Category: Business

Free at Last, Free at Last, Thank God Almighty We Are Free at Last!

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Today, the Windows 10 free upgrade offer and its associated nagware ends. I am so ready to be done with this crap:

Microsoft has offered its free upgrade to Windows 10 for one year to the day now. Although most users interested in the upgrade have probably already taken it, anyone who has been putting off the move to Windows 10 has mere hours left to install the new OS.

The free upgrade to Windows 10 officially ends July 29 11:59 PM UTC-10. That translates to 2:59 AM PDT and 5:59 AM EST July 30. According to a Microsoft representative, all upgrades must be completely finished prior to this time.

BTW, if you are interested, there are a number of law suits suits against Microflaccid’s remarkably persistent and deceptive attempts to force an upgrade on unsuspecting users.

Your Daily Schadenfreude

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Almost two years ago, I mocked hedge fund manager Bill Ackman’s jihad against Herbalife.

The nickel tour was that he went heavily short on Herbalife, and then he aggressively lobbied regulators to shut the company’s business model down.

Ackman’s actions were a primer on how Wall Street types used the political and regulatory processes in an attempt to enrich themselves.

He asserted that Herbalife’s business model was essentially a pyramid scheme, and now the FTC has ruled against some of the supplement manufacturer’s business practices, but the ruling was limited, and Ackman’s short bets will not pay off:

For nearly four years, Herbalife has been locked in a fierce Wall Street battle with billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman. But on Friday the dietary supplements seller scored an enormous victory in this fight.

The Federal Trade Commission said on Friday that it had charged Herbalife with deceiving consumers into believing they could earn substantial money selling diet nutritional supplements, but it did not determine that Herbalife is a pyramid scheme or fraud like Ackman had alleged for years. Herbalife said on Friday it will pay $200 million in a settlement with the FTC. The settlement will force Herbalife to change some of its key business practices, but the regulatory investigation of Herbalife will not end with the type of knock-out blow that Ackman clearly had hoped.

The FTC did make strong accusations against Herbalife, claiming that Herbalife’s compensation structure was unfair because it “rewards distributors for recruiting others to join and purchase products in order to advance in the marketing program, rather than in response to actual retail demand for the product, causing substantial economic injury to many of its distributors.”

………

Still, the FTC settlement looks to be another big setback for Ackman, whose Pershing Square hedge fund is under pressure after suffering large losses over the last 12 months, mostly from a disastrous big bet on Valeant Pharmaceuticals, a company with a stock that has crashed. Pershing Square has a long-running and very large short position in Herbalife.

………

Ackman’s Pershing Square Holdings has already plunged by 19.1% this year after falling by 20.5% in 2015, and Ackman’s assets under management have fallen sharply. Ackman has suggested that he would continue to pursue his crusade against Herbalife even if his effort to get U.S. regulators to shut the company down was unsuccessful. He once said he would go “to the end of the earth” in his battle against the company and became teary eyed on a stage when describing the damage he believed it had done.

………

Michael Johnson, Herbalife’s longtime CEO who has been at the forefront of the company’s battle against Ackman, argued the settlement was a big win. The company also announced that it had reached a $3 million settlement of an investigation conducted by the Attorney General of Illinois that had also hung over the company. “The settlements are an acknowledgment that our business model is sound and underscore our confidence in our ability to move forward successfully, otherwise we would not have agreed to the terms,” Johnson said in a statement.

It’s nice to see a self styled hedgie “geniuses” taken down a few notches.

Oh Crap

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One of GM’s suppliers just went chapter 11, and it has the potential to shut down automobile assembly across General Motors:

A Massachusetts supplier that filed for bankruptcy protection last week could disrupt production at nearly every General Motors North American plant in coming days, according to documents filed in bankruptcy court.

Clark-Cutler-McDermott, based in Franklin, Mass., supplies acoustic insulation and interior trim products for automobiles, textiles and other transportation manufacturers. But GM is its largest customer and Clark-Cutler-McDermott is losing more than $30,000 a day — and more than $12 million since 2013 — partly because what GM pays for those components “usually decreases annually,” CEO James McDermott stated in a court filing.

But GM has no other supplier for the parts CCM provided and any interruption in delivery of those parts would cost the automaker “millions of dollars per day per plant,” GM said in another filing.

GM obtained a restraining order last month compelling CCM to continue supplying those items specified in its purchase orders with GM. But that order expired July 1. CCM filed for protection under Chapter 11 of federal bankruptcy law on July 7.

………

In a separate dispute, CCM wants to use $1.9 million of cash it held when it filed for bankruptcy to pay its workers. GM contends it provided most of that cash as part of its temporary restraining order.

GM doesn’t object to CCM paying workers for what was produced before the bankruptcy filing, but it does not want its cash used to pay workers if they aren’t making GM’s parts.

This could get very messy very quickly.

A lot of plants are retooling for the new model year right now, but if they lack the parts to reopen, we are going to see some major issues with the economy just as the presidential election ramps up, particularly in the Midwest.

And the Con Continues to Unravel

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Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has been banned from running labs for 2 years:

In a severe turn of events for former blood testing darling Theranos, which has been defending itself against accusations of wrongdoing for months, U.S. regulators slapped strong sanctions against the company and its owner.

Theranos said in a statement issued late Thursday that the certificate for its lab in Newark, Calif., had been revoked, its approval to receive Medicare and Medicaid payments “cancelled,” and that it would have to pay an unspecified fine. In addition, chief executive Elizabeth Holmes, the company’s founder, will be banned from owning, operating or directing a lab for at least two years.

………

Theranos was perhaps the most celebrated of these young companies. Holmes was at one time compared to Apple’s Steve Jobs, and the company’s valuation was estimated to be a staggering $9 billion at its peak.

I still don’t understand how this company was ever seen as a success.

Their technology never worked., but supposedly sophisticated investors showered them with hundreds of millions of dollars.

This is nuts.

This is the Least Surprising News in ……… Ever

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One of the theories in modern economics is that people will engage in behavior that will provide them with a perceived benefit.

This is literally Economics 101. (Really. It’s in the text books.)

It’s called Rational Choice Theory, and it is a bedrock of Neoliberal (free market mousketeer) economics.

One of the blind spots amongst the followers of Rational Choice Theory is that whenever excessive executive compensation or control fraud is brought up, they suggest that managers operate in the best interests of the shareholders, and further argue that their bloated remuneration is what leads them to take this course.

Of course this has never happened in the history of ……… ever:

It won’t surprise any market-watcher to learn that in the run-up to earnings season, companies tend to lower the bar for top and bottom line performance, thereby giving themselves better odds of exceeding analysts’ expectations.

 However, a new working paper suggests that the sins of omission that occur during the corporate “cheating” season, as it was dubbed by Societe Generale Global Head of Quantitative Strategy Andrew Lapthorne, are far more insidious.

 Authors Kenneth Froot, Namho Kang, Gideon Ozik, and Ronnie Sadka conclude that managers mislead analysts and shareholders during earnings reports, and that their penchant for massaging expectations downwards may be employed in order to open up a window to buy their stock on the cheap in the near future.

It’s not just about buying stocks, its about manipulating the price of stock options.

The researchers developed two hypotheses: either managers make disclosures in a timely matter (and their forward-looking information is quickly reflected in stock prices) or members of the C-Suite actively “lean against the wind” to understate good or bad news — or even offer the completely wrong impression of what’s transpired since the last quarter ended.

 Their findings suggest that guidance (or “bundled forecasts”) provided by managers as well as the general tone of the conference call (analyzed using a “bag of words” approach) “point toward rejection of Timely Disclosure in favor of the Leaning Against the Wind alternative.”

“Leaning against the wind,” huh?

I would call it lying, and some would call it fraud, but I am an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit!*

*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

Not the Onion: Hillary Clinton Proposes Welfare for Rich White Boys

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She has now proposed that entitled rich kids who launch startups will get 3 years forbearance on their student loans:

Hillary Clinton has a bold plan to ensure the bright future of every hardworking American who has the considerable resources required to start his or her own company: three years of student debt deferrals, for every single startup founder. Wonderful news for our striving technocrat class—they need all the help they can get.

………

What else do we need? Less debt, obviously. And who are the people most in need of debt forgiveness? The sort of people—overwhelmingly highly educated, white, male people—who launch startups.

Enter Hillary’s plan:

Hillary is committed to breaking down barriers and leveling the playing field for entrepreneurs and innovators who are launching their own start-ups. Hillary will allow entrepreneurs to put their federal student loans into a special status while they get their new ventures off the ground. For millions of young Americans, this would mean deferment from having to make any payments on their student loans for up to three years—zero interest and zero principal—as they work through the critical start-up phase of new enterprises. Hillary will explore a similar deferment incentive not just to founders of enterprises, but to early joiners – such as the first 10 or 20 employees.

What’s more, the economic benefits will trickle down to those of us who don’t have the courage or inheritance (“more than 80% of funding for new businesses comes from personal savings and friends and family”) to start our own hovercraft-sharing services and toothpaste disruption ventures. Startups, with their famously long lifespans and reliable revenue models, will eventually provide jobs (well, independent contractor agreements) for all of us down the road, as long as they don’t shutter due to lack of users, like Washboard did, or succumb to an overwhelming tide of warranted criticism, like SketchFactor.

This is, of course, absurd, but it is a window into who Hillary Clinton’s views on society and virtue, and as Lambert Strether pithily notes,  it ain’t a pretty picture:

Exactly as with health care (“never, ever”), Clinton seeks to destroy education as a public good. Therefore, she seeks, like a Victorian, to sort the worthy creditors, from the unworthy (and to create another complex administrative apparatus filed with credentialed 10%-ers (her base (ka-ching)) to do the sorting for her.

Her statements on single payer mirror this, as does her comments on Sanders’ tuition proposal, where she wanted to establish a whole new bureaucracy, and the attendant costs, and humiliation to the recipients.

Hillary Clinton in her teens supported Barry Goldwater.  She has described herself as a former “Goldwater Girl.”

It looks like you can get the girl out of the Goldwater, but you can’t get the Goldwater out of the girl.

I am so glad that I live in Maryland, where my vote does not count.

Uber Gets Even More Evil

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First Uber has redefined it app to conceal when it charges surge prices to its users:

An Uber exec recently disclosed that the company knows when you are more likely to pay surge pricing. (It’s when your phone battery is just about to die.) But with a potential app change Uber is rolling out, this might not matter, because you probably won’t notice that surge is even in effect.

The app change, The Verge reports, would eliminate the blue-and-black circle that pops up before you hail a ride, letting you know that your trip will cost you two or three times what it usually does. On that screen, users also have to manually input the surge percentage, a sort of formal acknowledgement they know the ride will cost extra. (Like guac.)

Instead, now when you order a ride, you’ll see a set fare, a small line of text letting you know there’s an additional cost, and no second confirmation or indication of the surge multiplier.

Did you notice that especially evil bit there? It jacks up the rates when it knows that your battery is about to die?  That is deeply evil on a level  that buggers the mind:

Other than the company’s notoriously lax attitude about background checks, allegations of drivers kidnapping and raping riders, and that, um, interesting new logo, the worst thing about Uber is surge pricing. And, not surprisingly, the company has figured out exactly when you are more likely to pay double or triple the cost of your ride: when your phone battery is low.

This is a company with a multi-billion dollar valuation, which means that this is a company that our society (or at least our financial system) lionizes.

This is a particularly searing indictment of the values we hold as a society.

This Reminds Me of the Railroad Industry

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I worked at GE Transportation System in the early 1990s aas a locomotive systems engineer.

After years of contraction and decay, they were recapitalizing.

Standard line was that they had gotten to the point where they had to recapitalize, but it was something more basic: The Wall Street types who believed that railroads were dying had finally looted all they could, and they had been replaced by management that actually believed in railroads.

Freight rail in the Us has been on a generally upward path since.

Well, we are seeing the same thing in the newspaper business these days, with the jargon of the official launch of Tronc, formerly Tribune Publishing being a particularly egregious example.

As Allison Hantschel observes, “Media Companies Hate News, the Internet, Employees and their Own Customers:

Or, as the Hip Happening Kids Today call it, #Tronc:

CasSelle: We produce tons of great content every single day. We’re really focused on how we we deliver it to people in a way they want to consume it more and more. 


Vasquez: One of the key ways we’re going to harness the power of our journalism is to have an optimization group. This Tronc team, will work with all of the local markets, to harness the power of our local journalism, feed it into a funnel, and then optimize it so we reach the biggest global audience possible.
Yes, Tronc shall take the corn feed of journalism and funnel it into the optimization-group goose, to make delicious foie gras that will be consumed by the digital natives.

It arguably gets worse from there. And what’s genuinely sad is that people who talk like this typically don’t understand how the internet actually works—that’s why they lean on buzzwords—or have any notion of how to communicate with journalists, who tend to bristle at this stuff.

These are internal employee videos designed to PUMP YOU UP about your newfound place not at Tribune Publishing, a recognizable name that at least still sounded impressive, but at Tronc, which sounds like you stepped on a duck.

I understand that conventional journalism in general, and the newspaper business in particular, faces challenges, but the bigger problem is that upper management does not believe in the product: Journalism.  (Of course, there is also the fact that Sam Zell ran the company into the ground).

Our MBA/Wall Street/Private Equity management “Culture” does nothing but loot.

Finally a Small Reason to Buy Windows 10

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Microsoft has added a (still Beta) feature to Windows 10, which will allow users to do a clean install of the OS to remove crapware that manufacturers install in their PC’s:

Windows 10 already includes ways to clear out applications and data to repair misbehaving systems or prepare them to be sold, courtesy of the Refresh and Reset features added in Windows 8. Microsoft is now adding a third option: a new refresh tool.

Currently available only for Windows Insiders, the new tool fetches a copy of Windows online and performs a clean installation. The only option is whether or not you want to preserve your personal data. Any other software that’s installed will be blown away, including the various applications and utilities that OEMs continue to bundle with their systems.

This is an upgrade from Microsoft that actually is an improvement, as opposed to, for example, the abomination that is ribbon.

Panglossian Bullsh%$

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I just love the techno-utopians who seem to think that your car spying on your driving habits and phoning home will create a travel paradise,

The author thinks that Tesla invading your privacy is the bee’s knees:

………

The majority of cars sold in the U.S. now have event data recorders—sometimes described as black boxes—that log data to be examined in the event of an accident.

Most of those devices don’t record as much detail as Tesla does, or send it out over the Internet. But Internet connectivity in cars is becoming more common, and carmakers are keen to make use of whatever data they can get from our vehicles.

Only about a quarter of new cars have the necessary technology today, but that’s expected to reach over 90 percent by 2020. Companies such as GM are open about their interest in expanding the range of data they collect on driver actions to open up new business opportunities.

One big motivation for car companies is to get into the insurance business. Some insurance companies already offer discounts if you install a device in your car with sensors that monitor your driving habits, and GM has partnerships with several that tap into its OnStar system. But insurance companies could have much to gain by getting more detailed data as Tesla does, so they can see not only the car’s motion but every action of the driver.

The word for this is dystopian.

Big Brother, Big Auto, whatever.

Your Daily Schadenfreude

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Elizabeth Holmes, CEO of Theranos has just had her personal wealth recomputed by Fortune. Yesterday,   it was $4,500,000,000.00 today it is $0.00:

Last year, Elizabeth Holmes topped the FORBES list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women with a net worth of $4.5 billion. Today, FORBES is lowering our estimate of her net worth to nothing. Theranos had no comment.

Our estimate of Holmes’ wealth is based entirely on her 50% stake in Theranos, the blood-testing company she founded in 2003 with plans of revolutionizing the diagnostic test market. Theranos shares are not traded on any stock market; private investors purchased stakes in 2014 at a price that implied a $9 billion valuation for the company.

Since then, Theranos has been hit with allegations that its tests are inaccurate and is being investigated by an alphabet soup of federal agencies. That, plus new information indicating Theranos’ annual revenues are less than $100 million, has led FORBES to come up with a new, lower estimate of Theranos’ value.

FORBES spoke to a dozen venture capitalists, analysts and industry experts and concluded that a more realistic value for Theranos is $800 million, rather than $9 billion. That gives the company credit for its intellectual property and the $724 million that it has raised, according to VC Experts, a venture capital research firm. It also represents a generous multiple of the company’s sales, which FORBES learned about from a person familiar with Theranos’ finances.

At such a low valuation, Holmes’ stake is essentially worth nothing. Theranos investors own preferred shares, which means they get paid back before Holmes, who owns common stock. According to VC Experts, investors in Theranos own a particular kind of preferred equity, called participating preferred shares, which take precedence to common stock in the event of a liquidation. FORBES is not aware of any plans to liquidate. If that were to happen, participating preferred investors would get their money back and more before Holmes gets a cent.

We now know the difference between a typical Silicon Valley company and one that actually has to produce a real physical product:  The emperor’s new clothes are revealed far sooner for the companies who make actuall “stuff”.

It appears that the medical testing industry does not lend itself to the “long con.”

The Secret Allure of the Sharing Economy

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You can form a big company and create pseudo free agents who are free to be bigots:

This is a story of an Airbnb experience I recently went through. I met this awesome lady Crissie in my Facebook group. Super nice lady, successful business owner, beautiful family, and they live in a small town in Idaho.

Crissie would post these amazing videos of the land and the snow, and the mountains and trees, and I told her one day I would come visit.

It‘s so absolutely beautiful there!

………

I like my space when I travel, and thought it would be fun to find a cool cabin.

………

Everything was set! As usual, I included a bit of info about myself on the Airbnb listing to put the host at ease

………

First response: Dang! No luck, even though the dates were available all of a sudden, the host said she was going to use the place.

………

No biggie, I’m really flexible. Crissie told me late June is good as well, so I rebooked for June.

CANCELLED! Well damn. So it wasn’t really the dates—the host cancelled my new request and ignored all future messages.

So I had a white friend book for my same dates, and all of a sudden her plans changed back. Approved immediately!

There are some similar stories and links described at the article.

I rather expect to find the same thing in all the similar apps.

My guess is that a black man finds getting an Uber or Lyft just as hard as finding an old fashioned taxi.

In fact, it might be harder, because there is no taxi commission collecting data on fares and origination and destination points.

That’s why this sh%$ needs real regulation with teeth.

This Has Fail Written All Over It

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Some whiz kid (as in urine for brains) at Google has decided that they can simply profile you well enough to do know who you are:

Google will begin testing an alternative to passwords next month, in a move that could do away with complicated logins for good.

The new feature, introduced to developers at the company’s I/O conference, is called the Trust API, and will initially be tested with “several very large financial institutions” in June, according to Google’s Daniel Kaufman.

Kaufman is the head of Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group, where the Trust API was first created under the codename Project Abacus. Introduced last year, Abacus aims to kill passwords not through one super-secure replacement, but by mixing together multiple weaker indicators into one solid piece of evidence that you are who you say you are.

Among the pieces of evidence that Google suggests the Trust API could use are some obvious biometric indicators, such as your face shape and voice pattern, as well as some less obvious ones: how you move, how you type and how you swipe on the screen. With the service continually running in the background of the phone, it can keep track of whether those indicators match how it knows you use your phone.

Individually, it would be ludicrous to use any of those methods to secure web services. Even facial recognition, now built in to many Android phones, is significantly less secure than a fingerprint scanner, according to Google’s own metrics. But combining them can, the company suggests, result in something more than 10 times as secure as a fingerprint.

This is a verification system that would fail when, for example, you have a migraine coming on, or when you have fallen and broken your wrist, or when you are shaken up following a car crash, then you cannot unlock your phone.

I understand why Google likes this,  “With the service continually running in the background of the phone,” it means that they can invade your privacy, and sell your data to identity thieves even more efficiently.

For the rest of us, it does not make a whole lot of sense.

This Is Either a Scam, or This Will Become a Scam

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The latest thing in crowd funding is something called a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) and my nose tells me that this is, or is going to be, a new way for people to have their money stolen:

We’ve flagged cryptocurrency enthusiasts’ distinctly mystic beliefs in spontaneously emergent headless organisms before.

Now something called the “Decentralised Autonomous Organisation” — The DAO, not to be mistaken with Tao — project has begun to attract actual column inches in mainstream publications, albeit in keeping with the new style of journalism… i.e. devoid of critical evaluation and taking all claims at face value.

The DAO is currently raising Ether tokens (the pre-mined currency of the Ethereum blockchain, itself funded via a bitcoin capital raising) — $110m at mark-to-market rates today — in exchange for DAO, a token which “grants its holder voting and ownership rights.” As Techcrunch put it, holders of DAO “can use their tokens to vote on big governance issues (akin to traditional shareholders) but also on minute details of how The DAO spends its resources. In this way, token holders have total control over The DAO’s assets and its actions.”

The DAO explicitly states its tokens are not a form of equity — even if to the average bystander everything about the DAO token looks, smells and feels like common equity. (Perhaps the feeling is that if you dazzle them with “tokens” instead of stocks, those pesky unlicensed stock solicitation rules won’t apply? We’re not sure regulators will see it that way.)

We won’t go on about how the world has had 100 years (or more) of feedback with respect to what happens when you remove the professional executive/management function from corporate identity, or transfer all day-to-day decision making to amateur committees. Any cursory review of modern history (or a quick read of Animal Farm) will flag up the problems: indecision paralysis; wasted time and resources on voting and bureaucracy; entirely non-diplomatic means of grabbing power just to get things done; uninformed decision making; exploitation of the ignorant; tragedies of the commons scenarios and last but not least: a lack of skin-in-the-game accountability for poor decision making leading to post-facto due diligence processes with dire consequences for capital, human resources and environments.

We won’t even mention that $110m raised in illiquid tokens based on mark-t0-market valuations is akin to a paper profit only, and might create a helluva Ether currency collapse if it’s actually spent on resources in the real-world…

I don’t know if this is a scam now, but I do know that it it isn’t, it will be, and it will be sooner than later, because this is what happens when people set up a business based on self delusion.

Something to Hide

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Purdue Pharma, best known as the manufacturer of the opiate Oxycontin, has been fighting tooth and nail to keep their marketing tactics from the public, but today a judge ordered those records unsealed:

Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, lost a legal battle Wednesday to keep records and testimony about its bestselling and widely abused painkiller secret.

A judge in Pike County, Kentucky, a region hard-hit by prescription painkiller abuse, granted a motion by a news outlet to unseal records from a lawsuit by the state accusing the company of fraud, conspiracy and negligence in the development and marketing of the drug.

Purdue settled that suit in December for $24 million without any admission of wrongdoing.

Circuit Judge Steven Combs granted the request of Boston Globe-affiliated investigative health news outlet STAT to unseal the documents, writing: “The Court sees no higher value than the public (via the media) having access to these discovery materials so that the public can see the facts for themselves.”

The judge said the order would not take effect for 32 days, allowing Purdue time to appeal.

Let’s be here:  Purdue has been aware of its potential for abuse and its addictive properties for a very long time, and it is clear that they used these to increase sales.

They are no different from the corner drug pusher, and seeing their marketing exposed to the light of day, with the resulting social pressure and prosecutions, would please me no end.

They Finally Lost One

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The City Council of Austin passed regulations on ride sharing services, and Uber and Lyft spent millions in an attempt to override the vote through a plebiscite, and lost:

Uber and Lyft spent nearly $9 million on a May 7 special election in Austin, Texas. They offered free rides to the polls, and texted users asking for their support. They pulled out all the stops in a political playbook that has worked in almost every other city in the US.

For once, it wasn’t enough.

Voters in the Texan capital came out against Proposition 1, upholding ride-hailing regulations that the city council passed in December. The rules are stricter than ones that Uber and Lyft face in other jurisdictions: They require drivers for the services to pass fingerprint-based background checks, to identify their cars with company emblems, and to avoid picking up and dropping off passengers in certain lanes.

That is to say, exactly the same requirements as exist for the taxis.

………

Uber, I think decided, they were going to make Austin an example to the nation,” said David Butts, a local political consultant who helped coordinate the campaign against Proposition 1, according to a report in the Austin American-Statesman. “And Austin made Uber an example to the nation.”

Ahead of the vote, both Uber and Lyft had threatened to leave Austin should the proposition fail. Austin mayor Steve Adler invited them to stay despite the election results.

………

The nay vote on Proposition 1 is all the more crushing for Uber and Lyft considering the lopsided amount of money they spent in favor of it. The companies invested a combined $8.7 million to support the proposition via their lobbying committee, Ridesharing Works for Austin, an unprecedented sum in Austin local politics. That dwarfed the $132,000 that Proposition 1’s opponents strung together from about 500 individual contributions, according to campaign finance filings.

………

Uber and Lyft have cultivated the impression that their services are indispensable to cities. But Uber in particular has also spun itself as politically unbeatable. It has the money; it has the policy talent; it has the app that makes reaching potential voters as simple as sending a text or push notification to their phones.

………

That’s a potent narrative. With the loss in Austin, it’s starting to come undone.

The myth of inevitability and invincibility is central to Uber’s and Lyft’ssuccess.

It is what allows them to move into new markets, break the law, cheat their employees, place their customers at risk, and create a multi-billion dollar stock valuation.

It may not be the beginning of the end for the lawless players in the “sharing economy”, but it might be the end of the beginning.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen!

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What a surprise. People are using facial recognition to stalk porn stars. I expect this to extend to non porn stars shortly:

This story originally appeared on Global Voices Advocacy

The developers behind “FindFace,” which uses facial recognition software to match random photographs to people’s social media pages on Vkontakte, say the service is designed to facilitate making new friends. Released in February this year, FindFace started gaining popularity in March after a software engineer named Andrei Mima wrote about using the service to track down two women he photographed six years earlier on a street in St. Petersburg. (They’d asked him to take a picture of them, but he never got their contact information, so he wasn’t able to share it with them at the time.)

From the start, FindFace has raised privacy concerns. (Even in his glowing recommendation, Mima addressed fears that the service further erodes people’s freedoms in the age of the Internet.) In early April, a young artist named Egor Tsvetkov highlighted how invasive the technology can be, photographing random passengers on the St. Petersburg subway and matching the pictures to the individuals’ Vkontakte pages using FindFace.

“In theory,” Tsvetkov told RuNet Echo, “this service could be used by a serial killer or a collector trying to hunt down a debtor.”

It ain’t just the government that is creating a panopticon.  The private sector is moving there even faster.

I Will Dine on His Tears, and They Will Be Sweet

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It looks like I Heart Radio, the company known as Clear Channel before Bain Capital looted it, is on the edge of collapse, and it looks like Rush Limbaugh will be facing a far less generous contract when it is renewed:

One of the favorite pastimes for sports fans is commiserating over the worst contract their home team ever made; guffawing over management’s decision to waste tens of millions of dollars for a player who never justified the huge payday. (See: Gilbert Arenas.)

For talk radio, there’s probably only one contract that enters that realm of notoriety: Rush Limbaugh’s eight-year, $400-million deal, signed in the summer of 2008 with his longtime radio employer Premiere Radio Networks.

Owned by Clear Channel Communications, which has since changed its name to iHeartRadio, Premiere’s Limbaugh deal instantly dwarfed any payout in AM/FM history. (Only Howard Stern’s contract with Sirius was larger.) The contract, which included a staggering $100 million signing bonus, never panned out as the wheels began to come off Limbaugh’s radio empire.
This year, his contract is up and the timing couldn’t be worse. The talker is facing ratings hurdles, aging demographics, and an advertising community that increasingly views him as toxic, thanks in part to his days-long sexist meltdown over Sandra Fluke in 2012. (He’s also stumbling through the GOP primary season.)

Concurrently, iHeartRadio’s parent company, iHeartMedia, is heading to court, teetering on bankruptcy. The once-dominant radio behemoth is saddled with $20 billion in debt, thanks to a misguided leveraged takeover engineered by Bain Capital in 2008, the same year the radio giant inked its disastrous Limbaugh deal.

I am so amused that in its own way, Mitt Rmoney’s bucket shop is involved in Limbaugh’s downfall.

I am VERY amused.