Month: July 2017

Linkage

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This makes me want to learn to play the bass, and it’s just a promo.

As I have said before, a symphony orchestra on just 4 strings:

Meanwhile, Back in Silicon Valley

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We now find rampant sexual harassment and discrimination at Tesla Motors, wunderkind Elon Musk’s most high profile project:

The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day was “be bold for change” in the fight for a “more gender inclusive world” – but some at Tesla had a different plan for the day.

It was an opportunity for women to discover essential oils. A “health and wellness group” at the electric car company invited female staff members to an 8 March “lunch ‘n learn” about oils and how they can help improve people’s “health and happiness”, according to emails seen by the Guardian, which reveal that the proposed event was quickly met with vocal criticism. It was particularly offensive to some given that a week earlier, AJ Vandermeyden, a female engineer, had publicly accused Elon Musk’s company of sexual harassment and discrimination.

Tesla postponed the oils session. The company organized a town hall meeting on diversity for that day, which included six male executives and one woman, according to multiple attendees. At the crowded meeting at the Fremont factory, women took the microphone one-by-one and shared stories of sexual harassment, mistreatment by male managers, unfair promotion decisions and more, sources said.

Vandermeyden, who attended the meeting, thought the outpouring of comments validated her own story. But soon after, Tesla fired her, accusing her of pursuing a “miscarriage of justice” by filing a lawsuit that alleged “pervasive harassment” and pay discrimination. Testimony from the town hall – along with internal emails from Musk, and Vandermeyden’s first interview since her termination – paint a picture of a company that has struggled to respond to mounting complaints about gender discrimination and has aggressively attempted to discredit a woman who publicly criticized it .

………

 Musk also appeared to reference Vandermeyden in a company-wide email sent two days after her termination. In the email – with the subject “Doing the right thing”, sent at 2.29am – Musk lamented the scrutiny that his company faces, saying, “The list of companies that want to kill Tesla is so long, I’ve lost track.”

As as a result, he continued, employees must work harder and faster than competitors, adding they can’t be a “jerk” in the process.

Musk did not name Vandermeyden, but went on to offer what seemed to be a thinly veiled attack on her lawsuit: “If you are part of a less represented group, you don’t get a free pass on being a jerk yourself. We have had a few cases at Tesla where someone in a less represented group was actually given a job or promoted over more qualified highly represented candidates and then decided to sue Tesla for millions of dollars because they felt they weren’t promoted enough. That is obviously not cool.”

(emphasis mine)

What a classic example of a narcissistic self entitled tech bro, and Elon Musk is supposed one of the “good” guys in Silicon Valley, someone who is out to save the world.

If this is their best, there is something seriously rotten in the immediate vicinity of San Jose.

Fail

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Yesterday, the Teabaggers had a major case of butt hurt over a series of tweets sent out by National Public Radio.

They claimed that they were an attempt to provoke a revolution against Donald Trump.  They were claiming that it was “fake news” and left wing propaganda.

One small problem, the series of 113 tweets was the declaration of independence:

For about 20 minutes Tuesday, NPR traveled back to 1776.

 To echo its 29-year on-air tradition, the public radio network’s main Twitter account tweeted out the Declaration of Independence, line by line.

 There — in 113 consecutive posts, in 140-character increments — was the text of the treasured founding document of the United States, from its soaring opening to its searing indictments of King George III’s “absolute tyranny” to its very last signature.

 Who could have taken issue with such a patriotic exercise, done in honor of the nation’s birthday?

 Quite a few people, it turned out.

 Perhaps it was the Founding Fathers’ capitalization of random words or the sentence fragments into which some of the Declaration’s most recognizable lines were broken. But plenty of Twitter users reacted angrily to the thread, accusing NPR of spamming them — or, worse, trying to push an agenda.

Seriously?

You are claiming that the quoting the Declaration of Independence on Independence Day is a communist plot?

What the actual f%$#?

Where did you get your education, Hamburger University?

Seriously, if you freaked out over this, then you seriously need to evaluate your value system.

Also, take a history course, and try to actually read the founding documents that you claim to have so much affection for.

For All Your Craft and Hobby Needs, Now with Grave Robbing

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I am referring, of course to Hobby Lobby, which has been caught smuggling antiquities to provide exhibits for their “Museum”:

The packages that made their way from Israel and the United Arab Emirates to retail outlets owned by Hobby Lobby, the seller of arts and craft supplies, were clearly marked as tile samples.

 But according to a civil complaint filed on Wednesday by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, they held something far rarer and more valuable: ancient clay cuneiform tablets that had been smuggled into the United States from Iraq.

 Prosecutors said in the complaint that Hobby Lobby, whose evangelical Christian owners have long maintained an interest in the biblical Middle East, began in 2009 to assemble a collection of cultural artifacts from the Fertile Crescent. The company went so far as to send its president and an antiquities consultant to the United Arab Emirates to inspect a large number of rare cuneiform tablets — traditional clay slabs with wedge-shaped writing that originated in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago.

 In 2010, as a deal for the tablets was being struck, an expert on cultural property law who had been hired by Hobby Lobby warned company executives that the artifacts might have been looted from historical sites in Iraq, and that failing to determine their heritage could break the law.

 Despite these words of caution, the prosecutors said, Hobby Lobby bought more than 5,500 artifacts — the tablets and clay talismans and so-called cylinder seals — from an unnamed dealer for $1.6

 million in December 2010.

 In addition to the complaint, the prosecutors on Wednesday filed a stipulation of settlement with Hobby Lobby that requires the company to return all of the pieces, and to forfeit to the government an additional $3 million, resolving the civil action.

………

Hobby Lobby’s purchase of the artifacts in December 2010 was fraught with “red flags,” according to the prosecutors. Not only did the company get conflicting information about the origin of the pieces, its representatives never met or spoke with the dealer who supposedly owned them, according to the complaint.

Instead, on the instructions of a second dealer, Hobby Lobby wired payments to seven separate personal bank accounts, the prosecutors said. The first dealer then shipped the items marked as clay or ceramic tiles to three Hobby Lobby sites in Oklahoma. All of the packages had labels falsely identifying their country of origin as Turkey, prosecutors said.

Multiple transfers to accounts, deliberate and varied mislabeling of their country of origin, and the CEO of Hobby Lobby is claiming that they should have been better at dotting their “I”s and crossing their “T”s.

This is bullsh%$.  This was an organized effort by Hobby Lobby boss Steve Green to smuggle artifacts into the United States: He went to the UAE to inspect the artifacts, ignored conflicting data regarding provenance, and was scrupulous in using an intermediary to avoided dealing directly with the dealer of the artifacts.

Prosecutors should be pursuing him personally over this.  The federal conspiracy statutes should cover this nicely.

And Today in Charter School Corruption

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Kipp Schools, the star of the hagiography Waiting for Superman, has been caught ripping off poor parents by demanding illegal fees, and when caught they refused to refund them:

Charter schools claim they are public schools. They are not. What public school is part of a corporate chain? What public school operates for profit? What public schools charges fees for service?

The KIPP schools in Houston have been charging fees to poor parents. Now that the scam has been exposed, KIPP refuses to refund the money to parents who need the money far more than the multi-million dollar KIPP organization does. KIPP [should] ask its patron, the rightwing Walton Family Foundation, for a few more dollars, enough to reimburse the needy families that it ripped off.

Supporters of school privatization will claim that this is an aberration.  It isn’t.

This is a natural and foreseeable consequence of applying the for-profit business model to a public good.

It’s all about maximizing profit on while being paid by the taxpayers.

This is a feature, not a bug.

If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them

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Reverse flow operation (starts at 45s)


See also this diagram


The GE Engine

GE will be attempting to challenge Pratt & Whitney in the turboprop market, where the PT6 turboprop completely dominates the market.

Of interest to me is that GE will be copying the basic operating principals of the PT6,(paid subscription required) P&W’s reverse flow operation.

The inlet is at the back of the engine, and air flows forward. This allows the compressor and the compressor turbine to be completely separate from the power turbine and prop.

While the air flow is rather more circuitous than that of a straight through engine, it has a number of significant advantages:

  • No need for concentric shafts while still maintaining a two spool compressor and turbine.
  • A smaller and lighter starter motor.
  • More easily adopted to different power levels.
  • Greater simplicity and reliability.

The PT6 has used this formula to completely dominate the market, and it looks like GE will be aping their approach, with a lot of additive manufacturing throw into the mix:

………

Then there’s the ATP, GE’s Advanced Turboprop engine (see photo, above). This is a very big deal in terms of technology and targeting.

 For those cloistered monks among you, some background: Pratt & Whitney Canada’s PT6 family has reigned supreme among turboprops since, well, forever. And for good reason. The type ranges in power from 500-2,000 shp and has demonstrated rock-solid reliability through decades of operation. Its bulletproof reputation is the reason almost all single-turboprop-powered aircraft—from the Piper’s owner-flown M600 to Beechcraft’s PT-6 Texan II military trainer to the do-it-all Pilatus PC-12—are fitted with a PT-6. More than 51,000 PT6s have been produced since the engine’s introduction in the 1960s. It has been expanded to include 69 versions that power some 100 different aircraft models, including all production King Airs.

 GE hopes the ATP will break Pratt’s near monopoly. Developed at the company’s “turboprop center of excellence” in Prague with a $400 million investment, this, the world’s most “printed” engine (additive manufacturing has replaced 855 parts with a mere dozen 3D-printed components)features a single-lever integrated engine and propeller control, 16:1 pressure ratio, reverse-flow combustor and output of 850-1,650 shp. The design promises 20% better fuel burn, 10% more power and longer maintenance intervals than you know what.

This is, in its own way, a tribute to the genius of the design team that first devised the PT6.

Good for the Canadians

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The Canadian government has decided to pay Can$ 10 million to Omar Khadr.

To recapitulate the story, he was taken to Afghanistan by his father as a 15 year old, and then threw a grenade in a firefight that killed a US soldier.

He was taken into custody, tortured repeatedly, and eventually pled guilty, he was later repatriated to Canada, and then released on bail in 2014.

Khadr filed suit against the Canadian government for depriving him of his rights, and illegally treating as an adult while in detention, and now Canada has settled with him, paying him Can$10 million settlement:

Canada’s Liberal government will apologize to former Guantanamo Bay inmate Omar Khadr and pay him around C$10 million ($7.7 million) in compensation, two sources close to the matter said on Tuesday, prompting opposition protests.

A Canadian citizen, Khadr was captured in Afghanistan in 2002 at age 15 after a firefight with U.S. soldiers. He pleaded guilty to killing a U.S. Army medic and became the youngest inmate held at the military prison in Cuba.

Khadr later recanted and his lawyers said he had been grossly mistreated. In 2010, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that Canada breached his rights by sending intelligence agents to interrogate him and sharing the results with the United States.

The case proved divisive: defenders called Khadr a child soldier while the then-Conservative government dismissed calls to seek leniency, noting he had pleaded guilty to a serious crime.

The US took a child soldier and treated him as a criminal, they then tortured him abd coerced a confession out of him with the active support of the Canadian state security apparatus, a fact that Canada’s judiciary has repeatedly taken a dim view of.

This is a good thing, though I am not surprised that former PM Stephen Harper had to exit the scene for the right thing to be done.  Harper was to doing the right thing as Josef Stalin was to rule of law.

It’s nice that the Canadian government is doing the right thing.

It will never happen here, since Obama decided to normalize this behavior, (Looking forward, not backward) and then systematically promoted the people who aided and abetted crimes against humanity in the US state security apparatus.

There will never be an accounting for the torturers, much like there will never be an accounting for the banksters who blew up the world in 2008.

If Only Classic Economic Theory Could Provide a Solution

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There seems to be much hand wringing over the fact that not enough people want to work construction these days:

About two-thirds of the contractors who are struggling with the labor shortages gripping the construction industry say it has become a challenge to finish jobs on time, according to a new survey.

More than one-third of contractors said they are being forced to turn work down and 58% said they are putting in higher bids, said the survey sponsored by USG Corp. and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Three-quarters of those who said they are having difficulty finding skilled labor said they are simply asking their employees to work harder.

“Basically they’re just making people work harder as a way to cope,” said Steve Jones, senior director of Dodge Data & Analytics, which was the research partner of USG and the Chamber on the project.

If you have a shortage of workers, increase wage and non-wage remuneration to a level where you have enough workers.

This is literally Econ 101.

Evil Megalomaniac Seeks to Revive Monster from Primeval Times

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There are certain people who I will assume that anything they do is in furtherance of evil.

One of them is Peter Thiel, who literally has aspirations to be a vampire.

Now, he’s dropping big bucks on an attempt to revive the species of the Woolly Mammoth.

I do not know how reviving the Woolly Mammoth will make life more miserable for the rest of us, but given that Thiel is funding it, I guarantee that it will make life more miserable for the rest of us.

At least he’s not a one of the megalomaniacs planning on mounting a private operation to mine asteroids, which could easily be turned into a devastating weapon.

Linkage

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We are the most powerful warship in the world:

The Republican Politician in a Nut Shell

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For those of you not living in the Garden State, you may be unaware that New Jersey is in the middle of a government shutdown.

Hizzoner wants to get money earmarked for handling the opioid crisis to avoid breaking his no new tax pledge.

As a result of the shutdown, all but emergency government services are shut down.

This includes things like government offices and state parks, unless you are Governor Chris Christie, in which case you have the beach to yourself:

People hoping to visit Island Beach State Park this holiday weekend were not allowed in because of the state government shutdown Gov. Chris Christie ordered amid the state budget standoff in Trenton.

But there was one family there: Christie’s. They are using the summer beach house provided by the state for a weekend down the Shore.

And here are exclusive aerial photos by NJ Advance Media showing Christie surrounded by wife, Mary Pat Christie, and others.

It was taken early Sunday afternoon before the governor headed to Trenton to hold another news conference about the shutdown.

At that news conference, Christie was asked if he got any sun Sunday.

“I didn’t,” he said. “I didn’t get any sun today.”

When later told of the photo, Brian Murray, the governor’s spokesman, said: “Yes, the governor was on the beach briefly today talking to his wife and family before heading into the office.”

“He did not get any sun,” Murray added. “He had a baseball hat on.“

(emphasis mine)

Bad move Governor.  I’ve seen your poll numbers, and they are so low that about the only way for you to salvage your political career would be to get cancer.

It make some voters feel sympathy for you.  (Not me, but some voters ……… maybe)

Take off the hat, and no sunscreen.

About that Minimum Wage Study in Seattle

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The weepy table

The state of Washington commissioned a study of Seattle’s minimum wage, and found that low wage workers lost money as a result.

This comes as a surprise, since all the other studies found no effect, but this has not stopped the economic journalist community from touting this as conclusive evidence that raising the minimum wage does now work.

What the study concluded was that for low wage workers, the number of hours worked decreased, resulting in a loss of wages, but the devil is in the details.

The study appears to have been deliberately structured to deliver this results:

  • They did not include any multi-location employers, about 40% of the data set.
  • It defines “low wage” as earning less than $19 an hour, in a labor market where wages have increased by 18% over the period in question, so if a worker’s pay goes from $16.50/hour to $19.25/hour, (a 16% increase), this would be counted as lost low wage hours. (Bracket creep)
  • Downplays the fact that employment at the single site employers that they survey increased total hours worked at all wage levels by 18% as well. 
  • Assumes that increases in higher wage jobs NEVER involved lower wage employees making more.

This is complete crap:

Words cannot describe the torment experienced by the data before they confessed what the University of Washington team got them to confess. I can only urge readers with an open mind to study Table 3 carefully. The average wage increase, from the second quarter of 2014 to the third quarter of 2016, for all employees of single site establishments was 18 percent. Eighteen percent! That is an annual increase of almost 8 percent. For two and a quarter years in a row. Not bad. And the number of hours worked of ALL employees of single site establishments? Up 18 percent in a little over two years. That too is an increase of almost 8 percent per annum.

Now multiply that wage by those hours and the total payroll for all employees rose 39.5 percent over the course of nine quarters. An annual rate of increase of 17.5 percent. These are BIG numbers. They are freaking HUGE numbers.

It must have taken a team of at least six academics to extract a 9.4 percent decline in hours from the 86,842 workers (out of a total of 336,517) earning under $19 dollars an hour at these single-site establishments. Look at the Table and weep.

(emphasis original)

Sources as diverse as the Economic Policy Institute and the Financial Times have excoriated the methodology here as well for much the same reasons.

Since the study has not yet been peer reviewed, I’d like to see the results, because I think that the the authors had a conclusion, and then cherry picked data to confirm their desired outcome.

Quote of the Day

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Nothing against new ideas. Some of them might even be good ones! But just because a company is based in the Bay Area and does something on your smartphone doesn’t really make it “tech” at this point any more than something which uses that new-fangled electricity is tech.

—Duncan “Atrios” Black

He’s right.  Uber is basically a taxi service.  Grubhub is food delivery.  Air B&B is a B&B.  Stubhub is a scalper.

But all these guys think that they are geniuses of the first order, because ……… Internet. (or because ………Smart Phone)

This is why we find Silicon Valley to be a lot like Lord of the Flies. 

It’s the only way to keep the all balls into the air is to never stop.

This is a Grammatically Correct Use of the Term Irony

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Donald Trump has commissioned vote fraud commission to prove that he actually won the popular vote in 2016. (Yes, this is Narcissistic insanity)

He has appointed prominent figures in the voter suppression movement including Kansas Secretary of State Kris Korbach and Hans “Der novotenführer” von Spakovsky, whose primary goal has been to keep blacks and Hispanics from voting, primarily through purging them from voter rolls.

This commission is a clear attempt to go national with the voter purges in an attempt to gain partisan political advantage, and, in an attempt to go national programs to disenfranchise minorities.

Basically, the commission will manufacture data, and then manufacture outrage, and use this to jump start national legislation to suppress minority voting.

This is clear to anyone with two brain cells to rub together, so when the commission requested complete voter registration data from the states and the District of Columbia, over half of the states election officials have told the commission to go pound sand.

It turns out that, due to vagaries in state election law, one of the Secretaries of State that is telling Kris Korbach to go pound sand, is Kansas Secretary of State Kris Korbach:

Kris Kobach, the co-chair of Donald Trump’s glorious Find The Five Million Illegals Who Voted For Hillary Commission, has been running into a bit of pushback to his letter asking all 50 states to submit detailed voter information to be used in a great big study that would supposedly root out all the voter fraud. At least 25 states have said they won’t or can’t comply — or will not submit all the data Kobach requested, either because they’re restricted by state law, or they don’t trust the commission, which is expected to skew the data to support Republican claims of massive voter fraud, and to recommend restrictions on voting rights.

Among the states that won’t be giving the “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity” all the data Kris Kobach wants is Kansas, where Secretary of State Kris Kobach explained that under state law, he can’t release the last four digits of voters’ Social Security numbers. The state will release all other information requested in the letter, like voters’ names, addresses, dates of birth, voting history, party affiliation, and felony criminal history. Kobach explained,

 “If the commission decides that they would like to receive Social Security numbers to a secure site in order to remove false positives, then we would have to double check and make sure Kansas law permits,” Kobach said.

“I know for a fact that this information would be secured and maintained confidentially,” he added in response to security concerns.

He happens to personally know the commission’s co-chair, after all, and he trusts Kris Kobach not to pull any funny stuff.

 Several other states, however, know exactly who Kris Kobach is, and have decided not to play along with Kobach, like Virginia, where Gov. Terry McAulliffe issued a statement saying

This entire commission is based on the specious and false notion that there was widespread voter fraud last November […] At best this commission was set up as a pretext to validate Donald Trump’s alternative election facts, and at worst is a tool to commit large-scale voter suppression.

Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, was a bit more blunt. His statement not only said Mississippi wouldn’t comply with the request for voter records, he also told Kobach that while he hadn’t yet received the letter, based on the copies he’d seen, his reply to the commission would be “They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great state to launch from.”

(emphasis mine)

I think there is a method to Republican madness here: They want to institute nationwide voter suppression, and they are using Trumps ego to push this whole effort along.

Unlike prior Republican Presidents, who had the hubris to believe that they could pick the lock of the minority vote, Trump is personally hurt by the 2.8+ million voter deficit, and really believes that this was from widespread voter fraud.

As such, Trump is the perfect patient zero for the plague of voter suppression.

Who Found Pictures of the Registrar of the Copyright Office Engaging in Carnal Congress with a Goat?

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After decades of interpreting copyright in the most bone headed and restrictive way possible, the US Copyright Office has come out in favor of a “Right to Repair”.

This means that , which will allow people who own products to repair them, despite licensing terms that lock down the products and attempt to force them to drive them to expensive service arrangements.

John Deer for example, is attempting to force farmers to do even the most basic maintenance on their tractors, oil changes, new spark plugs, etc., at the dealers.

This office literally had to be overruled by an act of Congress, the Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act, because the office decided that consumers should have no right to unlock the phone that they owned.

I think that what happened was that the interim registrar (the last permanent registrar was fired in part for IP extremism) has realized that some common sense needed to be applied:

Last week, to little fanfare, the US Copyright Office took its first baby steps towards stopping auto-makers wrapping their software in copyright rules.

The decision is important because auto-makers use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s “technical protection measures” (TPMs) provisions to restrict diagnosis and repair to an approved ecosystem.

That’s especially galling for farmers in remote locations who have argued that they can’t always wait for a factory rep to okay fixes to agricultural machines, while in the more mundane world of automobile mechanics, legitimate repair shops complain that Detroit uses the DMCA to exert market power.

In a lengthy report (PDF) that also canvasses how exceptions to the TPM rules could apply to accessibility technologies, device unlocking, and library archives, the office proposes legislation that sides at least in part with the “right to repair” lobby.

………

Since “bona fide repair and maintenance activities are typically non-infringing”, the report suggests using the DMCA to tie up the repair market wasn’t a legitimate use of the law.

Hence “to the extent section 1201 precludes diagnosis, repair, and maintenance activities otherwise permissible under title 17, the Office finds that a limited and properly‐tailored permanent exemption for those purposes, including circumventing obsolete access controls for continued functioning of a device, would be consistent with the statute’s overall policy goals”.

While this sounds like basic common sense, but the application of common sense to IP law has been virtually non-existent over the past 30+ years.

This constitutes a revolutionary shift in culture, even if it is a minor change in policy.

We are finally seeing meaningful push-back against a copyright and patent regime that increases inequality, reduces innovation, and perverts our economy and our society.

I Know That Stereotypes Are Bad, but ………

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I was just listening to NPR, and they were talking about the Canada Day celebrations, which is a big deal because this is the sesquicentennial (150th year) since the founding of the Canadian Confederation.

There was a mention of security precautions being taken, and mention was made of an, “Elite Canadian Anti-terrorism Unit,” (This would probably be JTF2) being on alert as a precaution. (No mention of any specific threats.)

I know that this is rank stereotyping, but the image that came into my head was of a bunch of guys in cardigans apologizing profusely.

This is clearly an inaccurate characterization of Canadian soldiers in general, but the image remains in my head.

Does this make me a bad person?