Category: Business

Entitled Idiots Who Should Not Have Your Money

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Nobody likes to be questioned.

But lately, some of Silicon Valley’s big tech investors seem to be particularly upset that journalists are questioning some of the valley’s hottest startups.

There’s a fundamental difference in point of view here. The funders see first-hand how hard it is to build something and sympathize with the struggle. The journalists are supposed to be as objective and careful as possible and report what they find — even if some people don’t like it.

The latest example is Theranos, whose science was called into question by The Wall Street Journal on Thursday. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was quick to defend her company, as you’d expect from a CEO.

But some VCs also seemed genuinely upset. Not at the substance of the allegations, but for not giving founders the benefit of the doubt when it comes to building something.

………

Startup founders have a really hard job. They are trying to do something new and drive society forward. The tech press doesn’t know all the facts so you should give them a break.

The first sentence is indisputably true — it’s hard (and lonesome) to found a tech startup.

………

The second sentence is where things get sticky.

A lot of tech founders are trying to do something new and drive society forward. But some of them are not.

………

The third sentence is where they completely miss the point.

Journalists don’t set out to write takedowns of companies. But when a journalist begins investigating a company and finds something is amiss, and the story is well vetted and fairly reported, the venture community should welcome that reporting.

I’m beginning to think that of all the problems facing the business culture of the United States , it is the Ayn Rand inspired corrosive narcissism which is worst of all.

If you look at Theranos, for example, the facts are fairly clear.

The company has misrepresented the scope of its technology, and there have been repeated reports that the at least some of the tests are significantly less accurate.

This technology may, or may not, be successful at a later date, but it is clear that its valuation, one which makes its CEO a billionaire is Silicon Valley “Unicorn” bullsh%$.

Scott Adams Called This Confusopolies

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In response to improvements in information and comparison shopping made available to the consumer through the Internet, the airlines have conspired to make their fare systems Byzantinely complex.

This may be why airlines are waging a war on travel websites. The tools available on these sites make it too difficult to f%$# the customers like a drunk sorority girl:

Once upon a time, there were reasonably well-known ways to pay less for your airfare. Airlines had rules governing ticket prices, those rules were consistent across airlines, and almost everybody knew what the rules were. (If you booked further in advance, the tickets were cheaper. If you stayed a Saturday night, the ticket would be cheaper. That kind of thing.)

 Those days, however, are long gone. Airline tickets are no longer priced according to simple rules: they’re dynamically priced according to insanely complex algorithms which, to the naked eye, make no sense at all. Cheap tickets still exist, of course—the problem is that there’s no reliable way of finding them. If you managed to luck into such a ticket a few weeks or months ago, good for you—but don’t for a minute expect that if you behaved exactly the same way today, then you would get a similar result.

 A recent paper by Symeon Meichanetzoglou, Sotiris Ioannidis, and Nikolaos Laoutaris sums up the current status quo: “complexity asymmetry,” they conclude, “defeated the web.” The paper is based on a massive database of 1,449,349 flight tickets involving 63 destinations and 125 different airlines—and finds that even the most common-sense rules of airline ticket pricing are regularly violated.

For instance, let’s say you want to book a round-trip flight from Brussels to Stuttgart. The researchers studied six different airlines flying that route, with 619 different fares, and found that 24.5% of the time, it was cheaper to buy two one-way tickets (one from Brussels to Stuttgart, and one from Stuttgart to Brussels) than it was to buy a round-trip. And when they looked at airlines rather than routes, they found similar outliers: one Dutch airline was cheaper more than half the time when buying singles rather than round-trip tickets. (Especially, it seems, on the Frankfurt-Zurich route.)

 ………

A few years ago, Delta got in trouble for showing higher prices to its frequent fliers than to everybody else; it blamed a “computer glitch.” Ever since then, conspiracy theories have abounded, especially among people who search for flights, find relatively cheap ones, and then find that the fares have suddenly increased when they decide to buy. Is it a good idea to use some kind of private browsing mode when shopping for tickets, so that the airlines can’t identify you and jack their prices accordingly?

 The answer, frankly, is that although it won’t hurt if you do that, you’re going to end up outsmarted whatever you do. The airlines and flight search engines have infinitely more information than you do, and that information asymmetry is always going to work to their advantage. If you find a cheap fare, good for you; if you don’t, it’s not your fault. The system is rigged against you. The battle of consumers against the airlines is over. And the airlines have won.

There are industries that hate their customers more than the airlines ***cough*** cable companies ***cough***, but this is a veritable rogues gallery of evil that they have joined.

Could Someone Please Hang this Guy from a Lamp Post?*

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Don’t You Want to Slap That Smile From His Face

It turns out that Martin Shkreli, he of the rapacious drug price hike infamy donated a few thousand dollars to the Bernie Sanders campaign and demanded an audience.

Sanders donated the money to a medical clinic and told him to piss off:

It must be strange, if you’re the kind of person who generally believes he can wave his wallet in the direction of something he wants and make it — poof! — appear, when that magic trick doesn’t work. When a drunken demand for mac and cheese goes unheeded. Or when a pharmaceutical company CEO gets turned down by a politician. Sorry, Martin Shkreli!

Just last month, Shkreli earned the disgust of a good portion of the Internet — as well as Democratic hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders — when it was revealed his company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, had raised the price of toxoplasmosis drug Daraprim from $13.50 a pill to $750 overnight. Sanders even wrote a letter to Shkreli, asking for an explanation. But though Shrkreli quickly vowed that “I think that it makes sense to lower the price in response to the anger that was felt by people,” no change has been forthcoming. He now says that “Until we figure out demand, we won’t lower the price. We have to find a safe price to lower it to.” Seems like something he’d want to get on, soon.

Shkreli has, however, meanwhile managed to find the time to troll journalists and retweet photos of cats rolling around in money. He also, according to the Boston Globe, “says he has donated to presidential candidate Bernie Sanders — who has been bashing Big Pharma on the campaign trail — to try to get a meeting so the two can talk it out.” It did not work out that way.

Shkreli claims he recently donated $2,700 — the maximum individual contribution — to Sanders’ campaign. He told the Boston Globe he had hoped for a private meeting with Sanders to explain the rationale of drug company pricing. But on Thursday, the Sanders campaign said they were giving the money to the Whitman-Walker health clinic in Washington, adding, “We are not keeping the money from this poster boy for drug company greed.”

And Shrkreli now says he’s “furious” over the snub. “I think it’s cheap to use one person’s action as a platform without kind of talking to that person,” he says. “He’ll take my money, but he won’t engage with me for five minutes to understand this issue better.” And he continues, “I’d ask him, what role does innovation play in health care? Is he willing to sort of accept that there is a tradeoff, that to take risks for innovation, companies have to invest lots of money and they need some kind of return for that, and what does he think that should look like?” I guess you can’t always get what you want. Meetings with senators, your toxoplasmosis drug returned to a reasonable cost, that sort of thing.

Seriously, Mr. Shrkreli, how about you make the world a better place, and just drop dead.

*From his testicles, not his neck.  Death by rope is too quick,†
†OK, in a perfect world, there would also be some pinata play as well.‡
‡And fire ants, definitely fire ants

He Has to Be the Most Evil Ratf%$# in Business Today

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Remember Martin Shkreli?

He’s the contemptible greedhead who raised the price of Daraprim by 5500% when he got the rights to it.

After a storm of public outrage, he agreed to roll back the price to an unspecified degree.

Guess which drug has not come down a penny in price:

It’s been two weeks since Turing CEO Martin Shkreli announced he would scale back the price of his drug, and so far nothing has really changed.

The biotech leader came under fire last month for his 5,000% price hike of Daraprim, a drug that fights parasitic infections.

The drug, which rose from $13.50 to $750 seemingly overnight, left the biotech and pharmaceutical industries reeling, with corporations such as Valeant facing a lot of criticism for their similar price-hike moves.

In September, he told ABC News, “We’ve agreed to lower the price of Daraprim to a point that is more affordable and is able to allow the company to make a profit, but a very small profit.”

That hasn’t happened yet. A 30-day, 30-pill supply of Daraprim would cost me $27,006 at my local pharmacy.

That boils down to about $900 a pill, which includes the wholesale cost, along with specific pharmacy fees based on the zip code I gave the pharmacy.

So while the price of the drug hasn’t gotten any higher since Shkreli hiked it 5,000%, it hasn’t gotten any lower since he promised to reduce it either. Turing did not respond to Business Insider’s request for clarification about this price.

(emphasis original)

This ain’t business, this is terrorism.

Perhaps the President should consider a drone strike.

Yeah, It Doesn’t Work in Education Either

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A study has shown that payments for quality of outcomes in hospitals do not actually improve those outcomes:

Medicare’s quality incentive program for hospitals, which provides bonuses and penalties based on performance, has not led to demonstrated improvements in its first three years, according to a federal report released Thursday.

The Government Accountability Office examined the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program, one of the federal health law’s initiatives to tie payment to quality of care. Earlier this year Medicare gave bonuses to 1,700 hospitals and reduced payments to 1,360 hospitals based on their mortality rates, patient reviews, degree of improvement and other measurements.

While the payments to a majority of the nation’s hospitals have been affected each year, the audit found the financial effect has been minimal. Most hospitals saw their Medicare payments increase or drop by less than half a percentage point. In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 74 percent of hospitals fell within that range, with a median bonus of $39,000 and a median penalty of $56,000, according to the analysis.

………

The report said that even before the program began in October 2012, hospitals had been improving in how consistently they followed basic clinical guidelines, such as performing blood cultures before giving patients antibiotics. That improvement continued but did not increase with the advent of the financial incentives. The same was true for patient ratings, on such items as the quality of communication from doctors and nurses, and for mortality rates for heart attack patients. Heart failure and pneumonia death rates stayed roughly the same.

“Our analysis found no apparent shift in … quality measure trends during the initial years of the program, but such shifts could emerge over time as the program implements planned changes,” the GAO wrote.

This is unsurprising.

As these payments become more significant, I expect to see hospitals use the same tactics as the charter schools: Find a way to encourage hard cases to go elsewhere.

These sorts of pay for performance schemes tend to generate efforts to game the metrics, not to improve performance.

Google Drops, “Don’t Be Evil”

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Google has reorganized itself under a holding company called “Alphabet”, and this new holding company makes no reference whatsoever to its former slogan:

Google is now Alphabet. Temporary Holding Company Number Two is now Google. And “don’t be evil” is now one step closer to being a thing of the past.

Following the corporate reshuffle at Google, the world’s largest search firm is now owned by a holding company called “Alphabet” – which, confusingly, was temporarily a subsidiary of Google but then executed a “reverse takeover” of its parent company to become the new boss, at which point Google spun off a number of its own subsidiaries such as its life sciences subsidiary Calico and “moonshot” division X to sit under Alphabet.

The end result is that the Google we all know and love still exists, but sits under an entirely new company, with a new name, new brand, new website – and new ethics policy.

When Alphabet was revealed, it was made clear that Google’s pre-existing ethics policy would only apply to the search firm itself, rather than its parent company. But now that Alphabet has revealed its own Code of Conduct, and the words “don’t be evil” are nowhere in sight.

It was only a matter of time, I guess.

The interesting thing here is whether Google’s eschewing its prior values will have the effect of making recruiting more difficult.

After all, before Carly Fiorina destroyed “The HP Way”, people were willing to take a pay cut to work at the firm.

iPhone Users Just Love Their Walled Garden

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Even if it means that Apple is censoring what news they can read:

Metadata+, a free app that catalogues fatal drone strikes by the United States, was pulled from the App Store this morning. Users were alerted via a notification that said the app was removed because of “exceptionally crude or objectionable content.”

Metadata+ was developed by The Intercept’s research editor Josh Begley. The app listed the date and location of drone strikes, as well as the victims, and sent notifications to users when a new strike occurred.

Begley struggled to get the App Store to accept his work—Mashable reports that Metadata+ was approved this February after five rejections. The sensitive topic of U.S. drone strikes seems to have been a problem for Apple: Begley was rejected last August because his app might be “objectionable” for many audiences.

………

Begley told Mashable that an Apple Review Team employee contacted him after several rejections and told him that if the app focused specifically on U.S. drone strikes, “it’s not going to be approved.”

So, it appears that not cheerleading for US drone strikes is unacceptable content for Apple, Inc.

What happens when the FBI comes and asks for a backdoor into your private communications?

At least Android is open source, so if there is a backdoor, someone can compile a version without some back door that has elements of the US state security apparatus leering looking at your private communications.

No wonder Apple is lobbying so hard for a bill in congress that grants them immunity for sharing data.

If You Treat Your Employees Like Crap, It Flows to the Customer

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It turns out that the Wal-Mart grocery business is lagging, because they suck at running supermarkets:

Wal-Mart’s grocery business is getting crushed by competitors, according to analysts.

The retailer is plagued by negative customer feedback “due to lack of convenience in shopping Supercenter formats, below-average customer service, and below-average quality, freshness, and breadth of produce,” Wayne Hood, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets, wrote in a recent research note.

As a result, Wal-Mart is losing grocery market share to rivals like Kroger and Publix, which have higher customer satisfaction ratings than Wal-Mart, according to Hood.

That’s a troubling sign for Wal-Mart, which gets more than half of its revenue from groceries, and has been consistently offering lower prices than its rivals, Hood writes.

Grocery prices at Wal-Mart are approximately 10% to 15% lower at Wal-Mart compared to Kroger, according to Hood.

But the lower prices have failed to spur growth in Wal-Mart’s grocery business, as illustrated in the graph below.

Basically, Wal-Mart sucks, but they are cheap.

Of course, dollar stores are cheaper and they are not suckier, and Target is a bit more expensive and much less sucky, and now it turns out that even the lowly supermarket chain produces stores that people are wiling to pay extra to go to.

Couldn’t happen to a more repulsive company.

What Happens When This Doesn’t Generate a Media Sh%$ Storm?

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Martin Shkreli, the hedge fund pharma executive who generated outrage when he bought a drug for rare diseases and boosted its price by over 5555%, has backed down after he got called out by the New York Times:

“Yes it is absolutely a reaction — there were mistakes made with respect to helping people understand why we took this action, I think that it makes sense to lower the price in response to the anger that was felt by people,” Shkreli, 32, said.

Turing Pharmaceuticals of New York bought the drug from Impax Laboratories in August for $55 million and raised the price. Shkreli said Tuesday the price would be lowered to allow the company to break even or make a smaller profit.

Daraprim fights toxoplasmosis. The infection is particularly dangerous for people who have weakened immune systems, like AIDS patients, as well as for pregnant women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

………

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was among those who expressed outrage over the price increase. On Tuesday she outlined a plan she said would limit how much patients have to pay out of pocket for medications each month.

As I noted last night, after Glaxo Smith Kline sold the drug market rights and before Shkreli bought the drug, the price was raised by 1350%, from $1.00 to $13.50 a pill, but since it wasn’t going from $13.50 to $750.00 a pill, nobody batted an eyelash.

Notwithstanding the protestations of contemptible greedheads like Martin Shkreli, generating unearned profits through financial engineering and exploitation of monopoly power benefits no one but contemptible greedheads like Martin Shkreli.

This Is a Clear Case of Immoral Parasitism, and It’s Pharma, so Not the Surprise

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You know the story, hedge fund puke buys a pharmaceutical firm, takes an out of patent drug that costs a few bucks, changes the distribution method to make analysis by potential competitors more difficult, and then raise the price by 5555%: (No, this is not a decimal place error)

Specialists in infectious disease are protesting a gigantic overnight increase in the price of a 62-year-old drug that is the standard of care for treating a life-threatening parasitic infection.

 The drug, called Daraprim, was acquired in August by Turing Pharmaceuticals, a start-up run by a former hedge fund manager. Turing immediately raised the price to $750 a tablet from $13.50, bringing the annual cost of treatment for some patients to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

 “What is it that they are doing differently that has led to this dramatic increase?” said Dr. Judith Aberg, the chief of the division of infectious diseases at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She said the price increase could force hospitals to use “alternative therapies that may not have the same efficacy.”

 ………

 The Infectious Diseases Society of America and the HIV Medicine Association sent a joint letter to Turing earlier this month calling the price increase for Daraprim “unjustifiable for the medically vulnerable patient population” and “unsustainable for the health care system.” An organization representing the directors of state AIDS programs has also been looking into the price increase, according to doctors and patient advocates.

 Daraprim, known generically as pyrimethamine, is used mainly to treat toxoplasmosis, a parasite infection that can cause serious or even life-threatening problems for babies born to women who become infected during pregnancy, and also for people with compromised immune systems, like AIDS patients and certain cancer patients.

 ………

 This is not the first time the 32-year-old Mr. Shkreli, who has a reputation for both brilliance and brashness, has been the center of controversy. He started MSMB Capital, a hedge fund company, in his 20s and drew attention for urging the Food and Drug Administration not to approve certain drugs made by companies whose stock he was shorting.

 In 2011, Mr. Shkreli started Retrophin, which also acquired old neglected drugs and sharply raised their prices. Retrophin’s board fired Mr. Shkreli a year ago. Last month, it filed a complaint in Federal District Court in Manhattan, accusing him of using Retrophin as a personal piggy bank to pay back angry investors in his hedge fund.

 ………

 With the price now high, other companies could conceivably make generic copies, since patents have long expired. One factor that could discourage that option is that Daraprim’s distribution is now tightly controlled, making it harder for generic companies to get the samples they need for the required testing.

 The switch from drugstores to controlled distribution was made in June by Impax, not by Turing. Still, controlled distribution was a strategy Mr. Shkreli talked about at his previous company as a way to thwart generics.

 ………

 Dr. Aberg of Mount Sinai said some hospitals will now find Daraprim too expensive to keep in stock, possibly resulting in treatment delays. She said that Mount Sinai was continuing to use the drug, but each use now required a special review.

 “This seems to be all profit-driven for somebody,” Dr. Aberg said, “and I just think it’s a very dangerous process.”

You can read the details of his looting the last firm he ran here.

I would note that Mr Shkreli is not alone in this behavior: When Glaxo Smith Kline sold the marketing rights to the drug to CorePharma, the price of the drug was $1 a pill,

Is there anything that big finance can’t make destructive and evil?

Quote of the Day

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“I’d rather go to Iraq than work for Carly Fiorina again,” said one high-level former campaign staffer, who asked not to be identified, citing disclosure restrictions in his contract.

Carly Fiorina, who’s net worth is something north of $50 million, stiffed her campaign workers in her 2010 Senate (Demon Sheep) campaign.

BTW, not getting paid by a political candidate is something that happens now and again, the amount of outright hatred expressed rivals that of long time Hewlett Packard employees.

It’s not about getting stiffed. She must have been absolute hell to work for.

Think about this: Donald f%$#ing Trump doesn’t have employees ratting him out like this, and neither does Hillary Clinton, and if any of her former employees were willing to right a tell all, they would get a seven figure advance. (Even more if they were willing to mention “Benghazi.” )

 It really is remarkable how people like her (I mean high powered executives, not Republicans in this case) keep failing up the business food chain.

H/t Digby at Salon for the quote.

The Ashley Madison Breach Reveals Something Interesting

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Most of the women members appear to be sock puppets:

When hacker group Impact Team released the Ashley Madison data, they asserted that “thousands” of the women’s profiles were fake. Later, this number got blown up in news stories that asserted “90-95%” of them were fake, though nobody put forth any evidence for such an enormous number. So I downloaded the data and analyzed it to find out how many actual women were using Ashley Madison, and who they were.

What I discovered was that the world of Ashley Madison was a far more dystopian place than anyone had realized. This isn’t a debauched wonderland of men cheating on their wives. It isn’t even a sadscape of 31 million men competing to attract those 5.5 million women in the database. Instead, it’s like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly-designed robots.

Those millions of Ashley Madison men were paying to hook up with women who appeared to have created profiles and then simply disappeared. Were they cobbled together by bots and bored admins, or just user debris? Whatever the answer, the more I examined those 5.5 million female profiles, the more obvious it became that none of them had ever talked to men on the site, or even used the site at all after creating a profile. Actually, scratch that. As I’ll explain below, there’s a good chance that about 12,000 of the profiles out of millions belonged to actual, real women who were active users of Ashley Madison.

………

It’s also a matter of public record that some percentage of the profiles are less than real. A few years ago, a former employee of Ashley Madison sued the company in Canada over her terrible work conditions. She claimed that she’d gotten repetitive stress injuries in her hands after the company hired her to create 1,000 fake profiles of women in three months, written in Portuguese, to attract a Brazilian audience. The case was settled out of court, and Ashley Madison claimed that the woman never made any fake profiles.

Still, there is a clause in the Ashley Madison terms of service that notes that “some” people are using the site purely “for entertainment” and that they are “not seeking in person meetings with anyone they meet on the Service, but consider their communications with users and Members to be for their amusement.” The site stops short of saying these are fake people, but does admit that many profiles are for “amusement only.”

………

But the second most popular IP address, found in 80,805 profiles, was a different story. This IP address, 127.0.0.1, is well-known to anyone who works with computer systems as a loopback interface. To the rest of us, it’s known simply as “home,” your local computer. Any account with that IP address was likely created on a “home” computer at Ashley Madison. Interestingly, 68,709 of the profiles created with that IP address were female, and the remaining 12,000 were either male or had nothing in the gender field.

………

Then, three data fields changed everything. The first field, called mail_last_time, contained a timestamp indicating the last time a member checked the messages in their Ashley Madison inbox. If a person never checked their inbox, the field was blank. But even if they’d checked their messages only once, the field contained a date and time. About two-thirds of the men, or 20.2 million of them, had checked the messages in their accounts at least once. But only 1,492 women had ever checked their messages. It was a serious anomaly.

The pattern was reflected in another data field, too. This one, called chat_last_time contained the timestamp for the last time a member had struck up a conversation using the Ashley Madison chat system. Roughly 11 million men had engaged in chat, but only 2400 women had.

Yet another field, reply_mail_last_time, showed a similar disparity. This field contained the time when a member had last replied to a message from another person on Ashley Madison. 5.9 million men had done it, and only 9700 women had.

What all these fields have in common is that they measure user activity. They show what happened after the account profile was created, and how an actual person used it by checking messages, chatting, or replying to messages. They measure what you might call signatures of real human behavior. Only a paltry number of women’s accounts actually looked human.

………

Overall, the picture is grim indeed. Out of 5.5 million female accounts, roughly zero percent had ever shown any kind of activity at all, after the day they were created.

………

Either way, we’re left with data that suggests Ashley Madison is a site where tens of millions of men write mail, chat, and spend money for women who aren’t there. 

There are two questions raised here:
The first question is whether or not Ashley Madison was a fraud from the get go.
The second question is how many other of the social networking sites out there are doing the same thing and sucking money from venture capitalists.

We need the someone to go Lisbeth Salander on all of these “Web 2.0” companies, because I think that this sort of fraud is the rule, not the exception.

H/t JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS for the Gary Larson cartoon.

Ashley Madison Hack Data Goes Live………

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I think that a fair amount of thought went into the how it was released, which is why is why they released the data on BitTorrent:

Gigabytes worth of data taken during last month’s hack of the Ashley Madison dating website for cheaters has been published online—an act that could be highly embarrassing for the men and women who have used the service over the years.

A 10-gigabyte file containing e-mails, member profiles, credit-card transactions and other sensitive Ashley Madison information became available as a BitTorrent download in the past few hours. Ars downloaded the massive file and it appeared to contain a trove of details taken from a clandestine dating site, but so far there is nothing definitively linking it to Ashley Madison. User data included e-mail addresses, profile descriptions, addresses provided by users, weight, and height. A separate file containing credit card transaction data didn’t include full payment card numbers or billing addresses.

The way that BitTorrent works is that someone puts a file up, and as people download it, they each get a little bit of the file, and then share it amongst themselves, which means two things:

  • There is not a central server to get hammered.
  • Once the whole file is loaded into this distributed network, it takes a long time for it becomes unavailable, because multiple copies of the various bits float around the impromptu network.

In fact, the protocol was developed to help with software firms that saw their servers hammered when they made popular new releases.

After the release, of course, it was applied to songs, movies, bootleg software, etc.

See the picture below for a graphic of how this all works.

It has already outed one prominent Christofascist asshole, who I will not name, because he is on my list of They Who Must Not be Named, so I will experience my Schadenfreude privately.

Pay Them More Money, You Stupid F%$#ing F%$#s!

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It appears that are having a problem finding and keeping experienced cooks:

Behind the swinging doors of restaurant kitchens around the country, things are getting a bit more chaotic. It’s not the sort of thing diners would not have noticed, because it’s happening behind the scenes, out of view. Orders are still coming in, and plates are still coming out. But there’s a growing problem that chefs and restaurateurs are talking about more these days.

Good cooks are getting harder to come by. Not the head kitchen honchos, depicted in Food Network reality shows, who fine-tune menus and orchestrate the dinner rush, but the men and women who are fresh out of culinary school and eager.

The shortage of able kitchen hands is affecting chefs in Chicago, where restaurateurs said they are receiving far fewer applications than in past years. “It’s gotten to the point where if good cooks come along, we’ll hire them even if we don’t have a position. Because we will have a position,” Paul Kahan, a local chef, told the Chicago Tribune last week.

It’s also an issue in New York, where skilled cooks are an increasingly rare commodity. “If I had a position open in the kitchen, I might have 12 résumés, call in three or four to [try out] in the kitchen, and make a decision,” Alfred Portale, the chef and owner of Michelin-starred Manhattan restaurant Gotham Bar and Grill, told Fortune recently. “Now it’s the other way around; there’s one cook and 12 restaurants.”

Gee, why is it so tough to find good cooks?

Maybe it’s this:

One of the clearest obstacles to hiring a good cook, let alone someone willing to work the kitchen these days, is that living in this country’s biggest cities is increasingly unaffordable. In New York, for instance, where a cook can expect to make between $10 and $12 per hour, and the median rent runs upward of $1,200 a month, living in the city is a near impossibility. As a result, people end up living far from the restaurants where they work. Add to that how late dinner shifts can end, causing people to arrive home well into the night.

Top it all off with the fact that culinary school graduates are often working through significant amounts of debt, and the burden can be insurmountable.

It’s markets, baby.

You cannot find cooks to underpay and abuse because ……… Oh, I don’t know ……… Maybe there are fewer illegal workers out there to depress wages:

And then there’s another subtle but significant change happening across America that doesn’t bode well for the restaurant industry. After years of steady inflows of Mexican immigrants, who have proved both eager and talented cooks, the trend is reversing itself. The number of unauthorized immigrants living in the United States has leveled off over the past decade (it peaked eight years ago in 2007). By 2012, net migration to Mexico was already zero, or even negative, meaning that more Mexicans were moving out than moving in.

So you want your employees to go heavily into debt at cooking schools, you want to work them mercilessly, and you don’t want to pay them well, and now the guys that you can use the threat of La Migra to keep them in line have gone home.

The pay sucks, and they are treated like crap, so people are not flocking to the profession,

You find the same thing in other fields where this has happened, like, for example, airline pilots.

We have been eating our seed corn in terms of skilled professionals for over a generation, if we are finding it hard to find new guys, the solution is not more gastarbeiters (H1B, L1A, etc.), it is to strengthen worker rights, strengthen union rights, and raise the minimum wage.

America, F%$# Yeah!

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Say what you will about America, but we lead the world in firearms related stupidity:

Flamethrowers were gruesome weapons of war and so controversial that the U.S. military stopped using them after Vietnam.

 But as crazy as it may sound, they are available for sale to the public.

 A Cleveland startup called Throwflame is selling flamethrowers for $1,599 that can shoot fire for 50 feet. Another company, Ion Productions Team of Detroit, is selling $900 flamethrowers that can eject flames for 25 feet. Both companies started selling them this year.

 The flamethrowers are marketed not as weapons, but as fun devices.

 “We always have the people who just want it for fun. Impress the neighbors at the BBQ,” said Throwflame founder Quinn Whitehead.

 Both Whitehead and Ion CEO Chris Byars said their flamethrowers have caused no injuries, and safety is a priority. But Ion notes on its website that the flamethrower “may result in injury or even death.”

A flamethrower may result in injury or even death?

Gee, you think?

One bright spot, for me, anyway:

Still, flamethrowers could run afoul of state or local laws. They are banned outright in Maryland. California considers them “destructive devices,” which are illegal, but the state does issue permits for use on movie sets.

So these lunatics are not selling their weapons of death in my my state.

I’m now beginning to wonder how this country ever managed to survive our occasional bouts of peace.

There are times that I wonder if we are more of an episode of Jackass than we are a nation.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

Today’s Lesson from Sesame Street

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Silly poor kids, educational TV is for rich kids:

For more than four decades, the television show Sesame Street has existed to teach children lessons. Today’s lesson is that people without disposable household income are in an inferior position and should be happy to receive secondhand goods.

The original purpose of Sesame Street was to provide uplifting educational programming to the widest possible audience of young children. Yesterday, the Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that produces the program, announced that for the next five years, new episodes will not run on the nonprofit, over-the-air Public Broadcasting Service, but will be distributed through HBO, a premium cable channel owned by the for-profit Time Warner media megacorporation.

In the press release, Sesame Workshop CEO Jeffrey Dunn described the arrangement as “a true winning public-private partnership model.” What does this winning model entail? It entails removing public goods and services from the commons, to repackage them as luxury products for affluent consumers.

………

Now Sesame Street will be restricted to a network that reaches less than one-third of American households. According to the announcement, with the money it gets from HBO, Sesame Street “will be able to produce almost twice as much new content as previous seasons.” And poor kids won’t be able to see any of it. 

………

Or, more precisely, they will be able to see it after the expiration of a nine-month HBO window of exclusivity—at which point the no-longer-new episodes will be passed on to PBS, while the children whose parents can afford to pay for premium cable are watching new-new episodes. The old Sesame Street block has been gentrified, so that HBO can build a sleek high-rise with a separate poor door. 

We have become an ugly society.

Belay that Upgrade to Windows 10

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No verification yet, but there has been a semi credible report that Microsoft’s new operating system is literally sending everything you do to the Redmond Borg:

Note: Some readers have commented that the original source for the article is of questionably validity. If anyone can confirm or refute the original author’s finding with actual data, please let me know in the comments, and I’ll update this post accordingly.

Some Czech guy did a traffic analysis of data produced by Windows 10, and released his findings the other day. His primary thesis was that Windows 10 acts more like a terminal than an operating system — because of the extent of the “cloud” integration, a large portion of the OS functions are almost dependent on remote (Microsoft’s) servers. The amount of collected information, even with strict privacy settings, is quite alarming.

Information transmitted

All text typed on the keyboard is stored in temporary files, and sent (once per 30 mins) to: 

oca.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
pre.footprintpredict.com
reports.wes.df.telemetry.microsoft.com

There isn’t a clear purpose for this, considering there there’s no autocorrect/prediction anywhere in the OS (There is autocorrect in certain text fields, but the supposed purpose for transmitting these keystrokes is to improve autocorrect across devices. Whether a full keylog is necessary for this (as opposed to just corrections) is questionable. Furthermore, this appears to still occur even if the user is not signed in to a Microsoft account, eliminating the “across devices” benefit. Perhaps there is a global autocorrect dictionary that benefits all users, but the privacy implications of an un-disableable always-on keylogger outweigh these potential benefits.). The implications of this are significant: because this is an OS-level keylogger, all the data you’re trying to transmit securely is now sitting on some MS server. This includes passwords and encrypted chats. This also includes the on-screen keyboard, so there is no way to authenticate to a website without MS also getting your password.

………

………In another example, typing the name of any popular movie into your local file search starts a telemetry process that indexes all media files on your computer and transmits them to:  ………

………

It’s hard to imagine any purpose for this other than the obvious piracy crackdown possibilities.

When a webcam is first enabled, ~35mb of data gets immediately transmitted to: 

………

Everything that is said into an enabled microphone is immediately transmitted to: 

………

If this weren’t bad enough, this behaviour still occurs after Cortana is fully disabled/uninstalled. It’s speculated that the purpose of this function to build up a massive voice database, then tie those voices to identities, and eventually be able to identify anyone simply by picking up their voice, whether it be a microphone in a public place or a wiretap on a payphone. 

……… 

While the inital reflex may be to block all of the above servers via HOSTS, it turns out this won’t work: Microsoft has taken the care to hardcode certain IPs, meaning that there is no DNS lookup and no HOSTS consultation. However, if the above servers are blocked via HOSTS, Windows will pretend to be crippled by continuously throwing errors, while still maintaining data collection in the background. Other than an increase in errors, HOSTS blocking did not affect the volume, frequency, or rate of data being transmitted. 

So it appears that Microsoft does key-logging under Win 10, which means that they have your password, they phone home with your media files, meaning that the RIAA and MPAA can go after you for your bootlegs, and they have created a voice profile, so that the NSA can listen to you when they recognize your voice..

Again, this is preliminary, but if half of this is true, my next computer will be a Linux box.

If You Cannot Make Charter Schools in Sweden, You Cannot Make Them Work at All

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It turns out that when you take well funded and competently run public schools, and decide to sh%$ can that and throw public monies at privately run schools, it all turns into crap:

Sweden’s education system has often been cited by Michael Gove as a role model, especially for its policy of state-sponsored free schools providing increased choice for parents. In 2008 Gove told the Conservative party conference that Sweden’s school reforms would be introduced if he was in government – and in 2010 promptly did so, with the advent of free schools.

A few years later and Sweden’s star has dimmed. The 2012 Pisa results show Sweden’s exam results falling abruptly across all three measures of reading, maths and science – with the country recording the largest drop in maths performance over 10 years. Anna Ekström, head of Sweden’s National Education Agency, said in response: “The bleak picture has become bleaker with the Pisa review that was presented today.”

………

In recent months a number of for-profit companies running free schools in Sweden have been in financial difficulties, while a recent TV exposé revealed that the state-funded privately-run schools were prepared to bend selection rules to admit bright pupils.

Sweden’s education minister, Jan Björklund, said the Pisa results were “the final nail in the coffin for the old school reform,” and speculated that the central government could take over running schools from Sweden’s municipalities.

This is not a surprise.

The way to fix public schools is to actually fix public schools.

The charter school movement is based on the twin goals of destroying teachers’ unions and transferring public funds to the parasites on Wall Street.

Charters have not, nor has they ever been about our kids learning.

H/T Angry Bear.

F%$# Me, I Agree with Jeff Bezoa

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Yes, the founder of Amazon, a company whose treatment of its workers makes Walmart look like an organic food cooperative has banned PowerPoint presentations:

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is not a fan of PowerPoint presentations.
Anytime an Amazon worker has an idea to discuss, they’re asked to structure their pitch in the form of a four-to-six-page memo, which the company calls a “narrative.”

They then take their pitches to team meetings, where the first 20 minutes or so are spent reading the memo. After, the presenter fields questions from the rest of the team.

………

Pete Abilla, an early Amazon employee and current director of digital, content, and demand generation at HireVue, shared Bezos’ email in a recent post on his employer’s blog.

………

A little more to help with the reason “why.”

Well structured, narrative text is what we’re after rather than just text. If someone builds a list of bullet points in word, that would be just as bad as powerpoint.

The reason writing a 4 page memo is harder than “writing” a 20 page powerpoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what’s more important than what, and how things are related.

Powerpoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the innerconnectedness of ideas.

OK, I am now feeling some grudging respect for that wanker.  He absolutely nails the deep banality that is inherent in PowerPoint.

I don’t like feeling grudging respect for him.

Nice That This Has Made The Times

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It appears that the mainstream media is finally noticing that a big problem in US healthcare is prices, and not people taking their children to the doctor for a case of the sniffles:

As complaints grow about exorbitant drug prices, pharmaceutical companies are coming under pressure to disclose the development costs and profits of those medicines and the rationale for charging what they do.

So-called pharmaceutical cost transparency bills have been introduced in at least six state legislatures in the last year, aiming to make drug companies justify their prices, which are often attributed to high research and development costs.

“If a prescription drug demands an outrageous price tag, the public, insurers and federal, state and local governments should have access to the information that supposedly justifies the cost,” says the preamble of a bill introduced in the New York State Senate in May.

In an article being published Thursday, more than 100 prominent oncologists called for support of a grass-roots movement to stem the rapid increases of prices of cancer drugs, including by letting Medicare negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies and letting patients import less expensive medicines from Canada.

“There is no relief in sight because drug companies keep challenging the market with even higher prices,” the doctors wrote in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings. “This raises the question of whether current pricing of cancer drugs is based on reasonable expectation of return on investment or whether it is based on what prices the market can bear.”

………

“The industry has used R&D costs for the justification, but anyone who is reasonably sophisticated understands those are sunk costs and have little to do with pricing,” Mr. Rother said. “The more important information is any calculation of value. If the drug actually cures people, then what costs in health care are you saving?”

Dr. Jerry Avorn, a professor at Harvard Medical School and critic of some drug company practices, said the industry “has brought this on itself by charging prices that are so astonishing, it makes citizens wonder, ‘Where did this figure come from?’ ”

Yes, it does make citizens wonder.

What could help is ending evergreening, where a company uses a compliant FDA and US Patent Office to extend their legal monopolies, or the insane way in which the orphan drug act is used to grant legal monopolies on drugs that are literally thousands of years old.  (For example Colchicine has been in use for at least 3500 years, and when the company got exclusivity, it raised the price by a factor of 50)

The problem with drug prices, as well other medical prices, is that we have structures in place that allow corporations, which are by their very nature designed to function as sociopaths to extort excessive rents.

And we are exporting this model to the rest of the world through out trade deals like the TPP and TTIP, which will put the health of citizens in the signatory nations at the same sort of risk that exists here.