, but what they have so far shows at least 65K excess deaths from mid-march through out the end of April.

This number is likely to increase as more death data makes its way to the CDC.

This is My Shocked Face

Norma McCorvey, aka Jane Roe, in whose name Roe v. Wade was filed, and who, for the past 20 some odd years, has been a poster-child for the people who want to criminalize abortion, has it was all a lie she was paid to make by the Christian right:

In its final 20 minutes, the documentary film AKA Jane Roe delivers quite the blow to conservatives who have weaponized the story of Jane Roe herself—real name, Norma McCorvey—to argue that people with uteruses should have to carry any and all pregnancies to term.

McCorvey, who died in 2017, became Jane Roe when, as a young homeless woman, she was unable to get a legal or safe abortion in the state of Texas. Her willingness to lend her experience to the legal case for abortion led to the passing of Roe v. Wade in 1973, which legalized abortions in all 50 states (though red states do all they can to get around this; recently, several have even used the COVID-19 pandemic to make abortions functionally impossible to procure). But conservatives had a field day in the mid '90s when the assertive, media-savvy pro-choice advocate and activist McCorvey became an anti-abortion born-again ex-gay Christian with the help of leaders of the evangelical Christian right, Reverend Flip Benham (of the infamous Operation Rescue) and Reverend Rob Schenck. A conservative film, Roe v. Wade, starring Jon Voight and Stacey Dash, will dramatize McCorvey’s “conversion.”

But those filmmakers, and the rest of the pro-life evangelical community, have another curveball coming. In the final third of director Nick Sweeney’s 79-minute documentary, featuring many end-of-life reflections from McCorvey—who grew up queer, poor, and was sexually abused by a family member her mother sent her to live with after leaving reform school—the former Jane Roe admits that her later turn to the anti-abortion camp as a born-again Christian was “all an act.”

“This is my deathbed confession,” she chuckles, sitting in a chair in her nursing home room, on oxygen. Sweeney asks McCorvey, “Did [the evangelicals] use you as a trophy?” “Of course,” she replies. “I was the Big Fish.” “Do you think you would say that you used them?” Sweeney responds. “Well,” says McCorvey, “I think it was a mutual thing. I took their money and they took me out in front of the cameras and told me what to say. That’s what I’d say.” She even gives an example of her scripted anti-abortion lines. “I’m a good actress,” she points out. “Of course, I’m not acting now.”

………

Reverend Schenck, the much more reasonable of the two evangelical leaders featured in the film, also watches the confession and is taken aback. But he’s not surprised, and easily corroborates, saying, “I had never heard her say anything like this… But I knew what we were doing. And there were times when I was sure she knew. And I wondered, Is she playing us? What I didn’t have the guts to say was, because I know damn well we’re playing her.” Reverend Schenck admits that McCorvey was “a target,” a “needy” person in need of love and protection, and that “as clergy,” people like Schenck and Benham were “used to those personalities” and thus easily able to exploit her weaknesses. He also confirms that she was “coached on what to say” in her anti-abortion speeches. Benham denies McCorvey was paid; Schenck insists she was, saying that “at a few points, she was actually on the payroll, as it were.” AKA Jane Roe finds documents disclosing at least $456,911 in “benevolent gifts” from the anti-abortion movement to McCorvey.

So, the anti-abortion terrorists and their pet were running a scam on each other, and on the American public.

What the People of Amsterdam Have Discovered

They have discovered that they are sick of these motherf%$#ing tourists in their motherf%$#ing city!!!

Amsterdam has been catering to tourists, for the weed, for the sex shops, the canals, and for the wonderful architecture, for years, and now its citizens have discovered that they like their city a lot better without the hoards of overbearing tourists:

Amsterdam’s historic Red Light District is rife with English-language city signs admonishing tourists: “Don’t pee in the street”; “No alcohol in public spaces”; “Put your trash in the bin”; “Fine: 140 euros.”

But the cartoonish black-and-red warnings on the 17th-century canals look strangely out of place these days. There are no visitors to heed them.

Beginning in mid-March, when the Netherlands went into semi-lockdown to combat the covid-19 pandemic, tourism vanished from Amsterdam almost overnight. A social and economic crisis has hit the country and its capital hard. But for residents of Amsterdam’s historic city center, there is a clear silver lining: temporary relief from the burden of overtourism.

………

Nowhere is the difference more clear than in the now-deserted alleys of the Wallen, as the red-light district is called. It is a major tourist draw, famous for the sight of sex workers soliciting from behind their windows and the many coffee shops where visitors can light up a joint. Here, noise is permanent, and nuisance a given. Tourists often leave trash and urinate in public.

………

“It’s just lovely. I’ve lived here five years, and I’m now getting to know neighbors I didn’t know I had. They used to blend into the crowd,” she says. “Now, when the sun is out, people take a chair and sit out front. It’s so gezellig,” she continues, using the common Dutch adverb that translates to “having a good time together.”

………

“It’s like the city is ours again,” she says, echoing a common sentiment among Amsterdammers who feel like their interests had become subordinate to those of visitors.

………

Seeing the pristine metropolis, many citizens feel like they are wandering through the Amsterdam of the past. Tim Verlaan, an assistant professor of urban history at the University of Amsterdam, draws a parallel to what it looked like in the 1970s and ‘80s.

“The lockdown, of course, is unprecedented. But many Amsterdammers are reminded of a time when the city first and foremost was a place to live, and not to consume or play tourist,” he says.

………

Through a combination of economic prosperity, a lowered crime rate and shrewd marketing, tourism to Amsterdam exploded. Global trends contributed further. Airfare became ever cheaper as the traveling middle classes of Europe and the United States were joined by those in Asia.

From the 21st century on, the balance in the inner city was definitively skewed toward visitors. Hotel rooms multiplied, streets felt permanently overcrowded. The canal cityscape became the domain of tours, ticket offices and souvenir shops. And perhaps the biggest offense to locals? The ever-multiplying sellers of ice cream and waffles sauced with Nutella chocolate, now the dreaded symbol of a monocultural tourism industry.

Last year, 9 million tourists, mostly foreigners, visited Amsterdam, a city of 820,000 people.

………

With tourism down and out, many are hoping things will be different after the current crisis.

“This is such an opportunity to reflect on where we go from here,” says Els Iping, spokeswoman for VVAB, an organization that protects cultural heritage in the inner city and has been a vocal advocate of restoring the balance in favor of residents. “We are proud of our city, and we like to see others enjoy it. But the superficial type of tourism that has people pay pocket change to fly out here has to stop.”

………

“You’ll likely see changes already in the making accelerated by this crisis,” Verlaan says.

To be on the safe side, Iping’s organization is already petitioning the city to stick to its guns. “Some in the tourism industry, of course, will now want to reverse these policies, citing the need for economic recovery,” she says.

“But almost everyone else agrees that Amsterdam should seize this moment to never return to the old situation again.”

I've wonder if the people who live in colonial Williamsburg feel the same way.

If you wonder why people live in tourist traps seem to hate tourists, this is it.

Arthur

We now have an early start to the named storm seasion, with Arthur reaching tropical storm status, which makes a named storm before the normalstart of hurricane season for the 6^th time in 6 years.

Nope.  No anthropogenic climate change driven weirdness here:

The Atlantic hurricane season's first named storm formed late Saturday night off the eastern coast of Florida, when its sustained winds reached 40mph.

Named Tropical Storm Arthur, the system should move north-northeast for the next couple of days. Although there is a fair amount of uncertainty about this motion, Arthur should come near, or just over, coastal North Carolina, where tropical storm warnings have been raised. After this Arthur is likely to bend due eastward, away from the mainland United States and out to sea.

Because of low wind shear and moderately warm waters, Arthur may remain a tropical storm and even strengthen a little before succumbing to cooler waters later this week. The National Hurricane Center forecasts the system to reach maximum sustained winds of 50mph on Monday.

The Atlantic hurricane season officially begins two weeks from now, on June 1, and runs through November 30. Historically, it is not all that unusual for a tropical or subtropical storm to form before June 1 and become named after reaching sustained winds of 40mph. This happens, on average, about every two to three years.

However, this is now the sixth year in a row that a named storm has developed prior to the June 1 date. And according to data compiled by University of Miami hurricane scientist Brian McNoldy, the average date of the first named storm is steadily moving earlier. In 1970, it typically came in early July, but now the average date of the first storm is about one month earlier. There has been some discussion in the hurricane community about moving the start of the Atlantic season up to May 15 to match the beginning of the Eastern Pacific hurricane season.

We are in a world of hurt if we do not act.

Here is a Useful Resource

The good folks at Payday Report have COVID-19 Strike Wave Interactive Map.

This is a profoundly useful resource:



You can zoom in and clicks on the strikes and protests to get the details of all of the labor actions.

This is worth checking out, as is the whole Paycheck Report, a publication dedicated to covering the labor movement

OK, This is Wierd

Ben Smith of The New York Times has just come out with a an article excoriating Ronan Farrow.

The thing is, there is not a whole bunch of "There" there.

Smith suggests that Farrow sees himself as a crusading reporter with an attitude, rather than an ideology free automaton, something which Farrow freely admits, so this is not what one would call a big reveal.

I’ll be honest, my first reaction to NYT publishing a bizarre hit piece on Ronan Farrow is that he’s working on something they want to preemptively discredit.

— Shannon 🩸🦷 (@TheStagmania) May 18, 2020

The question is why, and why now?

I think that there are a number of reasons that this story might have run.

The most banal reason for this would be that the priesthood at the The New York Times is simply offended by Farrow's success and notoriety for what they would see as garbage journalism.

They are the "Karens" of journalism, and this is a profoundly "Karen" moment for them.

While this is a behavior that is typical of the Times hive mind, it does not typically end up in the news section.  It typically ends up in the the snark sections, OP/ED or media criticism, and not in news.

A more laudable, but by no means laudable, motivation might they want to throw Farrow off of his stride because they have a competing scoop, and they want to get there first, so they pulled this out of their back pocket.  (A stick in his bicycle spokes, so to speak.)

Not nice, but journalism ain't tiddly winks.

Assuming this is not a product of the two above scenarios, then we need to go a little bit tinfoil hat, and conclude that they have gotten word of a story that they (whoever "they" are) never want to see the light of day.

I don't buy this, but if it is either hyper competitive journalism or a conspiracy theory, then the likely stories would cover 3 general areas:

• A revelation related to the crimes of the late Jeffrey Epstein.
• A revelation related to someone close to the publisher of the New York Times. (tinfoil hat only)
• A revelation related to sexual misconduct that rhymes with Poseidon.

My guess is that we going to see an Epstein story in the next few weeks, and my money is that Farrow will get there first.

Note that I have what might be the worst prediction this side of my dad, so I'm probably wrong.

Headline of the Day

South Korean Soccer Team Apologizes for Filling Stands with Sex Dolls

—New York Post

We are living in profoundly weird time.

Linkage

• Scientists Find The First Animal That Doesn't Need Oxygen to Survive (Science Alert) It resembles a little jellyfisn.
• Nearly 2 million chickens at Eastern Shore farms set to be destroyed because of coronavirus-related plant shortages (Baltimore Sun) A potential solution would be to break up the meat-packing monopolies and oligopolies.
• David Sirota Joins the Jacobin Team (Jacobin)  I look forward to this.
• Joe Biden’s Garbage Career: A Timeline (Rampant) Joe Biden has been on the wrong side of every major legislative initiative over the past 40 years.
• Biden Can’t Return Things To Normal, Because Trump Is A Normal US President. That’s The Problem. (Caitlin Johnstone) A rather dire, and depressingly accurate, take on the nature of the modern US presidency.
• Sears’ Headquarters Was Supposed to Turn a Sleepy Suburb Into a Boomtown. It Never Happened. (ProPublica) Tax incentives never EVER pay for themselves.
• This Guy Got Hit By Lightning and Became a Concert Pianist (VICE) The human brain is weird.

John Oliver on the US Post Office, and calls out Postal banking

Review: Harley Quinn

Harley Quinn

Cast:
Kaley Cuoco … Harley Quinn
Lake Bell … Poison Ivy
Ron Funches … King Shark
Tony Hale … Doctor Psycho, Felix Faust
Jason Alexander … Sy Borgman
J. B. Smoove … Frank the Plant
Alan Tudyk … the Joker, Clayface, Calendar Man, Doctor Trap, Condiment King
Charlie Adler … Nick Quinzel, Grandpa Quinzel
James Adomian … Bane, Chaz, Ian, Ratcatcher
Diedrich Bader … Batman
Tisha Campbell-Martin … Tawny Young, M.O.N.I.C.A.
Briana Cuoco … Barbara Gordon
Andy Daly … Two-Face
Chris Diamantopoulos … Aquaman
Rachel Dratch … Nora Fries
Giancarlo Esposito … Lex Luthor
Susie Essman … Sharon Quinzel, Grandma Quinzel
Sean Giambrone … Joshua Cobblepot
Meryl Hathaway … Marcus
Tom Hollander … Alfred Pennyworth
Michael Ironside … Darkseid
Tom Kenny … Clayface's Hand
Wayne Knight … the Penguin
Rahul Kohli … the Scarecrow
Phil LaMarr … Jason Praxis, Black Manta, Lucius Fox, Brian
Sanaa Lathan … Catwoman
George Lopez … Himself
Howie Mandel … Himself
Vanessa Marshall … Wonder Woman, Giganta, Joey Day
Christopher Meloni … Commissioner James Gordon
Alfred Molina … Mr. Freeze
Natalie Morales … Lois Lane
Brad Morris … Victor Zsasz
Frankie Muniz … Himself
Matt Oberg … Kite Man, Killer Croc, KGBeast
Rhea Perlman … Golda
Jim Rash … the Riddler, Stan, Mr. Isley
Will Sasso … Maxie Zeus
Rory Scovel … Gus
Nicole Sullivan … Mrs. Cobblepot, Benjamin
Wanda Sykes … Queen of Fables
Talia Tabin … Debbie Day
Jacob Tremblay … Damian Wayne / Robin
Mark Whitten … Herman Cizko / The Cowled Critic
James Wolk … Superman

Directors:
Directors: Juan Meza-Leon, Matt Garofalo, Ben Jones, Frank Marino, Cecilia Aranovich Hamilton, Colin Heck, Colin Heck, Vinton Heuck, Brandon McKinney, Ben Jones

I will attempt to keep this this review as spoiler free as possible, but there will be a few inevitable spoilers, you have been warned.

This series is a telling of Harley Quinn's transition from sidekick to super-villain after her split with Joker.

You can (at least until June 1) stream it online at Syfy.com, at least if you have a cable account. (see the link)

I have enjoyed what I have seen this far, I am very impressed.

Kaley Cuoco, who plays Harley, gives what her is arguably her finest performance to date.

She puts the "fun" in dysfunction, and plays Quinn as a whip smart and thoroughly broken ingenue.

The best performance though, is Lake Bell as Poison Ivy, who completely steals the show as the self-described eco-terrorists.

She is deeply devoted to Harley (I ship them so much), and she has a remarkably clear view of reality, except for the whole insane toxic pheromone criminal plant lady thing.

Ron Funches as King Shark is an truly amusing combination of techno nerd and ravenous prehistoric deep sea predator.

Alan Tudyk as Clayface (and  the Joker, Calendar Man, Doctor Trap, Condiment King) is a revelation. (He is a leaf on the wind, watch as he soars)

His, and the writers' vision of Clayface as the ultimate theater dweeb overeager actor is truly inspired.

All of this is wrapped in witty, completely irreverent, and thoroughly profane (S-Bomb, and F-Bomb, though the (spoiler) C-Bomb is bleeped) plotting and dialogue.

There are some problematic bits in the scripts though, particularly the fact that they occasionally traffic in Jewish stereotypes, particularly during the (spoiler) Cobblepot bar-mitzvah, and the character of Sy Borgman, and (spoiler) Harley's parents.  (Who knew that Quinzel was a Jewish name?)

This is a joyous roasting of super-hero culture, while also being a profoundly feminist narrative.

I recommend this highly, and rate it 8⅔ out of 10.

When Your Drive through Resembles a Lab from the Andromeda Strain

Definitely an "A" for Effort

When I dropped off Charlie at work this evening, I picked up some egg rolls and won ton soup at Seafood Wok.  (Nat got spring rolls and hot and sour soup)

This is actually the one of the first restaurants that I ate at once I moved up to the Baltimore and was living in a hotel before we got an apartment.

I rather like their fried dumplings and soups.

In any case, they had shut down for a while as a result of the pandemic lock-down, but now they have reopened as a pickup only restaurant.

They modified the vestibule of their  restaurant to provide a safe way for people to pick up their orders.

The new normal is profoundly weird.

Speaking of Vaccine Efficacy………

5 sailors on the USS Theodore Roosevelt who tested positive for Covid-19, were quarantined, recovered, and returned to service, have tested positive for Covid-19:

Five sailors who returned to the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt have tested positive for the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), said Navy spokesman Cmdr. Myers Vasquez.

The sailors had previously tested positive for the disease but they had spent more than two weeks in isolation, showed no symptoms for at least three days, and they all tested negative for the disease twice before being allowed back on the aircraft carrier, Vasquez said on Thursday.

“The five sailors developed influenza-like illness symptoms and executed their personal responsibility by reporting to medical for evaluation,” Vasquez said in a statement. “The sailors were immediately removed from the ship and placed back in isolation, their close contacts were mapped, and they are receiving the required medical care.”

Increasingly, there is evidence that, at best, any Covid-19 vaccine would be of VERY limited effectiveness, perhaps granting immunity for only a few weeks or a few months.

This is not good.

An Elegant Solution

Dean Baker, an economist who not only predicted the housing meltdown, but put his money where his mouth was, and sold his home and moved into rental housing in the early 2000s, has a solution to the "problem" of the Chinese "stealing" US vaccine research.

He suggest that all research be released as free and public information, which would mean that there is nothing to "steal".

What's more if all this information were publicly exchanged, we would have a vaccine that much sooner (assuming that a vaccine is possible, but that is another blog post).

The only people who would lose, would be the big pharma guys who want to charge thousands of dollars a dose.

To them, I say, "Go Cheney yourself."

In the last couple of weeks both the New York Times and National Public Radio have warned that China could steal a vaccine against the coronavirus, or at least steal work in the U.S. done towards developing a vaccine. Both outlets obviously thought their audiences should view this as a serious concern.

As I wrote previously, it is not clear why those of us who don’t either own large amounts of stock in drug companies, or give a damn about Donald Trump’s ego, should be upset about the prospect of China “stealing” a vaccine. Concretely, if China gained knowledge from labs in the United States that allowed it to develop and produce a vaccine more quickly, this would mean that hundreds of millions of people might be protected against a deadly disease more quickly than would otherwise be the case. If China made this vaccine available to people in the developing world, then the numbers could be in the billions.

Sounds pretty scary, right?

It is amazing that neither the reporters writing these stories nor their editors apparently gave much thought to the implications of China “stealing” a vaccine. Or perhaps, even worse, maybe they did. Anyhow, I suspect that most of the audiences of these outlets would not consider it a terrible thing if people in China or other countries could get vaccinated more quickly against the coronavirus.

But the issue of this potential theft is just the beginning of the story. If China can in principle develop a vaccine more quickly if it has access to data from labs in the United States then it must also be the case that researchers in the United States could develop a vaccine more quickly if they had data from labs in China and elsewhere. This raises the question of why we are not researching a vaccine collectively, with researchers all over the world posting their findings as quickly as practical so that teams of researchers everywhere can benefit from them?

There is a bad answer and somewhat less bad answer to this question. The bad answer is that the goal of the researchers is to get a government-granted patent monopoly so that they can charge lots of money for a vaccine and get very rich. The less bad answer is that we rely on grants of patent monopolies to finance research. If companies didn’t have the hope of getting a patent monopoly, they would have no way to recoup the costs they are incurring paying researchers and undertaking the trials necessary to establish the safety and effectiveness of a vaccine.

………

However, in a context where the whole world is struggling to deal with a pandemic that is killing hundreds of thousands of people, it might be reasonable to just do the research and worry about the cost-sharing later. It would make sense for governments to fund their own research to the extent practical and require that everything be fully public as soon as possible.

If we went this route, our leading news outlets could put aside their fears that China would steal the vaccine. If they take advantage of U.S. research and rush ahead and develop an effective vaccine before our own researchers, then the whole world will benefit from having a vaccine sooner than would otherwise be the case.

………

We have a huge amount of potential gain from going the route of open research and very little to lose. And our leading news outlets would be able to stop worrying about China stealing our vaccine.

Now, is the absolutely worst time to allow big pharma to loot the rest of us though thoroughly undeserved patent rights.

Our Parasitic Financial Industry

The New York Times finally noting the obvious, that private equity looting is destroying whole industries, this time retailers:

J. Crew and Neiman Marcus were each facing a host of issues before the coronavirus pandemic forced them to close their stores and eventually file for bankruptcy, including trouble adjusting to the rise of e-commerce and a lack of connection with a new generation of shoppers.

But they also shared one increasingly common problem for retailers in dire straits: an enormous debt burden — roughly $1.7 billion for J. Crew and almost $5 billion for Neiman Marcus — from leveraged buyouts led by private equity firms. Like many other retailers, J. Crew and Neiman over the past decade paid hundreds of millions of dollars in interest and fees to their new owners, when they needed to spend money to adapt to a shifting retail environment. And when the pandemic wiped out much of their sales, neither had anywhere to go for relief except court.

“Much of the difficulty that the retail sector is experiencing has been aggravated by private equity involvement,” said Elisabeth de Fontenay, a professor at the Duke University School of Law who specializes in corporate finance. “To keep up with everybody’s switch to online purchasing, there really needed to be some big capital investments and changes made, and because these companies were so debt strapped when acquired by private equity firms, they didn’t have capital to make these big shifts.”

………

In July, a report from the Center for Popular Democracy, a progressive advocacy group in Brooklyn, said 10 of the 14 largest retail chain bankruptcies since 2012 involved companies that private equity firms had acquired.

………

Private equity firms have been involved with retailers for decades. But the collapse of Toys “R” Us in 2017 put a spotlight on how major buyouts by the firms could go sideways. The chain had been burdened with $5 billion in debt from a 2005 leveraged buyout by the private equity firms Bain Capital and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and the real estate firm Vornado Realty Trust, and it did not have sufficient funds to invest in its stores and e-commerce business during a crucial period of growth for Amazon and Walmart.

………

Marble Ridge Capital, a hedge fund that holds some of Neiman’s bonds, wrote in a public letter to the owners last month that “you have left a carcass of a company for the remaining stakeholders and have put both Neiman’s storied franchise and thousands of jobs at risk.”

………

“One of the defenses of private equity right now is, they’re saying these are structurally declining businesses already, and, look, that is a part of it,” said Andrew Park, a senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform. “But again, having to service that debt makes these businesses hard, and when you see these companies blatantly taking money away, that’s the element that has really led to criticism.”

Mr. Dahiya, the Georgetown professor, said he expected more bankruptcies from retailers backed by private equity firms given the current environment and that he thought it could potentially become a political issue.

It should be a political issue.

What's more, there is a fairly simple solution, a change to the bankruptcy laws to make sure that private equity "management fees" could be clawed back.

By the same token, complex derivatives should be moved from the front to the back of the line.

When you look at many of the problems in our financial system, it all comes down to cheats and frauds being able to walk away and leave companies, and their employees, holding the bag.

How Convenient

Remember that Stanford study that showed that the Covid-19 rate infection levels were much higher than previously noted, and so the mortality rate was much lower?

In addition to it being bad science, the antibody test that they used was grossly inaccurate, it turns out that their study was founded almost entirely by the founder of JetBlue, who had an interest in getting the shutdown relaxed as quickly as possible.

The big take-away here is that when ordinary people distrust "experts" and "scientists" they are not rejecting science or expertise, it is that they believe that the "Technocrats" are just as corrupt as every institution in our society:

A highly influential coronavirus antibody study was funded in part by David Neeleman, the JetBlue Airways founder and a vocal proponent of the idea that the pandemic isn’t deadly enough to justify continued lockdowns.

That’s according to a complaint from an anonymous whistleblower, filed with Stanford University last week and obtained by BuzzFeed News, about the study conducted by the famous scientist John Ioannidis and others. The complaint cites dozens of emails, including exchanges with the airline executive while the study was being conducted.

The study — released as a non-peer-reviewed paper, or preprint, on April 17 — made headlines around the world with a dramatic finding: Based on antibodies in thousands of Silicon Valley residents’ blood samples, the number of coronavirus infections was up to 85 times higher than believed. This true infection count was so high that it would drive down the virus’s local fatality rate to 0.12%–0.2% — far closer to the known death rate for the flu.

Almost immediately, the study became a flashpoint in the increasingly politicized debate over whether and how to reopen the economy. Although many scientists assailed its methods, leading the authors to post a revision nearly two weeks later, it was trumpeted by conservative media to support a growing theory: that fears of the coronavirus are overblown.

“Most of the population has minimal risk, in the range of dying while you’re driving from home to work and back,” Ioannidis said on the Fox News show Life, Liberty & Levin, a few days after the study’s release.

………

And emails cited within the complaint also suggest that the study’s authors disregarded warnings raised by two Stanford professors who tried to verify the accuracy of the antibody test used. The pair of scientists ultimately refused to put their names on the study because, they told the lead researchers, they could not stand by the test results. The complaint suggests that Neeleman “potentially used financial incentives to secure cooperation from” one of these scientists, who told colleagues by email that she was “alarmed” by aspects of the antibody test’s performance.

Asked if Neeleman donated to the study, Ioannidis said he was “not personally aware” he did. “David Neeleman has a particular perspective and some ideas and some thoughts,” he told BuzzFeed News. “I don’t know exactly who were the people who funded the study eventually. But whoever they were, none of them really told us it should be designed in a given way or done in a given way or find a particular type of result or report a particular type of result.”

………

But according to Neeleman, the authors did know he’d given money to fund the study. Neeleman confirmed that he made a $5,000 donation to Stanford to be given to these researchers and that he was in communication with them while they were conducting their research. He denied, however, that he influenced their process or results in any way, saying they had “tremendous integrity,” and said that he was not shown the results prior to release. He also rejected the accusation that he put financial pressure on the researcher who expressed misgivings about the test.

………

In response to a detailed set of questions about the whistleblower complaint, Stanford Medicine spokesperson Julie Greicius said: “Stanford Medicine is aware of serious concerns related to the Santa Clara County seroprevalence study. The integrity of Stanford Medicine’s research is core to our mission. When we receive concerns such as this, they are taken extremely seriously. This matter is being reviewed by the appropriate oversight mechanisms at Stanford.”

As one of the world’s most-cited researchers and a “godfather to the science reform crowd,” Ioannidis helped elevate the study to national news. In a landmark 2005 paper titled “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” he called out the factors that incentivize shoddy scientific work, from personal bias to tenure systems that reward quantity over quality. In doing so, he spurred a movement to root out bad science.

The whistleblower complaint alleges, however, that the coronavirus study was rife with some of the pitfalls Ioannidis has famously lambasted, from a sloppy statistical analysis to an apparent conflict of interest. In the COVID-19 era, as science and politics become increasingly intertwined, the Stanford study is perhaps the highest-profile instance of a hotly contested scientific finding fueling arguments for policies with life-and-death stakes.

………

And as for Neeleman, Lipsitch added, “This has nothing to do with science. This is wanting his airlines to thrive.”

………

Days prior to the op-ed, those scientists had overseen their massive antibody, or serological, survey in Santa Clara County. On April 3 and 4 in sunny Northern California, more than 3,300 people drove through pop-up testing sites at two parks and a church and stuck out their fingers to be pricked. If their blood turned out to have antibodies to the virus, that could indicate they’d recovered from an infection.

Many participants had learned about the test from Facebook. Others had received an email from Bhattacharya’s wife, falsely claiming that an “FDA approved” test would definitively reveal if they could “return to work without fear,” as BuzzFeed News has reported.

………

But so far, the coronavirus appears to be much more lethal than the flu. According to a preliminary analysis of more than a dozen recent studies, including Stanford’s, the infection fatality rate worldwide ranges from 0.49% to 1.01%. That would be 5 t0 10 times higher than the flu’s death rate from confirmed cases, at about 0.1%. (And the flu’s infection fatality rate is likely even lower, given the unknown number of people who don’t report having it.)

………

The whistleblower complaint alleges that Neeleman “sought out the study authors for their congruent policy views” on the pandemic and funded their work. The complaint is based on a series of screenshotted emails — some timestamped around early April, others with truncated dates and email addresses — and does not specify the value or nature of Neeleman’s funding.

Screenshots of two such emails came into the complainant’s possession by April 11, the complaint states. One undated screenshot shows the email addresses of Bogan, the investor and coauthor, and of David Neeleman. In another, undated message, “Andrew” expressed gratitude to “David”: “Thanks again for your willingness to help me and my friends in Silicon Valley support this groundbreaking and timely research work financially.”

The email adds, “I think we all agree how critically important that is to better informing public health and policy leadership’s decision making across the nation.”

Neeleman confirmed receiving the email. Bogan did not respond to a request for comment.

These folks were corrupt as hell; bought and paid for, or specifically selected by those who were bought and paid for for their preexisting bias.

Here We Go Again

Pro Publica has a story about Wall Street has been engaged in systematic fraud to pump up mortgage backed securities.

This is what took down the markets in 2008-09, and it's not surprising that they are doing this again, since Barack Obama and Eric "Place" Holder, steadfastly refused to prosecute.

No consequences, so they went back to ripping of the rest of us:

Among the toxic contributors to the financial crisis of 2008, few caused as much havoc as mortgages with dodgy numbers and inflated values. Huge quantities of them were assembled into securities that crashed and burned, damaging homeowners and investors alike. Afterward, reforms were promised. Never again, regulators vowed, would real estate financiers be able to fudge numbers and threaten the entire economy.

Twelve years later, there’s evidence something similar is happening again.

Some of the world’s biggest banks — including Wells Fargo and Deutsche Bank — as well as other lenders have engaged in a systematic fraud that allowed them to award borrowers bigger loans than were supported by their true financials, according to a previously unreported whistleblower complaint submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission last year.

Whereas the fraud during the last crisis was in residential mortgages, the complaint claims this time it’s happening in commercial properties like office buildings, apartment complexes and retail centers. The complaint focuses on the loans that are gathered into pools whose worth can exceed $1 billion and turned into bonds sold to investors, known as CMBS (for commercial mortgage-backed securities).

Lenders and securities issuers have regularly altered financial data for commercial properties “without justification,” the complaint asserts, in ways that make the properties appear more valuable, and borrowers more creditworthy, than they actually are. As a result, it alleges, borrowers have qualified for commercial loans they normally would not have, with the investors who bought securities birthed from those loans none the wiser.

ProPublica closely examined six loans that were part of CMBS in recent years to see if their data resembles the pattern described by the whistleblower. What we found matched the allegations: The historical profits reported for some buildings were listed as much as 30% higher than the profits previously reported for the same buildings and same years when the property was part of an earlier CMBS. As a rough analogy, imagine a homeowner having stated in a mortgage application that his 2017 income was $100,000 only to claim during a later refinancing that his 2017 income was $130,000 — without acknowledging or explaining the change.

It’s “highly questionable” to alter past profits with no apparent explanation, said John Coffee, a professor at Columbia Law School and an expert in securities regulation. “I don’t understand why you can do that.”

………

The complaint suggests widespread efforts to make adjustments. Some expenses were erased from the ledger, for example, when a new loan was issued. Most changes were small; but a minor increase in profits can lead to approval for a significantly higher mortgage.

The result: Many properties may have borrowed more than they could afford to pay back — even before the pandemic rocked their businesses — making a CMBS crash both more likely and more damaging. “It’s a higher cliff from which they are falling,” Flynn said. “So the loss severity is going to be greater and the probability of default is going to be greater.”

………

After lobbying by commercial real estate organizations and advocacy by real estate investor and Trump ally Tom Barrack — who warned of a looming commercial mortgage crash — the Federal Reserve pledged in early April to prop up CMBS by loaning money to investors and letting them use their CMBS as collateral. The goal is to stabilize the market at a time when investors may be tempted to dump their securities, and also to support banks in issuing new bonds. (Barrack’s company, Colony Capital, has since defaulted on $3.2 billion in debt backed by hotel and health care properties, according to the Financial Times.)

………

The notion that profit figures for some buildings are pumped up is surprising, said Kevin Riordan, a finance professor at Montclair State University. It raises questions about whether the proper disclosures are being made.

Investors don’t comb through financial statements, added Riordan, who used to manage the CMBS portfolio for retirement fund giant TIAA-CREF. Instead, he said, they rely on summaries from investment banks and the credit ratings agencies that analyze the securities. To make wise decisions, investors’ information “out of the gate has to be pretty close to being right,” he said. “Otherwise you’re dealing with garbage. Garbage in, garbage out.”

Once again, they are robbing us blind, and the response of the powers that be will be to bail them out.

To quote the late Paul Volker, "The only useful thing banks have invented in the last 20 years is the ATM."

There is Brazenness, There is Effrontery, There is Gall, There is Chutzpah, and then there is ………

Cable company legal arguments.

Case in point, Charter Communications, whose only value to society is that it makes Comcast looks good, who is now claiming that refusing to give refunds is necessary because it saves their customers money.

Seriously, on this makes the demand by the man who murdered his parents mercy as an orphan look like an amateur:

Charter is suing Maine to block a new state law that requires prorated refunds when cable customers cancel service mid-month, claiming that the requirement is a form of rate regulation and is preempted by federal law. The preemption question will be at the heart of the case, but Charter also told the court that its no-refund policy prevents its prices from rising even more than they usually do.

"Charter's decision not to provide a partial-month rebate for cancelling subscribers reflects the fact that Charter's service is sold on a monthly basis," the company, which operates Spectrum TV service, said in its complaint against the state government. "It also reduces administrative costs and thus ultimately reduces the upward pressure on rates for Charter's continuing subscribers."

Charter further said that its policy minimizes price increases "for continuing subscribers by reducing costs associated with implementing pro-rata rebates for mid-month cancellations." Charter said that subscribers who cancel in the middle of a monthly billing period can continue to receive the service until the end of the month.

Charter made a similar argument in a motion for preliminary injunction, saying that its no-refund policy "reduce[s] its transaction and back-office costs and thereby ease[s] upward pressure on rates for existing and future subscribers."

Why Google Should be a Utility

Google has been allowing bad actors to suppress news stories through false DMCA take-down notices.

The fact that they don't care enough to fall prey to these transparent censorship actions indicates that there should be a sh%$ load more regulation of their activities:

A Google search, at one time, could locate a news article on a man accused of attempted child rape, another on someone charged with fraud and still others on Ukrainian politicians facing corruption allegations. Googling certain keywords in March would find an article detailing the movements of two coronavirus-infected British tourists in Vietnam and warning others who visited the same places to take precautions.

Then the stories vanished.

Google stopped listing them in searches after it received formal requests that it scrub links to the pieces, a Wall Street Journal investigation found.

The Journal identified hundreds of instances in which individuals or companies, often using apparently fake identities, caused the Alphabet Inc. unit to remove links to unfavorable articles and blog posts that alleged wrongdoing by convicted criminals, foreign officials and businesspeople in the U.S. and abroad.

Google took them down in response to copyright complaints, many of which appear to be bogus, the Journal found in an analysis of information from the more than four billion links sent to Google for removal since 2011.

Google’s system was set up to comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. The 1998 law gives tech firms immunity from claims in copyright cases as long they quickly take down copyrighted material once alerted.

Takedown requests to Google are often from media companies legitimately requesting that pirated copies of a movie or album be removed from search results. Publishers and news outlets, including the Journal, have also asked Google to scrub allegedly infringing material from Google Search.

Yet some requests, the Journal found, appear to be from people manipulating the system in ways it didn’t intend, resulting in Google’s taking down lawful content.

When a Colorado man, Dak Steiert, faced state-court charges of running a fake law firm in 2018, he sent Google a series of copyright claims against blogs and a law-firm website that discussed his case, claiming they had copied the posts from Mr. Steiert’s own website. That wasn’t true, the Journal determined, but Google erased the pages from its search engine anyway.

Last year, Mr. Steiert, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, pleaded guilty in Colorado state court to one count of false advertising in his business. The Colorado Supreme Court closed his practice. The articles remained invisible in Google searches until the Journal flagged the cases to Google, which then reinstated the links.

………

“If people can manipulate the gatekeepers to make important and lawful information disappear,” said Daphne Keller, a former Google lawyer and now a program director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center, “that’s a big deal.”

………

After the Journal shared its findings with Google, the company conducted a review and restored more than 52,000 links it determined it had improperly removed, she said. Google said its review identified more than 100 new abusive submitters, declining to discuss individual cases.

………

A Google search for reputation managers turns up firms claiming to be able to remove negative content from popular search engines including Google—even though typically Google only removes links for alleged copyright violations or to comply with other relevant laws.

The Journal dug into the world of takedown requests by reviewing electronic records of copyright-removal notices that Google shares with Harvard University researchers. The Journal cross-referenced those requests with separate data Google releases regularly in a “transparency report,” which discloses whether it granted each request.

………

Financial-news site Benzinga fell victim to a common tactic to trick Google: backdating. Someone wanting Google to hide a webpage will find a little-trafficked blog and post a copy of the content from the legitimate webpage. After backdating the plagiarized post, the complainant will file an electronic notice with Google claiming the real article is a copyright violation.

A simple change to the DMCA, requiring fines against those who file false claims, and fines against entities who fail to use diligence with regards to a take-down notice,  (the latter would cover Google) would shut this crap down.

Meaningful regulation, and the right for private recourse would go a long way to shutting down this.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizens

The Senate has voted to allow warrantless collection of your web browsing history.

The US Senate has voted to give law enforcement agencies access to web browsing data without a warrant, dramatically expanding the government’s surveillance powers in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The power grab was led by Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell as part of a reauthorization of the Patriot Act, which gives federal agencies broad domestic surveillance powers. Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Steve Daines (R-MT) attempted to remove the expanded powers from the bill with a bipartisan amendment.

But in a shock upset, the privacy-preserving amendment fell short by a single vote after several senators who would have voted “Yes” failed to show up to the session, including Bernie Sanders. Nine Democratic senators also voted “No,” causing the amendment to fall short of the 60-vote threshold it needed to pass.

Yes, I am very disappointed that Sanders was not there to support the amendment, and mad as hell at the Democrats who voted against the the amendment to strip this from the bill.

Hopefully, Nancy Pelosi won't ram it through the House.

Who am I kidding, OF COURSE Nancy Pelosi will ram it through the house.

Travis Kalanick's Ghost Haunts Uber

Again and again, despite having given Kalanick the boot, Uber shows that it remains rotten to its core.

Case in point, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has decided that maintaining the excessive pay of senior executives is worth firing thousands of employees.

At it's core Uber is still about monetizing the public commons and misery of its employees to enrich the looters at the top:

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi reportedly vetoed a request from the ride-hailing giant’s top executives to cut their own salaries in order to avoid laying off rank-and-file workers, paving the way for thousands of pink slips.

A number of the ride-hail giant’s engineering leaders last month told Khosrowshahi that they and other managers were willing to have their own pay slashed in order to spare their workers from Uber’s wide-ranging culling of its headcount, according to The Information (paywall).

“The answer is no,” Khosrowshahi said in response, according to the report. “What we’re doing through is fundamentally realigning the company so that our cost base matches the new reality of the world post COVID. We do not want to take temporary measures.”

Khosrowshahi likewise signaled that part of his plan includes “remaking the engineering team so that over time more jobs would be located overseas,” according to the report.

Uber earlier this month laid off 3,700 workers from its customer support and recruiting teams, and expects to continue the culling with cuts to its engineering, products, operation and self-driving units that will be completed by May 18. The cuts may end up representing as much as 30 percent of Uber’s workforce.

Uber is pond scum, top to middle management, dedicated to abusing its lower level employees and its customers for a quick buck.

Mixed Emotions

It's a big deal when the FBI formally serves a warrant to someone that they are investigation.

It's an even bigger deal when they seize the phone of the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee:

Federal agents seized a cellphone belonging to a prominent Republican senator on Wednesday night as part of the Justice Department’s investigation into controversial stock trades he made as the novel coronavirus first struck the U.S., a law enforcement official said.

Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, turned over his phone to agents after they served a search warrant on the lawmaker at his residence in the Washington area, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss a law enforcement action.

It's interesting, because authorization for this had to come from the most senior levels of the Department of Justice, meaning Attorney General William Barr, a man who has exhibited no interest whatsoever in pursuing this sort of corruption.

What's more, there have been no similar serving of warrants to Senator Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.), who is objectively in an even more egregiously compromised position:

In late February and early March, Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) sold stocks valued at between $1.25 million and $3.1 million in companies that later dropped significantly, including ExxonMobil. She also bought shares in Citrix, which makes telework software.

Loeffler, who was appointed to her seat to fill a vacancy and faces an election later this year, said after the sales became public that she and her husband would divest all individual stocks.

Why would William Barr do this when it is so out of character, and not go after the least senior member of the Senate?

Perhaps because Burr has temporarily stepped down as Chairman of the Intel Committee, and Burr has bee working to release a declassified version of his committee's report of Russian involvement in the 2016 campaign:

………


The public evidence again Burr is quite damning, so there’s no question that this is a properly predicated investigation.

Still, coming from a DOJ that has gone to great lengths to protect other looting (and has not taken similar public steps against Kelly Loeffler), the move does raise questions.

Particularly given the focus that Richard Burr gave, during the John Ratcliffe confirmation hearing, to getting the final volume of the SSCI Report on 2016 declassified and released by August.

………

If Richard Burr is prepping to reverse his prior public comments about “collusion,” it might explain why the Bill Barr DOJ, which has stopped hiding that it is an instrument used to enforce political loyalty to Trump, would more aggressively investigate Burr than others.

Again, there’s no question that this is a properly predicated investigation. But in the Barr DOJ, properly predicated investigations about political allies of Trump all get quashed. This one has, instead, been aggressively and overtly pursued.

This is a political hit against a guilty man conducted by the most corrupt Attorney General in the history of the United States.

On the other hand, Burr is as guilty as hell.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Don't Make Bernie Angry, You Wouldn't Like It When He's Angry

Some of staffers fro Bernie Sanders' now suspended Presidential campaign set up a PAC.

Bernie Sanders HATES PACs, and so was unamused when they used one of his slogans to name it.

Bernie has gotten them to change the name, and reports that Sanders loudly expressed his displeasure to the people who set up the organization.

All things considered, I think that this is an attempt by those staffers to generate some consulting fees off of Bernie supporters, so I am not surprised that he was unamused:

When a bunch of Bernie staffers formed a super PAC name-checking his old slogan “Future to Believe In,” he was none too pleased given his well-known hatred of groups that skirt campaign finance limits. So, they changed the name.

The group will now be known as America’s Promise PAC. The change was filed with the Federal Election Commission on Tuesday.

“We wanted to be as clear as possible that there is no association between the PAC and the senator,” super PAC head and Sanders adviser Jeff Weaver told VICE News.

………

But Sanders has also spent the better part of his career crusading against “the millionaires and billionaires” looking to buy political power — and had a particular ire for super PACs, which can accept unlimited sums from individuals and corporations. Sanders hammered his opponents for taking help from super PACs during the 2016 and 2020 primaries. And by all accounts, he was rather furious when he found out some of his top advisers had decided to move ahead with one.

"The senator was informed about the creation of the super PAC before the paperwork was filed, and he was not happy about it,” Sanders political spokesman Mike Casca told VICE News.

Numerous other Sanders staff used more colorful language to describe Sanders’ reaction to the group.

………

Weaver declined to discuss the details of his conversations with Sanders, but was quick to admit his old boss wasn’t thrilled that he was creating a super PAC.

………

Weaver dismissed grumblings from critics that he might be looking to cash in with the group, saying no one had taken salaries yet from the organization, and “we’ll probably make at or less than what we made before.”

That word, "Yet," covers a whole lot of future mischief.

………

This isn’t the first time a Weaver group has gotten off to a rocky start, partly because he sought unlimited funds. When Weaver was named the head of the pro-Sanders Our Revolution after Sanders’ 2016 campaign, more than half the staff resigned in protest — partly over personal differences but also because he’d decided to push for a large independent expenditure effort to power the organization rather than focus on small-dollar donations. Both Our Revolution and this new group can take unlimited contributions, though the new super PAC America’s Promise will eventually be required to disclose its donors, unlike Our Revolution.

Yeah, this is going to be a remarkable success  ……… NOT.

So Not a Surprise

The AP has come across the original recommendations from the CDC for the pandemic, the ones that the White House suppressed, and they were far more extensive than what Trump and Evil Minions^™ eventually released:

Advice from the top U.S. disease control experts on how to safely reopen businesses and institutions during the coronavirus pandemic was more detailed and restrictive than the plan released by the White House last month.

The guidance, which was shelved by Trump administration officials, also offered recommendations to help communities decide when to shut facilities down again during future flareups of COVID-19.

The Associated Press obtained a 63-page document that is more detailed than other, previously reported segments of the shelved guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It shows how the thinking of the CDC infection control experts differs from those in the White House managing the pandemic response.

Hoocoodanode?

What Happens When You Go with a Moderate Uninspiring Candidate

While I am sure that members of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) and their consultants thought that it was a good idea to pick a "moderate" candidate to replace Katherine "Katie" Hill.

I can just imagine the consultants extolling an uninspiring and timid candidate, Christy Smith, who opposes Medicare for all, takes PAC money, and is squishy on climate change, and in a special election, one where bringing out the base is paramount, she gets demolished by double digits.

I understand why members of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) favor uninspiring candidates who do not make waves; because they don't make waves, they rake in the bucks, and require massive bucks in an attempt to make the sow's ear into a silk push.

And the consultants, and their friends in the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) get a percentage of the media buy.

Ka Ching.

Unfortunately, it also means that you lose elections, but those consultants need to make their payments on their Tesla Model X's.

Another 3 Million New Jobless Claims

So the total since mid March, about 8 weeks, is 36½ million new jobless claims.

Assuming that the normal level of claims is 225,000 (PDF link, see page 6), this means that the excess initial unemployment claims is $36,500,000-225,000\times 8=34,700,000$ excess unemployment claims.

The labor force was roughly 165 million with 3% unemployment, which gives about 170 million working or looking for work.

Just subtracting the 34.7 million excess claims, and a lot of people have not been processed, gives 23.4% unemployment (U3).

The above is just spit-balling by me, but it is not unreasonable to expect the unemployment rate to top 20% right now.

Fuck No!

It appears that Bernie Sanders is being pressured to turn over his donor list to Joe Biden and the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment).

Fuck that.

The people who donated to you do not want to be a an asset to be managed by some hack political consultant whose only qualification is their close relationships with members of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment).

Please, just don't.

Clever Hans Speaks*

A federal judge in Utah has ruled that drug sniffing dogs are unreliable as a source of probable cause because they cue into their handlers:

For as long as people have been driving, cops have been imagining reasons to pull them over and coerce them into "voluntary" searches. The Supreme Court's Rodriguez decision (sort of) put an end to extended stops -- the ones that start with a perceived violation that's dragged out until a drug dog arrives. Unfortunately, that decision only removed part of the equation. The Supreme Court's Heien decision made it possible for cops to rely entirely on pretext to engage in fishing expeditions by saying cops only had to think they witnessed a traffic violation, rather than actually be accurate about the laws they're tasked with enforcing.

Cops are still trying to bring drug dogs to routine traffic stops. The Rodriguez decision is generally taken to mean cops just need to be quicker about rustling up a K-9 unit. Cops love drug dogs because they allow cops to perform the warrantless searches they want to perform. The drug dog's handler can call literally any movement by the dog an "alert," turning normal dog behavior into "probable cause" for a search. It doesn't help that the dogs are rewarded for every alert and given no positive reinforcement for failing to find anything interesting.

Courts have historically been willing to cut drug dogs as much slack as they cut their law enforcement officer handlers. Subjective interpretations of anything an animal does to please its master is considered close enough to Fourth Amendment compliance to justify warrantless searches. Every so often, a court will question the reliability of the dog or the intent of its handler, but those are anomalies.

This case, via FourthAmendment.com, is an amazing anomaly. Not only did the court choose to hear from experts on drug dog training and handling, it actually went so far as to call into question the reliability of every drug dog in the state.

………

The defense brought in an expert witness, Dr. Mary Cablik, who has two decades of drug dog training experience working with POST units in Nevada and California. Cablik said the absence of "blind" training is a real problem. If the dog is only tested in areas where the handler knows drugs will be found, the dog carries this knowledge on to the real world and will continue to search for nonexistent drugs until it gives its handler what they want: an "alert."

………

Utah's training does not produce reliable drug dogs. Officer Moore's drug dog is possibly more unreliable than most, but this order makes it clear everyone who's been subjected to a drug dog sniff should challenge it. The state POST training has produced little more than handy Fourth Amendment circumvention tools for officers to use at will. This court is having none of this and refuses to condone the deployment of dogs that are basically trained to please their handlers, rather than actually detect narcotics.

This is a feature, not a bug.

Dogs, in traffic stops at least, are not intended to detect drugs, they are intended to provide a corrupt pretext for a search.

Dogs are eager to please their handlers, and when the only training that a dog receives, as was the case here, was where the trainer knows what they have to find, it does not train a dog as an impartial detector, it makes the dog into a fraud routine.

This continues, because this is what the police want.

^*The Clever Hans Effect, named after a horse that cued into its handler's subconscious body to create the illusion that it could do complex math.

The Bond Villain Wins

Instead of clapping him in irons, Alameda county has capitulated to Elon Musk, because when someone is a billionaire, laws do not apply to them.

This is bad policy, and corrosive to the rule of law.

I so want the guillotine futures for the upcoming unrest.

Another Attempt to Destroy Social Security

The Trump White House is looking to propose a stimulus where people will be required to sign away a portion of their Social Security benefits for a payment now.

🚨 COVID paper alert 🚨

Excited to share a new paper with @sc_cath and @mjmill611

We show that allowing workers to access a tiny % of their future Social Security benefits today can provide the liquidity they need to weather this storm.

Thread: pic.twitter.com/Jmu7VeH0FH

— Natasha Sarin (@NatashaRSarin) May 5, 2020

This is a transparent strategy to cut social security benefits to reduce its popularity, so that the money can be shoveled out to private accounts where Wall Street will profit from egregious fees and the like.

As an aside, it turns out that a senior Biden Advisor Larry Summers' protege and sometime co-author Natasha Sarin supports the same death of a thousand cuts to social security. (See the embedded Tweet)

The Trump administration is casting this idea as a way to keep the deficit down, but considering the fact that they are trying to cut more taxes, and there is always money for more war, it's clear that they want to destroy the most popular federal program one bit at the time:

………

Senior White House economic officials also are exploring a proposal floated by two conservative scholars that would allow Americans to choose to receive checks of up to $5,000 in exchange for a delay of their Social Security benefits, according to three people familiar with the internal matter. That plan was written by Andrew Biggs of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute and Joshua Rauh of the right-leaning Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Senior administration officials have discussed the “Eagle Plan,” a 29-page memo that called for an overhaul of federal retirement programs in exchange for upfront payments to some workers, but the White House has already rejected it, according to three administration officials. A copy of the plan was obtained by The Washington Post.

The proposal calls for giving Americans $10,000 upfront in exchange for curbing their federal retirement benefits, such as Social Security, the report says. Art Laffer, a conservative economist who is advising the White House on its economic response, said in an interview he reviewed the presentation and supports it.

Of course Laffer likes it.

Laffer has been an idiot ideologue has been arguing that cutting taxes to basically nothing will generate more revenues, which failed so abysmally with Sam Brownback in Kansas.

There is, of course a point where higher taxes reduce revenues, but the best evidence puts this at 75%±15%, not the less than 20% that Laffer argues for on things like corporate and capital gains taxes.

Social security is a system which by any metric is more efficient and more effective than the private sector, but the Randroid free market mousketeers believe that government programs are an ineluctable evil, so even if 80% of the benefits line the pockets of Wall Street, they support killing it.

They hate Social Security because it works, not because it doesn't.