Author: Matthew G. Saroff

Not Feeling the Pain Here, Peter Parker is Free Now

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As you may, or may not, be aware, Spider-Man’s movie rights are owned by Sony, while much of the rest of the Marvel universe is owned by the Rodent Borg, aka Disney.

There has been some coordination between the two studios to sync the characters to fit into the Marvel universe, but now, some sort of corporate dispute will cleave the two apart.

Some people are losing their sh%$, but I think that this would be a good thing.

Spider-Man has always been one of the most solitary of super-heroes out of marvel, and unlike the normal run of Marvel spandex clad warriors, more of a working-class bloke from Queens.

The occasional cross over is one thing, but his playing Skywalker to Tony Stark’s Yoda has never rung true to me.

I really do like Tom Holland’s Spider-Man’s interpretation of the role too:

Interviews with the filmmakers behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe almost always get around to what seems to be the studio’s core creative ethos: paint yourself into a corner, then find a creative way to get out of it. That mission statement inspired the snap in Avengers: Infinity War and the big secret-identity reveal that ends Spider-Man: Far From Home. And while creative inspiration probably wasn’t at the top of anyone’s mind during the business impasse that reportedly dissolved the partnership between Sony (which owns the current film rights to Spider-Man and his rogues’ gallery) and the Disney-owned Marvel Studios, that unexpected split could inadvertently inspire Sony to adopt exactly the sort of creative problem-solving that has fueled some of the MCU’s greatest moments.

First things first: No, this doesn’t mean we’re in for another Spider-Man reboot. According to current reports, Sony is planning to make more Spider-Man films starring Tom Holland, with conflicting reports saying that he’s currently contracted for either one or two more solo films. The only difference is that Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige won’t produce those films. The deal will also likely prevent Holland’s Spider-Man from appearing in future MCU movies, although that aspect seems to be slightly more in flux. (It’s also possible this whole deal could change, especially as both companies examine the public reaction to their confrontation. Entertainment Weekly reports that negotiations are still ongoing.)

I’m for letting the high-schooler from Queens stay a high-schooler  from Queens.

Why Defined Contribution Plans Do Not Work

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Because there is extreme information asymmetry in favor of the financial industry, there is an opportunity for fraud, and as I’ve noted before, (today) If fraud can occur, fraud will occur.

Case in point, Fidelity bribing MIT to allow the financial firm overcharge the school’s employees for their retirement plan:

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the nation’s most prestigious universities, stands accused of hurting workers in the company’s retirement plan by engaging in an improper relationship with the financial firm Fidelity.

 A lawsuit headed to trial in September alleges that MIT ignored the advice of its own consultants and allowed Fidelity to pack the university’s retirement plan with high-fee investment funds that ended up costing employees tens of millions of dollars. In return, the lawsuit said, MIT leveraged millions of dollars in donations from Fidelity.

 MIT and Fidelity say the allegations have no merit.

 The same as any employer that offers workers a retirement plan, MIT is required by law to set up investment options that are in the best interest of its employees and retirees.

………

Twenty years ago, MIT hired Fidelity to help manage its 401(k) plan. But the lawsuit alleges that MIT then let Fidelity include dozens of Fidelity funds with high fees — and that some charged fees more than 100 times higher than other funds that MIT could have chosen. [Plaintiff’s Attorney Jerry] Schlichter said MIT’s own outside consultants recommended shifting to a plan with lower-cost investment options, but “that advice was ignored for years.”

Meanwhile, Schlichter’s lawsuit says, MIT benefited from the excessive fees that the workers’ retirement plan paid Fidelity. Court documents allege: “In return, MIT leveraged Fidelity’s revenue stream from the Plan to secure numerous donations (over $23 million since Fidelity became the recordkeeper).”

In 2015, when the university considered other options, an MIT dean emailed the head of an MIT committee overseeing the plan: “if we’re not switching to Vanguard or TIAA Cref, I am going to expect something big and good coming to MIT,” according to the court records.

Schlichter said that soon after that exchange, “Fidelity donated $5 million to MIT.”

Seriously, we need to cap fees on tax deferred accounts.

While there may be a societal value to retirement savings accounts, there is no such value to reckless seeking alpha, nor is there a societal value to rip off retirees.

It will hit Wall Street in the pocket book, but f%$# Wall Street.

Quote of the Day

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Central to this narrative is the presentation of the difference between Trump and Obama as akin to the difference between Hitler and Gandhi. A better analogy – especially when it comes to foreign policy – would be the difference between John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer who was known for dressing up as a clown at public events, and Ted Bundy, the tall, handsome serial killer who enticed his victims into his car with his charm and good looks.

—Peter Bolton at Counter Punch

He’s writing about how Joe Biden has stapled himself to Barack Obama’s increasingly dubious legacy.

It’s a wonderfully evocative turn of phrase.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

Consider the Source

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Given the latest news of the aggressive self dealing that National Rifle Association Chief Executive and Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre has been engaging in, it’s normally not newsworthy when someone calls him an, “Odious Little Grifter,” but this time it’s Fox News that is calling him that.
Stick a fork in his corrupt white flabby ass, he’s done:

Fox News appears to have abandoned Wayne LaPierre, but not the NRA. Conservative weekend host Steve Hilton ripped LaPierre to shreds, calling him an “odious little grifter” before calling for his ouster.

“Wayne has a big, important job,” Hilton said. “If you want to buy a big house, good luck to him. Except it was not him buying the house. It was you.”

The plot, Hilton explained, was for NRA advertising contractor Ackerman McQueen to create a new corporate entity, which the NRA would then fund for over $6 million, guaranteeing them 99 percent ownership. The new corporation would then buy the property for the benefit of LaPierre. Clearly there are not enough regulations on the relationships between nonprofits and corporate entities.

Hilton also went over the other LaPierre grifts, like the request for nearly $14,000 to rent an apartment for a summer intern, spending hundreds of thousands on clothing, flights, and luxury hotel stays.

“A new report revealed that tens of thousands of dollars of NRA donor funds were used on flights and luxury hotel stays for hair and makeup artists for Wayne’s wife and they traveled with her for events because apparently those are the only two stylists in the whole country capable of doing the job,” Hilton said.

And it wasn’t limited to travel in the United States, either, noting that thousands of dollars had been spent on overseas travel. “There are other countries and other hotels you can stay at if you want to protect the Second Amendment,” Hilton sneered. “Try the Hyatt in Washington D.C. It’s a short walk to places like the United States Congress and Supreme Court where American gun rights are actually decided, not Budapest or even Lake Como.”

He wrapped it up with a snappy conclusion: “For years Wayne has taken NRA members’ money to live the life of a king but he’s not a king. He’s the head of a nonprofit trusted by millions to use its funds to secure constitutional rights. He’s an odious little grifter and it’s time for him to go.”

Fox News has turned on him.

I am amused.

Whatever This Says about Our Society, It’s Profoundly Depressing

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The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) has accumulated an exhaustive database of academic citations, and found what appears to be a whole lot of self dealing and corruption:

The world’s most-cited researchers, according to newly released data, are a curiously eclectic bunch. Nobel laureates and eminent polymaths rub shoulders with less familiar names, such as Sundarapandian Vaidyanathan from Chennai in India. What leaps out about Vaidyanathan and hundreds of other researchers is that many of the citations to their work come from their own papers, or from those of their co-authors.

Vaidyanathan, a computer scientist at the Vel Tech R&D Institute of Technology, a privately run institute, is an extreme example: he has received 94% of his citations from himself or his co-authors up to 2017, according to a study in PLoS Biology this month1. He is not alone. The data set, which lists around 100,000 researchers, shows that at least 250 scientists have amassed more than 50% of their citations from themselves or their co-authors, while the median self-citation rate is 12.7%.

The study could help to flag potential extreme self-promoters, and possibly ‘citation farms’, in which clusters of scientists massively cite each other, say the researchers. “I think that self-citation farms are far more common than we believe,” says John Ioannidis, a physician at Stanford University in California who specializes in meta-science — the study of how science is done — and who led the work. “Those with greater than 25% self-citation are not necessarily engaging in unethical behaviour, but closer scrutiny may be needed,” he says.

The data are by far the largest collection of self-citation metrics ever published. And they arrive at a time when funding agencies, journals and others are focusing more on the potential problems caused by excessive self-citation. In July, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), a publisher-advisory body in London, highlighted extreme self-citation as one of the main forms of citation manipulation. This issue fits into broader concerns about an over-reliance on citation metrics for making decisions about hiring, promotions and research funding.

This is not a surprise.

If fraud can occur, fraud will occur.

Patent Troll, Patent Troll, Patent Troll, Patent Troll, ‎Nathan Myhrvold‎

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Good news everyone, calling someone a “Patent Troll” is a constitutionally protected opinion, and as such, patent trolls, like Nathan Myhrvold‎, (He’s not a party to this case) cannot sue you for calling them a patent troll:

Free speech in the patent world saw a big win on Friday, when the New Hampshire Supreme Court held that calling someone a “patent troll” doesn’t constitute defamation. The court’s opinion [PDF] is good news for critics of abusive patent litigation, and anyone who values robust public debate around patent policy. The opinion represents a loss for Automated Transactions, LLC (ATL), a patent assertion entity that sued [PDF] more than a dozen people and trade groups claiming it was defamed.

EFF worked together with the ACLU of New Hampshire to file an amicus brief [PDF] in this case, explaining that the lower court judge got this case right when he ruled against ATL. That decision gave wide latitude for public debate about important policy issues—even when the debate veers into harsh language. We’re glad the New Hampshire Supreme Court agreed.

Last week’s ruling court notes that “patent troll” is a phrase used to describe “a class of patent owners who do not provide end products or services themselves, but who do demand royalties as a price for authorizing the work of others.” However, the justices note that “patent troll” has no clear settled definition. For instance, some observers of the patent world would exclude particular entities, like individual inventors or universities, from the moniker “patent troll.”

Because of this, when ATL’s many critics call it a “patent troll,” they are expressing their subjective opinions. Differences of opinion about many things—including patent lawsuits—cannot and should not be settled with a defamation lawsuit.

Personally, I would call ATL a bunch of pig felching patent trolling rat bastards, which I think is protected too.

What’s Worse than a Corrupt Cop?

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When police showed up at Harry Schmidt’s home on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, he thought they were there to help. He was still mourning the disappearance of the beloved forest green Ford F-150 pickup that he’d customized with a gun storage cabinet, and he hoped the cops had solved the crime.

Instead, the officers accused him of faking the theft. The Vietnam veteran was now facing up to seven years in prison.

Schmidt was stunned, but he was even more upset when he found out who had turned him in.

Erie Insurance, one of the nation’s largest auto insurers, had not only provided the cops with evidence against its own loyal customer — it had actively worked with them to try to convict him of insurance fraud.

Erie had even paid part of the salary of the lead detective who knocked on Schmidt’s door that day, as well as that of the prosecutor who went on to charge him with felony insurance fraud. And it would also secretly cover the costs of an expert witness to testify against Schmidt in court.

Schmidt, a grandfather living on disability benefits from his war-related injuries, had no history of theft or fraud. But he found himself the target of an extraordinary alliance between private insurers and public law enforcement agencies — one that transforms routine claims into criminal evidence, premium-paying customers into suspects, and the justice system into a hired gun for a multibillion-dollar industry. It’s an arrangement essentially unheard of in other businesses, and one rife with potential conflicts of interest, as well as grave consequences for law-abiding customers.

If the above is scary, just think about how insurance companies literally have power over whether you live or die when they deny your medical coverage.

It Only Took 5 F%$#ing Years

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Daniel Pantaleo, the New York cop who choked Eric Garner to death, has finally been fired.

None of the other Cops, who falsified their reports, are facing any sort of consequences for their actions.

But really, this shouldn’t take 5 years. He should have been fired in 5 months:

The New York City police officer whose chokehold led to Eric Garner’s death in 2014 was fired from the Police Department and stripped of his pension benefits on Monday, ending a bitter battle that had cast a shadow over the nation’s largest police force.

Commissioner James P. O’Neill’s decision to dismiss the officer, Daniel Pantaleo, came five years after Mr. Garner’s dying words — “I can’t breathe” — helped to galvanize the Black Lives Matter protests that led to changes in policing practices in New York and around the country.

Officer Pantaleo had held on to his job as the Staten Island district attorney and the Justice Department declined to charge him with a crime in the face of calls by the Garner family and their supporters that the city punish him and other officers involved.

Commissioner O’Neill dismissed Officer Pantaleo just over two weeks after a police administrative judge had found him guilty of violating a department ban on chokeholds.

The commissioner gave an emotional explanation laced with sympathy not just for Mr. Garner, but for Officer Pantaleo, and said he had agonized over the decision. He said he might have made similar mistakes if he had been in Mr. Pantaleo’s place, and noted that Mr. Garner should not have resisted arrest when he was stopped and accused of selling untaxed cigarettes.

Still, the commissioner said, Officer Pantaleo had failed to relax a grip on Mr. Garner’s neck after he tackled him to the ground, and his recklessness triggered a fatal asthma attack.

The fact that this took so long, and that the other officers who lied will face no consequences for their actions, is indicative of a profoundly corrupt law enforcement, and criminal justice, syste,

Quote of the Day

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For all this, every time Trump seems headed for the dustbin of history, he bounces up again off the messageless paralysis of his Democratic opposition. When Trump vanquished a giant primary field of Republicans in 2016, Democrats cheered. When they lost the general election, they acted like it was an unrelated surprise event, an outrage to decency itself. They remain ineffective as anything but a punchline to the Trump story.

—Matt Taibbi

The Democratic Party is the Washington Generals of  ……… well ……… Washington.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

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The Portland, Oregon police, last seen colluding with Neo-Nazi white supremacists, has reached new heights in complete f%$#ery when it Photoshoped a booking photo of a suspect in order to get witnesses to pick him out of a photo lineup:

There’s no mistaking the elaborate tattoos that cover Tyrone Lamont Allen’s forehead and right cheek.

But when Portland police suspected Allen was involved in four bank and credit union heists, and none of the tellers reported seeing tattoos on the face of the man who robbed them, police digitally altered Allen’s mugshot.

They covered up every one of his tattoos using Photoshop.

“I basically painted over the tattoos,’’ police forensic criminalist Mark Weber testified. “Almost like applying electronic makeup.’’

Police then presented the altered image of Allen with photos of five similar-looking men to the tellers for identification. They didn’t tell anyone that they’d changed Allen’s photo.

Some of the tellers picked out Allen.

The practice came under fire this week in a federal courtroom in Portland as Allen’s attorney argued that the manipulation allowed police to “rig the outcome” of the photo lineup.

Gee, you think?

Someone should go to jail over this.

They should, but they won’t.

From the Department of About F%$#ing Time

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This program has been documented since before Google bought them, and only now are they taking action:

YouTube is going after an alleged copyright troll using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s (DMCA) provisions, alleging that Christopher Brady used false copyright strikes to extort YouTube creators, harming the company in the process. Now, YouTube is suing Brady, using the DMCA’s provisions against fraudulent takedown claims, seeking compensatory damages and an injunction against future fraudulent claims.

The lawsuit, first spotted by Adweek reporter Shoshana Wodinsky, alleges that Brady sent multiple complaints claiming that a couple of Minecraft gaming YouTubers — “Kenzo” and “ObbyRaidz” — infringed on his copyrighted material in January. (Their legal names were not listed in the lawsuit.) YouTube removed the videos that Brady claimed were infringing on his copyrighted material, as the company does whenever a claim is submitted.

ObbyRaidz was sent a message from Brady, according to the lawsuit, that stated if the YouTuber didn’t pay Brady $150 via PayPal (or $75 in bitcoin), he would issue a third copyright strike. This would essentially terminate ObbyRaidz’ channel and remove all of his videos from the platform. Kenzo was sent a similar message, but Brady requested $300. ObbyRaidz spoke about the situation in a video, noting that he made multiple attempts to get in touch with someone at YouTube but didn’t make any progress.

Of course he couldn’t contact a human being.  That is the primary goal of all Google customer support, which opens up all its platforms to scammers and fraud.

Linkage

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Pretty Much:

Overpriced and Underperforming

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Pathetic

Over a quarter century into the program, the F-35 fleet is still exhibiting abysmal readiness rates.

This ia particularly concerning given that one of the selling points of the mistake jet was increased reliability:

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighters in the operational test fleet at California’s Edwards Air Force Base are suffering from low readiness rates that may threaten the successful completion of the crucial combat-testing phase of the program, as shown in a chart created by the Joint Program Office’s Integrated Test Force and obtained by the Project On Government Oversight (POGO).

The revelation that the F-35 program is struggling to overcome the last hurdle before it can legally move into full-rate production follows numerous recent reports, including by POGO as well as the Government Accountability Office, indicating the most expensive weapon system in history is far from ready to face current or future threats. The 23 aircraft in the test fleet achieved an abysmal “fully mission capable” rate of 8.7 percent in June 2019 according to the chart, which covers December 2018 through mid-July 2019. A fully mission capable aircraft can perform all of its assigned missions, a particularly important readiness measure for multi-mission programs such as the F-35. The June rate was actually an improvement over the previous month, when the fleet managed a rate of just 4.7 percent. Since the beginning of operational testing in December 2018, the fleet has had an average fully mission capable rate of just 11 percent.

The Pentagon’s operational testing director has stated that the test fleet needs an 80 percent availability rate to meet the demanding schedule of the program’s test and evaluation master plan.

The money quote is, “Newer aircraft like the F-22 and F-35 are averaging lower mission capable rates than the legacy aircraft they are slated to replace.”

Our military industrial complex is increasingly dysfunctional, and I fear that it is only a matter of time before it collapses under its own prodigious weight.

Not a Surprise

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Former Google staffer Kevin Cernekee, whose firing has been held up as a victim of Silicon Valley’s liberal bias, is actually a supporter of Richard Spencer and other white supremacists.

So, this guy is not just a conservative, or even a contrarian, he’s a white supremacist, and a supporter of racist violence, which is pretty much a textbook definition of a clear and present danger in the workplace:

When we recently wrote about the myth of anti-conservative bias at the various internet platforms, we got a lot of angry responses from people who insist (very loudly, often with lots of insults and anger, but rarely with any facts or data) that we’re full of shit. We’d be open to believing it if there was any actual support for these claims. But none is ever forthcoming. Indeed, amusingly, some people pointed out that a recent WSJ article about an alleged fired “conservative” engineer at Google, described as a “whistleblower,” was more “proof” that the company has it in for conservatives. Tucker Carlson even had the engineer, Kevin Cernekee, on his show last week to continue to feed the narrative.

………

However, as we’ve pointed out concerning most of the “conservatives” who have had content removed or been banned from social media platforms (as is true in similar situations with liberals and other non-conservatives) there is almost always more to the story — and that “more” is often that these people are not banned or fired or otherwise held back because of their general political views, but because of something much worse. And, in the case of Cernekee, people finally realized that maybe it wasn’t that he was a conservative, but that he wanted to fundraise in support of one of the US’s most well known white supremacists, Richard Spencer.

………

But, yeah, the guy who Trump is holding up as proof that there’s anti-conservative bias at Google is maybe not the best messenger if you’re trying to convince the world that “conservatism” is not the same thing as “white nationalism.” Oh, and it gets worse. The Daily Caller article shows that, despite Cernekee claiming in the WSJ that he was a “mainstream Republican” who “disagrees” with white supremacy, within an internal Google listserve, Cernekee suggested that racist skinheads consider rebranding:

………

Meanwhile, another “conservative” engineer who was also fired from Google, Mike Wacker, has written a barnstormer of a blog post detailing the fairly typical trollish behavior by Cernekee. It’s pretty damning:

So not surprised.

This story always had a hinky smell to it.

Talibaptist

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Seriously, these people are indistinguishable from ISIS:

A week before his re-election last year, state Rep. Matt Shea denied that a leaked manifesto he wrote was a road map for a holy war, one that would pit conservative Christian “patriots” against Muslim and Marxist “terrorists.”

Rather, Shea insisted, the document titled “Biblical Basis for War” contained notes for a scholarly sermon on war in the Old Testament.

But newly leaked emails, first reported by The Guardian on Wednesday, as well as a video on Shea’s public Facebook page, show the Spokane Valley Republican has had close ties with a group called Team Rugged that trained children, teens and men in their early 20s for religious combat.

“The entire purpose behind Team Rugged is to provide patriotic and biblical training on war for young men,” a man identified as the group’s leader, Patrick Caughran, wrote in a July 2016 email to Shea. “Everything about it is both politically incorrect and what would be considered shocking truth to most modern christians. There will be scenarios where every participant will have to fight against one of the most barbaric enemies that are invading our country, Muslims terrorists.”

Props to the Spokane county sheriff though:

Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich, who has urged fellow Republicans to denounce Shea as an extremist, compared Team Rugged to the Hitler Youth of Nazi Germany.

“Any radicalization of youth in such a manner would be very comparable,” Knezovich said in a text message Wednesday.

I did Nazi that coming.

H/t EC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

The Real Question

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Who Protected Epstein for Decades, and Why?

There is significant evidence that elements of the US state security apparatus may have protected Jeffrey Epstein, and his extensive sexual abuse of children, because he was an intelligence gathering asset, either as an informant, or as a “Honey Pot”.

Even if this is not true, it is clear that SOMEONE OR SOMETHING was protecting him, and it behooves us to find out who and what.

Wells Fargo Needs to be Seized as a Criminal Enterprise

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Xavier Einaudi did not want to wait for Wells Fargo to send him a check.

The bank informed Mr. Einaudi that it was closing all 13 of the checking accounts it provided his roofing company, CRV Construction, for a reason it called “confidential.” The letter said the accounts would be closed on June 27, and he would be mailed a check for the balance in his accounts.

Mr. Einaudi went to his branch and collected the money, so he did not have to wait for a check to arrive in the mail. But the accounts did not close on the preset date.

For weeks after the date the bank said the accounts would be closed, it kept some of them active. Payments to his insurer, to Google for online advertising and to a provider of project management software were paid out of the empty accounts in July. Each time, the bank charged Mr. Einaudi a $35 overdraft fee.

Mr. Einaudi called the bank’s customer service line. He went to his local branch. Nobody could help him. “They told me, ‘The accounts are closed out — we cannot do anything,’” he said.

By the middle of July, he owed the bank nearly $1,500.

“I don’t even know what happened,” he said.

Current and former bank employees said Mr. Einaudi got charged because of the way Wells Fargo’s computer system handles closed accounts: An account the customer believes to be closed can stay open if it has a balance, even one below zero. And each time a transaction is processed for an overdrawn account, Wells Fargo tacks on a fee.

This is intentional, not an accident by IT.

Wells Fargo is rotten from top to bottom, and regulators should burn it to the ground.

Think of the Innocent Venture Capitalists!

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How dare a city set minimum standards for pay and disabled accessibility, as well as charging the companies for the congestion that they cause.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating:  Most of the so-called “Disruptive Innovation” out there is either regulatory and legal arbitrage (breaking the law), or monetizing the commons (Making the rest of use pay for their business model):

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who took the helm of the controversial company back in 2017, is known for being pretty unflappable. He was even upbeat during the company’s second quarter earnings call, when he was charged with explaining why Uber posted more than $5 billion in losses in just a few months’ time.

………

The new wave of rule-passing started last summer, when the city instituted the country’s first-ever freeze on for-hire vehicle licenses, barring drivers from registering new cars to drive for the companies. (The freeze exempts wheelchair-accessible and electric vehicles.) In January, Uber and Lyft trips beginning or ending in much of Manhattan got slapped with an extra $2.75 congestion charge. (Taxis got a $2.50 surcharge of their own.) Then, despite a lawsuit from Lyft (and a smaller competitor named Juno), the companies were forced to begin paying drivers $17.22 per hour earlier this year. And a new state law will force the companies to rejigger their fleets to accommodate wheelchair using-passengers more quickly. Phew.

Now, new rules approved by city regulators this month extend the freeze on new Uber and Lyft vehicle licenses in New York indefinitely. (This spring, a judge blocked an Uber lawsuit aimed at stopping it). The rules also cut down on “cruising,” or the time drivers spend waiting for their next rides or driving to their customers, forcing the companies to again rethink how they’re dispatching drivers.

………

The city has symbolic importance, too. Though most other cities don’t have the authority to regulate ride-hail in the way that New York does, many, also sick of traffic, are looking for ways to do so. Some hope to levy fees on the companies, like the kind collected in Chicago, Washington, DC, and, if San Franciscoans decide to pass an upcoming ballot measure, the City by the Bay. Others are attracted to the hard stick of New York’s ride-hail vehicle cap. In the run up to her election, Chicago’s new mayor told a newspaper that she would favor new limits on the number of ride-hail vehicles in the city. (The city’s consumer protection office, which is in charge of regulating ride-hail, did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.)

………

The ride-hail companies have responded to the rules, which they say have been instituted too quickly for anyone to understand their effect, with cat-and-mouse tactics aimed at keeping riders in cars and revenues in pocket. The companies have, for example, raised prices across the city, a move that Uber says has led to stunted ride growth in some low-income neighborhoods.

The ride-hail companies are also changing the way their apps work for New York City drivers, many of whom work full-time because of the city’s more stringent licensing policies. Now, in times of low demand, Lyft limits the number of drivers on the road, giving priority to high-volume drivers who have accepted and completed 90% of their rides, or those who have wheelchair-accessible cars, or those participate in the company’s Express Drive program, which rents vehicles to licensed drivers who don’t own cars. The driver app also now includes a “heat map” showing where rides are in the highest demand, and Lyft has urged drivers searching for rides to go there before turning on their app—urging them, essentially, to drive to where the app needs them without being paid for it, and without Lyft being penalized by both the new driver wage and new cruising rules. Uber sent an email to drivers earlier this month indicating it is also mulling changes to its driver app.

Rather ironically, the effects of unregulated Gypsy cabs like Uber and Lyft, low wages, unsafe vehicles, and congestion, are the very same reason why the medallion system was implemented in many cities in the first place.

Snark of the Day

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WeWork Officially Files To Be The Last IPO

This S-1 filing is a word quilt made up of every bad idea from every IPO of the past five years.

—Dealbreaker

I am used to IPOs for companies that have no path to profitability, but WeWork’s IPO documents admits that its CEO is literally looting the company.

This is a level of bald faced fraud that is extraordinary even by the standards of Silicon Valley.

Kochs Gave Seed Funding to the DLC as Well

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It turns out that Third Way, the corporatist faux Democrats, are being bankrolled by the Koch brothers.

This is not a surprise.

Their political activities are not about political parties, they are about supporting their own self-interest and their own libertarian ideology:

In the fall of 2007, the tide was beginning to turn against free trade, as the ongoing hollowing out of the American middle class was becoming associated with globalization and the offshoring of jobs. Its leading public opponent was the bombastic CNN anchor Lou Dobbs, a proto-Trump whose economic nationalism curdled easily into racism and nativism. Many Democrats, too, were turning sour on free trade. Then-President George W. Bush relied on Republican votes to ram through the Central American Free Trade Agreement in 2005, but future deals were looking far from certain, particularly after Democrats seized control of Congress in the 2006 midterms.

This was a direct threat to Koch Industries, the sprawling business empire long led by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. The fossil-fuel giant’s business has long been based on importing oil from Canadian tar sands, which it refines at its massive Pine Bend plant in Minnesota — and the opposition to free trade threatened to make that business much more costly. The Kochs desperately needed help with Democrats, so they turned to a reliable partner: Third Way.

According to the new book “Kochland,” written by investigative reporter Christopher Leonard, Koch Industries secretly financed a report by Third Way, a corporate-funded think tank with ties to the centrist wing of the Democratic Party. The report, titled “Why Lou Dobbs is Winning” and published in November 2007, was written to promote the free trade agenda to liberals. The white paper explained it would be the first salvo in a yearlong effort to reshape the messaging around trade policy, warning that “a new and powerful populist strain has emerged on both the left and the right of American politics that threatens to turn the nation fearful and inward.”

Third Way did not respond to a request for comment.

………

It may seem odd to see the Koch brothers, who operate today as partisan Republicans, aligning with business-friendly Democrats, but the strategy dates back further. (After publication, Nicholas Gass, a Koch spokesperson, noted that David Koch has stepped away from advocacy and that the Koch strategy is less partisan in its focus than previously.)

A 2001 American Prospect investigation noted that Koch Industries was a member of the executive council of the Democratic Leadership Council, founded in 1985 by centrist Democrats to combat the left inside the party. Hall, thanked in the report, was a member of the DLC’s event committee at the time.

This is the least surprising news that I’ve heard in a long time.