Category: Business

I Could Care Less about the Stanley Cup Playoffs

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Earlier today, my wife mentioned that the Stanley Cup playoffs were starting tonight.

She is a hockey fan, specifically the New York Rangers.

I am most assuredly not a follower of the sport.

Upon observing my lack of enthusiasm, she said, “You could care less about the Stanley Cup Playoffs.”

I corrected her, and said, “No, I couldn’t care less about the Stanley Cup Playoffs,” because this is the proper linguistic formulation to describe supreme apathy.

It turns, as is often the case, she was right, and I was wrong.

There are things that I care about a LOT less than specifically.

The I saw a report about the tweets of Craig Mazin, who was Ted Cruz’s roommate in their freshman year at Princeton.

He has made a bit of a hobby tweeting about how Cruz was back in the day, and it is clear that he has never been a fan of his.

Well, in response to accounts of Cruz’ running the defense of the Texas’ ban on “Sexual Appliances”, Mr. Mazin tweeted the following:

Ted Cruz thinks people don’t have a right to “stimulate their genitals.” I was his college roommate. This would be a new belief of his.

— Craig Mazin (@clmazin) April 13, 2016

Sharon was right, I was wrong, I care about this a LOT less than the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

I really did not need that image in my head.

Snark of the Day

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I feel this may well be a turning point. It’s one thing to lose a 12-minute version of “Sherry Darling,” or the first-round of the 2072 NCAA Men’s Division I basketball tournament. But when the state legislature finds itself besieged by hundreds of angry, blue-balled, hairy-palmed, half-blind preachers, that’s when you’ll really see things move. Venceremos, my comrades!

—Charlier Pierce on XHamster blocking porn viewers from North Carolina from viewing their pr0n in response to the state’s anti-gay laws.

Heh.

PayPal to Homophobic Bigots in North Carolina: Drop Dead

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2 weeks ago, Paypal announced it was beginning a major expansion in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Following the signing of an anti-gay bill into law by the governor, PayPal has canceled these plans:

Two weeks ago, PayPal announced plans to open a new global operations center in Charlotte and employ over 400 people in skilled jobs.  In the short time since then, legislation has been abruptly enacted by the State of North Carolina that invalidates protections of the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender citizens and denies these members of our community equal rights under the law.

The new law perpetuates discrimination and it violates the values and principles that are at the core of PayPal’s mission and culture.  As a result, PayPal will not move forward with our planned expansion into Charlotte.

This decision reflects PayPal’s deepest values and our strong belief that every person has the right to be treated equally, and with dignity and respect. These principles of fairness, inclusion and equality are at the heart of everything we seek to achieve and stand for as a company. And they compel us to take action to oppose discrimination.

Our decision is a clear and unambiguous one. But we do regret that we will not have the opportunity to be a part of the Charlotte community and to count as colleagues the skilled and talented people of the region. As a company that is committed to the principle that everyone deserves to live without fear of discrimination simply for being who they are, becoming an employer in North Carolina, where members of our teams will not have equal rights under the law, is simply untenable.

While we will seek an alternative location for our operations center, we remain committed to working with the LGBT community in North Carolina to overturn this discriminatory legislation, alongside all those who are committed to equality.

We will stand firm in our commitment to equality and inclusion and our conviction that we can make a difference by living and acting on our values.  It’s the right thing to do for our employees, our customers, and our communities.

Dan Schulman, President and CEO, PayPal

Good for them, and a well deserved bad for North Carolina.

Why You Cannot Rely on the Cloud

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Google, or more accurately its evil twin Alphabet, bought the a leader in the “smart home” industry, Nest.  

Flush with money, Nest bought competitor Revolv, but they didn’t want the technology, they just wanted the staff.

And now Google/Alphabet/Nest has announced that they will be shutting down all Revolv home control units.

I don’t mean that they will stop supporting the units, I mean that they will shut the units down.

They will go dark.

They are now door stops:

Nest, a smart-home company owned by Google’s holding company Alphabet, is dropping support for a line of products — and will make customers’ existing devices completely useless.

It’s a move that has infuriated some customers, and raises worrying questions about the rights of consumers in the ever-more connected future.

In October 2014, Nest acquired Revolv, a smart-home device maker, nine months after it was itself bought by Google. The terms of the Revolv deal were not disclosed, and as Re/code reported at the time, the deal was an acqui-hire — buying a company for its talent rather than its products or users.

Nest cofounder Matt Rogers praised Revolv as “the best team out there,” and Revolv immediately stopped selling its $300 (£210) home hub, which could be used to control lights, doors, alarms, and so on.

Revolv’s team was to work on “Work with Nest,” Nest’s API program, but customers’ existing Revolv products continued to be supported — until recently.

Just over a month ago, Revolv updated its website to announce that it is closing down completely, pulling the plug on its existing products in May. “We’re pouring all our energy into Works with Nest and are incredibly excited about what we’re making,” wrote Revolv founders Tim Enwall and Mike Soucie. “Unfortunately, that means we can’t allocate resources to Revolv anymore and we have to shut down the service.”

Shutting down Revolv does not mean that Nest is ceasing to support its products, leaving them vulnerable to bugs and other unpatched issues. It means that the $300 devices and accompanying apps will stop working completely.

As one customer puts it, Google parent company Alphabet is “intentionally bricking” the devices on May 15, 2016.

Arlo Gilbert, CEO of medical app company Televero, is infuriated by Nest’s decision. He has written a Medium post about the impending closure, labelling it a “pretty blatant ‘f–k you’ to every person who trusted in them and bought their hardware.”

I’ve experienced this on a smaller scale, when “upgrades” to blogger have made the product less capable and less powerful.

But this is just a blog, and until such time I own/rent my own server, I have to live with this.

If you let Google or cloud type company control your business or your phone, they are going to f%$# like a drunk sorority girl, whether it is product shutdowns, or upgrades that you hate.

I still use Office 2003, but if I used Google docs, I would be forced to work when they changed their interface and went with their low contrast “flat design”, and it would no longer support Office 2003 formats.

If you want to control how you get your work done, you cannot rely on the cloud.

A Real Estate Developer Does the Right Thing

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In response to larcenous demands from the incumbent (monopoly) connectivity providers, the developer of Jasper Highlands built and wired up his own gigibit ISP to serve his new development:

Tennessee is at the center of a nationwide battle over whether cities and towns should be allowed to build broadband networks without facing restrictions that help private ISPs avoid competition from the public sector.

But with a lawsuit and legislative battle over a Tennessee state law still pending, one home developer decided to build his own ISP. John “Thunder” Thornton of Chattanooga needed to install high-speed Internet for “his mountaintop residential development in Marion County,” but was unable to get affordable service from AT&T or Charter Communications, a Chattanooga Times Free Press article said yesterday. He also couldn’t get service from a Chattanooga electric utility that also provides Internet because the state law prevents it from expanding to nearby areas that lack fast, affordable service.

To solve the problem, Thornton “spent more than $400,000 to build his own fiber network and link it with a power cooperative in Stevenson, Ala., where fast broadband is available,” the article said. He announced yesterday that his Jasper Highlands community in Jasper, Tennessee, “is now able to offer high-speed, gigabit-per-second Internet service for all home sites in his 3,000-acre complex.”

Thornton’s ISP is called Hi-Tech Data. It sells 100Mbps fiber service for $70 a month and gigabit service for $80 a month. Phone service is available for another $30 a month. Since the existing fiber didn’t go all the way to the Jasper Highlands development, Hi-Tech Data deployed its own fiber to cover the final 2,000 feet.

This is a natural consequence of the rent seeking behaviors engaged in by the baby Bells, cable companies, and the rest of the incumbent providers.

It’s yet another case where we have actors whose primary business model is to sit athwart the productive work of others, and extract rents, which they use to pay off politicians so that they maintain their privileged position.

Didn’t Expect This to Appear in Fortune Magazine

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This essay eviscerates the claims by the finance industry that it needs to cheat its customers to function:

There’s a horrendous lie being told by the brokerage industry and its army of lobbying groups. It goes something like this:

“Middle-class Americans are not worth serving if we can’t charge them egregious fees and sell them products that they do not need.”

They’re not using that exact language, but this is precisely what they’re saying. This message disgusts me personally and I’m in a unique position to comment on it professionally. As I documented in my book Backstage Wall Street, the business model of selling investment products to investors is hopelessly rife with conflicts.

………

In other industries, higher-priced products are typically superior in both quality and efficacy—think luxury watches and cars, or the difference between a roadside motel and the Ritz-Carlton. With financial services products, however, it works in exactly the opposite way. Virtually every single piece of academic research ever produced on the topic says that the less you pay for an investment product, and the simpler it is, the better off you’ll be over the long-term. 

Wall Street knows this for a fact. It’s undeniable that high fees and excessive trading costs damage the long-term potential of a retirement account and work against investors. Unfortunately, the brokerage business is predicated on selling the higher cost solutions because that’s where the profit margins are. The incentives paid by fund companies to brokerage firm sales forces across the country are a cancer that must be rooted out. This built-in conflict between advisor and client is partially responsible for the nation’s looming retirement crisis. It also plays a role in the finance industry’s almost universally negative perception among Americans.

………

The logic here is astounding. The argument is literally that some people need to be taken advantage of in order for them to be worthwhile clients. I believe Ryan is on the wrong side of this issue and on the wrong side of history. But more than that, his argument—that somehow conflicted advice is better than none at all—is wrong for at least two reasons.

It’s a righteous rant.  I suggest that you read the rest.

First Civil Application will be on Car Bras

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A car bra

Researchers at Iowa State University claim to have developed a flexible skin that absorbs radar:

Iowa State University engineers have developed a new flexible, stretchable and tunable “meta-skin” that uses rows of small, liquid-metal devices to cloak an object from the sharp eyes of radar.

The meta-skin takes its name from metamaterials, which are composites that have properties not found in nature and that can manipulate electromagnetic waves. By stretching and flexing the polymer meta-skin, it can be tuned to reduce the reflection of a wide range of radar frequencies.

The journal Scientific Reports recently reported the discovery online. Lead authors from Iowa State’s department of electrical and computer engineering are Liang Dong, associate professor; and Jiming Song, professor. Co-authors are Iowa State graduate students Siming Yang, Peng Liu and Qiugu Wang; and former Iowa State undergraduate Mingda Yang. The National Science Foundation and the China Scholarship Council have partially supported the project.

“It is believed that the present meta-skin technology will find many applications in electromagnetic frequency tuning, shielding and scattering suppression,” the engineers wrote in their paper.

Dong has a background in fabricating micro and nanoscale devices and working with liquids and polymers; Song has expertise in looking for new applications of electromagnetic waves.

Working together, they were hoping to prove an idea: that electromagnetic waves – perhaps even the shorter wavelengths of visible light – can be suppressed with flexible, tunable liquid-metal technologies.

What they came up with are rows of split ring resonators embedded inside layers of silicone sheets. The electric resonators are filled with galinstan, a metal alloy that’s liquid at room temperature and less toxic than other liquid metals such as mercury.

Those resonators are small rings with an outer radius of 2.5 millimeters and a thickness of half a millimeter. They have a 1 millimeter gap, essentially creating a small, curved segment of liquid wire.

The rings create electric inductors and the gaps create electric capacitors. Together they create a resonator that can trap and suppress radar waves at a certain frequency. Stretching the meta-skin changes the size of the liquid metal rings inside and changes the frequency the devices suppress.

Galinstan is the metal in modern “Mercury” thermometers.

If this works, I expect to see covers on cars to absorb the radar frequencies used by speed radars.

Because these radars operate over a fairly narrow bands, it’s not a particularly demanding application, and radar absorbent car bras has been a kind of holy grail in the industry.

How Scalia’s Death Makes the World a Better Place

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Without Scalia on the court, business have lost a staunch defender of a business’s right to defraud its customers, and so they are settling with plaintiffs:

Dow Chemical Co (DOW.N) agreed to pay $835 million to settle a decade-long lawsuit on price fixing, saying it had less chance of winning its petition at the Supreme Court after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

 Dow, which is in the process of merging with Dupont (DD.N), said on Friday it decided to settle, without admitting any wrongdoing, citing “growing political uncertainties due to recent events within the Supreme Court.”

 The chemicals company was found liable by a federal jury in Kansas in February 2013 in the class-action lawsuit, which alleged Dow had conspired to artificially inflate polyurethane prices.

 ………

 Justice Scalia died earlier this month. The next justice could tilt the balance of the nation’s highest court, which was left with four conservatives and four liberals.

 “While Dow is settling this case, it continues to strongly believe that it was not part of any conspiracy and the judgment was fundamentally flawed as a matter of class action law,” the company said in a statement on Friday.

While we think of Scalia as a culture warrior, his role as the leading opponent of consumer protection and corporate accountability on the court has arguably hurt more people than anything else that he has done.*

*Except, of course for Bush v. Gore, but, as that opinion notes, it doesn’t count.  It never counts.

F%$# the Mouse

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You know, now that Mickey has stopped palling around with Michael Eisner, Disney has really gone to the dark side:

The Walt Disney Company has a reputation for lobbying hard on copyright issues. The 1998 copyright extension has even been dubbed the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” by activists like Lawrence Lessig that have worked to reform copyright laws.

This year, the company is turning to its employees to fund some of that battle. Disney CEO Bob Iger has sent a letter to the company’s employees, asking for them to open their hearts—and their wallets—to the company’s political action committee, DisneyPAC.

In the letter, which was provided to Ars by a Disney employee, Iger tells workers about his company’s recent intellectual property victories, including stronger IP protections in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a Supreme Court victory that destroyed Aereo, and continued vigilance about the “state of copyright law in the digital environment.” It also mentions that Disney is seeking an opening to lower the corporate tax rate.

“With the support of the US Government we achieved a win in the Supreme Court against Aereo—an Internet service claiming the right to retransmit our broadcast signals without paying copyright or retransmission consent fees,” writes Iger. “In the coming year, we expect Congress and the Administration to be active on copyright regime issues, efforts to enact legislation to approve and implement the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, tax reform, and more proposals to weaken retransmission consent, to name a few.”

The source who provided the letter to Ars asked to remain anonymous, and they were bothered by the assumption that anyone who worked for Disney would agree with the company’s political positions on tax, trade, intellectual property, and other matters.

“It just seems insensitive to folks that support the company but don’t necessarily support all of its priorities,” the source said. “Especially for something like TPP, which I view as particularly controversial. We do have a company position, but there’s going to be a wide variety of opinion [within the company].”

………
The Disney letter has language explicitly reassuring employees that their jobs won’t be affected by their decision whether or not to give to DisneyPAC.

“Your contribution is important to all of us, but I want to emphasize that all contributions are voluntary and have no impact on your job status, performance review, compensation, or employment,” writes Iger. “Any amount given or the decision not to give will not advantage or disadvantage you.”

If you believe that Disney won’t be making a list and checking it twice, you still believe in Santa Claus.

This isn’t a United Way drive, this is a demand to employees that they give to an organization promulgating Disney’s interest.

As I said at the start, f%$# the mouse.

Flies in 2018. Bankruptcy in 2019

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Terrafugia has announced that its flying car will take flight by 2018.

There is a long history of flying cars (or roadable planes), and it never makes it to the mass market:

When will we finally pilot our own flying cars? It’s a question that’s haunted anyone who grew up watching sci-fi classics, and one American company claims they’re coming sooner than you’d think. Terrafugia is building the first-ever unmanned prototype of its TF-X flying car. They claim the vehicle will be ready for testing in 2018 and available for purchase by 2025.

The TF-X hybrid electric flying car looks mostly like a high-tech 4-seat sedan, except it’s equipped with fold-out wings that have twin electric motors on each side. These motors, powered by a 300 horsepower engine, can assume a horizontal position for flight and a vertical position for takeoff and landing. After using propellers to rise into the air (eliminating the need for any kind of runway), the vehicle would be capable of cruising at 200 mph for up to 500 miles.

There would be no need for a driver to have a pilot’s license, given that the car will be semi-autonomous. The driver can simply input the destination and allow the car to steer itself. The vehicle operator will, of course, have final say over whether the car should land in a particular area, and can abort landing at any time if the area seems unsafe.

This has been in the works for a long time, and I am sure that the most of the tech will work as promised.

After all there have been a dozen or so flying cars over the years.

They’ve just never made the leap from prototype to product.

So Not a Surprise

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Transparency International is a NGO whose mission is to name and shame corruption.

The state Delaware was just named one of the most corrupt organizations on earth:

Normally, when one of our 50 states gets singled out by an international body of some consequence, you would hope it would be good news and something that the locals would brag about. But that’s not likely to be the case with Delaware’s recognition by Transparency International this month as one of the world’s best examples of “grand corruption.” The dubious distinction comes in recognition of the state’s laissez faire corporate registration system, which critics say provides corporations, fraudsters and wealthy individuals secrecy and asset protection that puts it on a footing with notorious tax havens like the Cayman Islands.

Transparency International’s selection of the top nine “grand corruption” winners was based on both internal deliberations by the non-governmental organization, most famous for its global ranking of the world’s nations for corruption, and the votes of 170,000 people around the world. Other “winners” include Brazilian oil giant Petrobras, enmeshed in an octopus like $2 billion dollar scandal that has shaken the sitting government; as well as FIFA, former leaders of the Ukraine, Panama and Tunisia, and Lebanon’s entire political system.

In the statement announcing the “dirty nine,” Transparency International said all the nominees were central to an “abuse of high level power that benefits the few at the expense of the many, and causes serious and widespread harm to individuals and society” in a way “that often goes unpunished” yet “concerns millions of victims around the world.”

Delaware’s over the top pro-business Chancery Court, its statutory trust provisions, non-existent taxes, as well as its extremely user friendly limited-liability-corporation registration process, has drawn in more than 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies and over half of America’s publicly traded companies. Back in 2012, the New York Times reported that Delaware had more registered corporations than it had residents, roughly one million compared to fewer than 900,000 people.

………

Worth noting: Delaware’s functioning as America’s home-away-from-home sanctuary for all business, big and small, brings in $1.1 billion dollars a year in revenue to the state coffers, roughly a quarter of the state’s annual budget.

“This is Delaware’s industry,” says William Black, professor of Economics and the Law at the University of Missouri and Kentucky. “They sell corporate leaders protection from compliance from fiduciary obligations and the provisions of law like anti-money laundering statutes.”

Boosters of Delaware say that the major reason businesses choose Delaware is their business savvy Chancery Court, which has been sorting out commercial equity issues since the 1790s and today has jurisdiction over suits in which the massive universe of Delaware entities are named as defendants.

Black — who as a federal bank regulator blew the whistle on the role of Congress in the Keating 5 (McCain, Glenn et al) savings and loan scandal — says Delaware’s Chancery Court is at the heart of the problem, noting it has enforced trusts between parties in a way that “allows you to eliminate the fiduciary duty of standard of care for shareholders and eviscerates the fiduciary duty of loyalty through their court decisions.”

I am not sure how the US can engage in sanctions against one of its own states, but if Delaware were a foreign nation, sanctions would be well justified.

Mount St. Mary’s Update: This Is What Happens When You Trust a Finance Guy

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William Agee, former CEO of Bendix is a man of many failures, but his destruction of Morrison Knudson is particularly instructive on the skill set of finance types:

………

 Mr. Agee further estranged insiders by quietly moving the CEO’s office to his Pebble Beach estate, and worse, scoffing at the company’s engineer-oriented culture. “You construction guys have been trying to run the company for 75 years,” Keith Price, who headed Morrison Knudsen’s MK Ferguson unit until he retired in April 1991, recalls Mr. Agee telling him. “Now I’m going to show you how the financial guys do it.”

 The November letter pointed out just how the financial guy did his numbers. Using numbers available from earnings reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the letter writers pointed out that the percentage of the company’s pretax income from nonoperating sources such as asset sales and interest for the five years ending 1993 averaged 43%. In other words, Mr. Agee was sweetening profit reports by selling Morrison off piece by piece, and investing Morrison’s cash.

 Meanwhile, lease obligations had rocketed. During the five years ended 1993, they had jumped, to $266 million at the end of 1993 from $38 million at the end of 1988. (To shore up cash, Mr. Agee had begun selling assets, such as equipment, and leasing them back, Morrison executives say.)

This is how finance works.  Find out a loophole, and use it to benefit personally, the future be damned.

At Mount St. Mary’s, Simon Newman, the recently appointed college President, a hedge fund type, decided to try to expel 5% of the freshman class to create the illusion that the retention rates.

When people complained, he fired them including a tenured professor with no due process.

We are now seeing the push back, with the faculty calling for his resignation by a vote of 87 to 3, which he promptly ignored.

Additionally, the alumni are freaking out, and the The Washington Post condemned the behavior of the President and the Board of Directors in no uncertain terms:

Mr. Newman has only himself to blame for the mess at “the Mount,” as the university is known, despite his and the board of trustees’ despicable efforts to deflect fault to what they regard as a cabal of infidels among the faculty and alumni. It was Mr. Newman who, in a conversation with professors, said that struggling freshmen should be culled in order to improve Mount St. Mary’s student retention rate, which affects its standing in U.S. News and World Report’s rankings of colleges and universities.

(Emphasis mine)

When I first posted about this, I jokingly suggested that Newman’s plan was to burn down the university for the insurance money.

More and more, it seems like my joke is reality.

Earmning a Capitalism Merit Badge

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An enterprising Girl Scout set up shop selling cookies outside a marijuana dispensary:

It’s that time of year again. Time when your local market entrances are flooded with Girl Scouts selling boxes of Samoas, Tagalongs and Thin Mints. But one 13-year-old Girl Scout in San Francisco and her mother made a rather business-savvy decision to sell cookies outside of a medical marijuana dispensary.

On Monday, Danielle Lei and her mother set up shop outside the Green Cross store with the cookies. With the store’s blessing, Lei sold 117 boxes in two hours.

Holli Bert, a spokeswoman for the Green Cross, said that after just 45 minutes, Lei had to call for backup cookies to replenish her stock.

Future venture capitalist, I guess.

Whip Me, Beat Me, Make Me Buy Apple Products

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Seriously. If you feel a burning need to be dominated and degraded by a pro, then you clearly need to own the newest iPhone:

Thousands of iPhone 6 users claim they have been left holding almost worthless phones because Apple’s latest operating system permanently disables the handset if it detects that a repair has been carried out by a non-Apple technician.

 Relatively few people outside the tech world are aware of the so-called “error 53” problem, but if it happens to you you’ll know about it. And according to one specialist journalist, it “will kill your iPhone”.

 The issue appears to affect handsets where the home button, which has touch ID fingerprint recognition built-in, has been repaired by a “non-official” company or individual. It has also reportedly affected customers whose phone has been damaged but who have been able to carry on using it without the need for a repair.

 But the problem only comes to light when the latest version of Apple’s iPhone software, iOS 9, is installed. Indeed, the phone may have been working perfectly for weeks or months since a repair or being damaged.

After installation a growing number of people have watched in horror as their phone, which may well have cost them £500-plus, is rendered useless. Any photos or other data held on the handset is lost – and irretrievable.

 Tech experts claim Apple knows all about the problem but has done nothing to warn users that their phone will be “bricked” (ie, rendered as technologically useful as a brick) if they install the iOS upgrade.

Freelance photographer and self-confessed Apple addict Antonio Olmos says this happened to his phone a few weeks ago after he upgraded his software. Olmos had previously had his handset repaired while on an assignment for the Guardian in Macedonia. “I was in the Balkans covering the refugee crisis in September when I dropped my phone. Because I desperately needed it for work I got it fixed at a local shop, as there are no Apple stores in Macedonia. They repaired the screen and home button, and it worked perfectly.”

 He says he thought no more about it, until he was sent the standard notification by Apple inviting him to install the latest software. He accepted the upgrade, but within seconds the phone was displaying “error 53” and was, in effect, dead.

 When Olmos, who says he has spent thousands of pounds on Apple products over the years, took it to an Apple store in London, staff told him there was nothing they could do, and that his phone was now junk. He had to pay £270 for a replacement and is furious.

 “The whole thing is extraordinary. How can a company deliberately make their own products useless with an upgrade and not warn their own customers about it? Outside of the big industrialised nations, Apple stores are few and far between, and damaged phones can only be brought back to life by small third-party repairers.

It appears that Apple’s new motto is, “There is a sucker born every minute.”

Surprisingly Good News

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The Supreme Court has just ruled that defendants cannot shut down a class action suits by paying off the lead plaintiff:

An effort to gut one of the most important mechanisms the law uses to deter businesses against widespread violations of the law failed on Wednesday, when the Supreme Court handed down its 6-3 decision in Campbell-Ewald v. Gomez. Had the defendants, who were backed by powerful business interest groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, prevailed in this lawsuit, it would have significantly altered the balance of power between large corporations and their customers and workers.

Campbell-Ewald involved a company that allegedly sent many unsolicited text messages to various cell phone users. Under federal law, someone who receives such a message may recover $500 for each violation of the law. The named plaintiff in this case, Jose Gomez, is a man who received one of the unwanted messages.

This tiny case about an annoying message took on far greater importance, however, because Gomez also sought to bring a class action on behalf of others who also received the unsolicited messages. As ThinkProgress previously explained, class actions are often the only mechanism available against defendants who commit small-scale violations of the law against many different individuals:

Suppose that a company cheats you out of a few hundred dollars. While you’ll probably be angry and may make some irate phone calls to the company’s customer service line, chances are you’re not going to sue if the company refuses to back down. The cost of bringing a lawsuit will greatly exceed any amount you are likely to recover from the company, and you are unlikely to find a lawyer willing to take such a small-dollar case unless you agree to pay that lawyer expensive hourly fees.

Class action lawsuits are often the solution to this problem. If the company cheats you and you alone out of a few hundred dollars, you’re probably out of luck. But if the same company illegally cheats thousands of people out of a few hundred dollars as part of the same scheme, class actions allow those thousands of people to join together in one grand lawsuit. Because their combined suit is now worth a lot of money, they are suddenly likely to be able to recruit excellent legal counsel to represent the class.

Campbell-Ewald, however, sought to allow class action defendants to sabotage these lawsuits. Typically, such lawsuits begin when a single plaintiff or small group of plaintiffs file a complaint laying out their allegations. Though Gomez’s complaint indicated his intention to bring this case as a class action, the question of whether the case can proceed as class litigation is not decided until later in the proceedings. That created an interim period when the defendants knew that a class action was coming, but the only plaintiff properly before the court was Gomez.

During that interim period, the defendant company offered Gomez $1,500 per unwanted text message that he received — an offer that would effectively buy off Gomez but leave the other class members with nothing. They then claimed that, even if Gomez did not agree to this offer, the lawsuit had to cease. Under Article III of the Constitution, the company argued, a lawsuit must not proceed unless there is an active “case” or “controversy” between two parties. So when the defendant company offered to give Gomez everything he personally could expect to collect under the law, that offer allegedly rendered the case moot because there was no longer a real dispute between the two sides.

 Considering the relentlessly pro business bent of this court, I am surprised, but pleased.

Running a University Like a Business: Burning it Down for the Insurance Money

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Current President of Mount St. Marys University, and former finance type, attempted to boot about 5% of the incoming freshman class in the first weeks of class. He called it Drowning Bunnies:

Amid a conversation about student retention this fall, the president of Mount St. Mary’s University told some professors that they need to stop thinking of freshmen as “cuddly bunnies,” and said: “You just have to drown the bunnies … put a Glock to their heads.”

Simon Newman was quoted in the campus newspaper, The Mountain Echo, on Tuesday, in a special edition that reported the university’s president had pushed a plan to improve retention rates by dismissing 20 to 25 freshmen judged unlikely to succeed early in the academic year. Removing students who are more likely to drop out could hypothetically lead to an improvement in a school’s federal retention data; the deadline for submitting enrollment data is in late September.

Newman, a private-equity chief executive officer and entrepreneur who was appointed president of the private university in Emmitsburg, Md., in 2015, said Tuesday that there are some accurate facts in the Echo story, but “the overall tone of the thing is highly inaccurate.”

“The inferences, the innuendo, it’s not accurate at all — the conclusions one would naturally draw from reading it,” Newman said in an interview with The Washington Post. He described an intensive, multi-pronged effort to improve retention rates, because the school loses 20 to 25 percent of its first-year students. School administrators, he said, want to be sure their customers, the students, are successful.

………

A professor who was part of the conversation The Echo quoted confirmed to The Post that the quotes were accurate.

(emphasis mine)

“Their customers, the students,” 4 little words that show everything that is wrong with corporate management of education.

They call it, “Bringing a blunt, analytical business perspective to the management of the school.” I call it arrogance and running their company into the ground, because after this, and the story is on their Wiki Page, (I put it there) they are in for a well deserved world of hurt.

BTW, the way he was running it was unethical and profoundly dishonest:

The Mountain Echo reporters wrote that Newman’s retention plan included administering a survey to all freshmen, with this introduction: “This year, we are going to start the Veritas Symposium by providing you with a very valuable tool that will help you discover more about yourself. This survey has been developed by a leadership team here at The Mount, and it is based on some of the leading thinking in the area of personal motivation and key factors that determine motivation, success, and happiness. We will ask you some questions about yourself that we would like you to answer as honestly as possible. There are no wrong answers.”

But the paper reported on an email exchange that expressed a desire to eliminate a certain number of students, based on the survey results, by the Sept. 25 cutoff date when the university would be required to report enrollment numbers to the federal government.

The plan, the paper reported, sparked strong pushback from some members of the faculty and the administration.

An email from Newman, the paper reported, explained: “My short term goal is to have 20-25 people leave by the 25th [of Sep.]. This one thing will boost our retention 4-5%. A larger committee or group needs to work on the details but I think you get the objective.”

………One of the goals of the symposium was to help ease students’ transition to college, and with this proposal they might be kicking out some students who would be successful.

Newman responded that “there will be some collateral damage.”

This is not only everything that is wrong the increasingly corporate business of education in the country, it is an indictment of business culture generally in the US, where callous selfishiness and indifference are viewed as virtues.

H/t CURMUDGUCATION.

Least Surprising News of the Day

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Pharma bro Martin Shkreli hasw taken the 5th in response to a Congressional inquiry into price gouging in drugs:

The founder and former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, Martin Shkreli, invoked his Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination on Wednesday, and he won’t comply with a subpoena for documents issued from a Senate panel investigating pharma drug pricing tactics.

The 32-year-old Shkreli was also subpoenaed to appear before a different panel, the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, to testify about the price of a life-saving drug he increased by more than 5,000 percent.

Shkreli became the poster child for greed last year after he raised the price of Daraprim—used to treat parasitic infections—from $13.50 a pill to $750. A single pill once sold for $1. Now facing criminal charges that he allegedly defrauded investors, Shkreli has said he should have boosted prices for the drug even more.

Let’s be clear:  He has a right not to testify against himself, but generally it doesn’t apply to, you know, physical proof.

And yes, he is a ratf%$# who deserves to spend the rest of his life in gaol.

La Cebolla

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Univision has taken a controlling interest in the satirical publication The Onion:

The Spanish-language media giant Univision Communications announced Tuesday that it had acquired a large stake in The Onion, the comedy and satirical digital media group, as part of the company’s efforts to extend its digital reach and strengthen its portfolio of comedy outlets.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the transaction was said to be for a 40 percent stake, valued at less than $200 million, according to one person briefed on the deal.

“Comedy is playing an expanding role in our culture as a vehicle for audiences to explore, debate and understand the important ideas of our time,” said Isaac Lee, chief news and digital officer of Univision. “It has also proven to be an incredibly engaging format for millennial audiences and is expected to play a key part in the 2016 presidential election process via our robust content offerings in Spanish and English.”

Univision’s digital portfolio is undergoing a flurry of changes, part of an effort to build its footprint and reach as diverse a group of millennials as possible. News emerged last month that Univision was in talks with the Walt Disney Company to take full control of their joint venture Fusion, the English-language digital news service and cable channel. In November, Univision named Mr. Lee to a new position with responsibility for overseeing digital functions, leading multicultural efforts and creating a music strategy. He also is chief executive of Fusion.

According to NPR 40% is a controlling interest.

I have no f%$#ing clue how Univision plans to make a coherent business plan out of this.

My guess is that they don’t have a plan, and notwithstanding promises to have a light touch, management will eventually feel compelled to bring it under the corporate wing, when they don’t experience the requisite “Synergies”, and then they will ruin it.

Muck Ficrosoft

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It’s clear that since the clusterf%$# that was Windows 8, Microsoft has been running scared.

Now, it appears that they will be doing their best to cripple earlier versions of their operating systems with the current hardware:

Soon, when you buy a new PC, it won’t support Windows 7 or 8. Microsoft has announced a change to its support policy that lays out its plans for future updates to its older operating systems, and the new rules mean that future PC owners with next-generation Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm processors will need to use Windows 10.

It’s not usual for old PCs to fall short of the minimum requirements of a brand new operating system, but in this case, the opposite is happening. Microsoft and its partners will not be putting in the significant work necessary to make new hardware work with older versions of Windows. The old operating systems, at best, will merely lack the latest updates. At worst, they might not function properly.

Policy starts with Intel’s current processors, Skylake

“Going forward, as new silicon generations are introduced, they will require the latest Windows platform at that time for support,” Microsoft notes in a blog post published on Friday. “Windows 10 will be the only supported Windows platform on Intel’s upcoming ‘Kaby Lake’ silicon, Qualcomm’s upcoming ‘8996’ silicon, and AMD’s upcoming ‘Bristol Ridge’ silicon.”

This new policy doesn’t mean that Windows 7 and 8.1 are no longer supported in general. The two operating systems will continue to get updates through January 14, 2020 and January 10, 2023, respectively. But that’s only if you’re using hardware that was contemporaneous with those operating systems.


For current PC owners, the detail to note is that Intel’s current, sixth generation processors, known as Skylake, are the first that won’t support either of the older versions of Windows. (Intel and Microsoft say that the platform and Windows 10 were designed for each other.) Microsoft is phasing in the policy now.

When juxtaposed with Microsoft’s attempts to move to software as a service, it’s yet another reason to move to Linux.

We’re Apple, We Don’t Care. We Don’t Have To.

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We don’t care, we don’t have to … we’re Apple.

Apple is being sued by Apple 4S users because the pushed an upgrade that rendered their phones about as useful as a third tit:

Lawyers in New York have filed a class action lawsuit against Apple, saying that the iOS 9 operating system upgrade slowed their older iPhone 4S handsets into uselessness.

 “Plaintiff and other class members were faced with a difficult decision: use a buggy, slow device that disrupts everyday life or spend hundreds of dollars to buy another smartphone,” reads the lawsuit spotted by Apple Insider.

 When iOS 9 was released in September, the operating system was supposed to fix many of the faults of its predecessors. But the owners of more than 100 iPhone 4S handsets claim Apple knew the new OS would be virtually unusable on the older hardware but released it anyway to force people to upgrade.

 To add insult to injury, Apple won’t allow the aggrieved users to uninstall iOS 9 and go back to simpler times. So 4S owners are left stuck with sluggish screens, hanging apps, and lousy touch use, the lawsuit claims.

 Apple’s internal testing must have shown these effects while the operating system was being developed, but Cook & Co nevertheless advertised the new operating system’s benefits without warning of obsolescent hardware, the plaintiff’s lawyers argue.

 ………

 One suspects Apple’s response will be “well what did you expect?” The iPhone 4S runs a 32-bit A5 processor and packs 512MB of DDR2 RAM, compared to the iPhone 6S’s A9 64-bit core with the M9 coprocessor and 2GB of DDR4 memory. Expecting similar performance ignores certain technical realities.

Actually, the scenario here is pretty straightforward.

Apple pushed an upgrade to inadequate hardware that could not handle it.

Either they did not do appropriate testing, or they did the testing, but decided that they could force users of old phones to upgrade.

In either case, Apple could have provided a downgrade option, or warned of the issues before the release, but they don’t give a sh%$.

Class action lawsuits are the corporate ecosystem’s way of making you give a sh%$.