I have been out of work for the past few months, and tomorrow I start a new job at Nozilizer, a company that makes No2 based sterilizers.
As is my wont, I am not going to be blogging about this new job, because this is a way for me to end up on unemployment list.
Even better, it is less than a 10 minute walk from the Lexington Market Metro stop, so I won’t be using my car to commute.
Time for a hearty “Boo Yah!“
In addition to users having very little recourse when a vendor creates an update that is worse than its predecessor,* it also leaves you at the mercy of a vendor who can jack up the licensing fees when you are hooked:
Microsoft looks to have increased the price it will charge for Office 365 in the Euro-zone, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Australia, and Canada.
Nicole Sheridan, who works and blogs for Irish distributor MicroWarehouse, has posted a Microsoft missive on the price rises. She also quotes from a Microsoft communiqué that says the price rises are justifiable because “cloud services are rapidly evolving, and Microsoft is adding significant value to our products.”
The translation from Microflaccid speak is as follows, “We are raising prices for the same reason that dogs lick their own genitals: Because they can.”
*Like when Google, who is particularly awful about retrograde “upgrades” removed the ability to save map locations to contacts when they went to version 7.†
†BTW, as of version 9, they have still left what was an essential feature out of maps.‡
‡The rat-f%$#s who did this should be the first bunch up against the wall when the revolution comes.Ψ
ΨBTW, you can get a link to the old version of Google Maps here. Just be sure to enable the installation of non Play Store apps, and turn off auto updating for the Maps app.
Last week, there was a huge bust of pot growers in Northern California.
It turns out that the primary motivation for the bust was not the growing of Marijuana, but the illegal taking of water required to grow Cannabis:
There were helicopters, SWAT teams, and nearly 100,000 marijuana plants yanked out of the ground, but last week’s massive raid in Northern California’s rugged Emerald Triangle was not your father’s pot bust. Carried out by county law enforcement with no help from the DEA, it targeted private landowners—and not just because they were growing pot, police say, but because they were illegally sucking some 500,000 gallons of water a day from a section of the nearby Eel river that is now stagnant and moss-ridden.
When pot is legal, it will no longer be grown in environmentally disastrous ways in national park land, because the growers won’t find it economically viable to do this.
Uber has been operating illegally in France for some time, and following protests from cab drivers, French authorities took Uber executives into custody:
On Monday, French authorities took two Uber executives into custody for questioning as part of an investigation into UberPop, the startup’s lower cost alternative.
Local media have named the men as Thibaut Simphal, the CEO for France, and Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, the CEO for Western Europe. Under French law, both men can be held for up to 48 hours without being charged.
“Our general managers for France and Western Europe today attended a hearing with the French police,” Gareth Mead, an Uber spokesman, told Ars in a statement. “We are always happy to answer questions the authorities have about our service—and look forward to resolving these issues. Those discussions are ongoing. In the meantime, we’re continuing to ensure the safety of our riders and drivers in France given last week’s disturbances.”
………
The primary regulatory issue in France is that UberPop’s drivers operate under a VTC license (véhicules de tourisme avec chauffeur, or tourism vehicles with a driver). Created in 2009, this license was designed for pre-booked travel, not on-the-street hails. UberPop’s drivers are like their UberX counterparts in the United States: normal people with regular cars who do not have an expensive French taxi license. As such, traditional taxi drivers in France have been upset that Uber seems to be flouting the law. Uber maintains that it is a technology company and not a traditional taxi company, and therefore the company believes it’s not bound by taxi law.
It’s nice to find authorities who doesn’t ignore the law, “Because ……… Internet.”
Uber has been operating an illegal taxi service, and been abusing its drivers, and the public, with its business model, and it’s good that someone is acting on this, albeit with some prodding by protesters.
Major internet providers, including AT&T, Time Warner and Verizon, are slowing data from popular websites to thousands of US businesses and residential customers in dozens of cities across the country, according to a study released on Monday.
The study, conducted by internet activists BattlefortheNet, looked at the results from 300,000 internet users and found significant degradations on the networks of the five largest internet service providers (ISPs), representing 75% of all wireline households across the US.The findings come weeks after the Federal Communications Commission introduced new rules meant to protect “net neutrality” – the principle that all data is equal online – and keep ISPs from holding traffic speeds for ransom.
Tim Karr of Free Press, one of the groups that makes up BattlefortheNet, said the finding show ISPs are not providing content to users at the speeds they’re paying for.
“For too long, internet access providers and their lobbyists have characterized net neutrality protections as a solution in search of a problem,” said Karr. “Data compiled using the Internet Health Test show us otherwise – that there is widespread and systemic abuse across the network. The irony is that this trove of evidence is becoming public just as many in Congress are trying to strip away the open internet protections that would prevent such bad behavior.”
Once again, call your congresscritter, and ask them not to support cable company f%$#ery.
But Taylor Swift has earned her entry into the most noble order of the “People I Do Not Want to Piss Off“.
Taylor: 1 — Apple: 0:
Tech oligarchs aren’t supposed to say sorry. And no, Apple hasn’t formally apologized to the music community for demanding that it works for Apple for free, Apple still comes out of it with plenty of credit.
Ten days ago, the contracts for Apple’s new Spotify-ish streaming service leaked out, and they contained an unprecedented request. Apple said artists and rights owners would not be paid for music streamed during the service’s first three months. During that time, the service will be offered for free to people, and then rise to something like ten bucks a month.
Typically, streaming pays almost nothing today – fractions of a penny. The segment numbers tens of millions of paying subscribers, and hasn’t achieved scale. But this, from Apple, was genuinely nothing: a big, fat zero. The story flew onto the business pages. Only bottom-feeding pirate websites used artists’ work without paying them, and it looked like Apple was diving into the cesspit of file-sharers.
………
Within hours of the world’s biggest pop star weighing in on the side of the indies, Apple caved in. Taylor Swift livened up Sunday with a devastating open letter to Apple, explaining her music wouldn’t be on Apple Music.
By the evening, Apple’s content chief Eddy Cue was tweeting, and phoning reporters, to tell say the no-royalties period was scrapped. Artist will believe it when they see the new contracts arrive: the trial-period royalty may be lower than the regular royalty. But that’s still an epic turnaround – and Apple emerges looking better than anyone expected last week.
Apple clearly wants Apple Music to succeed – and many artists and rights owners want it to succeed, too. This is surprising on the face of it, given that Apple pays barely more than streaming services. (Again, we’ll wait for the first royalty statements before seeing whether this is true.)
Well played, Ms. Swift.
Rather unsurprisingly, much like its cable competitors, Verizon* is steadfastly refusing to do infrastructure build-outs that in promised in exchange for its getting a cable franchise:
New York City officials today ordered Verizon to complete fiber builds that the company was supposed to finish a year ago. If Verizon doesn’t comply, the city can seek financial damages.
“In a 2008 agreement with New York City, Verizon committed to extend its FiOS network to every household across the five boroughs by June 30, 2014,” said the announcement of an audit released today by the city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT).
Verizon’s FiOS fiber network delivers Internet, TV, and phone service to areas traditionally served by Verizon’s copper landlines and DSL Internet.
“Through a thorough and comprehensive audit, we have determined that Verizon substantially failed to meet its commitment to the people of New York City,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said. “As I’ve said time and again, Verizon must deliver on its obligation to the City of New York and we will hold them accountable.”
The agreement, which gave Verizon a cable television franchise, says NYC may “seek and/or pursue money damages” from Verizon if it fails to deliver on its promises.
Verizon also failed to meet broadband promises in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, but those states let the company off the hook.
Verizon is disputing New York City’s findings. Verizon met the requirement to pass all households with fiber, though not all residents can actually buy fiber service, the company says. Verizon last year blamed landlords for delays. It also blamed Hurricane Sandy from October 2012, even though Verizon was still claiming to be “ahead of schedule” in April 2013.
………
Verizon further said that “it is important to note that it’s not a mere coincidence that the report is made public today, and labor negotiations with our largest union begin on Monday. It’s well known the union has ties to the city administration, and things like this are a familiar union tactic we have seen before.” The Communications Workers of America union has blamed Verizon’s fiber shortcomings on job cuts.
Verizon has also called complaints about its landline maintenance “meaningless rhetoric and hyperbole from the unions.”
The city’s audit report said refusal of access by landlords cannot explain the full extent of Verizon’s failure to bring fiber to all residents. Property managers interviewed by the city said Verizon has refused to extend service to buildings unless the company was granted exclusive agreements that would shut out other providers.
If the contract allows for pulling the franchise, I would like to see that.
If it doesn’t, use eminent domain to purchase the fiber infrastructure, and get the money for it from Verizon’s fines.
In a perfect world, of course, Verizon executives would be invited (compelled) to participate on that classic game show, Ow! My Balls!, but I will take what I can get.
What the free market mousketeers refuse to understand about this crap is that companies make more money from maintaining a monopoly and shutting out other competitors, so the free market will not lead to competition and lower prices.
*Full disclosure, I am a relatively satisfied (monopoly rents make them too expensive) Verizon FIOS® customer.
The city of Missoula, Montana has apparently had enough of mismanagement of their water infrastructure by its Carlyle Group owned private water company, Mountain Water Company, along with the normal private equity hijinks, so they tried to buy it.
The Carlyle Group refused, and so the city condemned the company, and seized it by eminent domain, and now Missoula has won a court victory confirming their right to seize the utility:
Missoula won its legal fight to take ownership of Mountain Water Co. and the city’s drinking water system Monday.
In a 68-page decision, Missoula District Court Judge Karen Townsend said the city “carried its burden of proof” and showed that “its contemplated use of the water system as a municipally owned water system is more necessary than the current use as a privately owned for-profit enterprise.”
“Based on credible evidence at trial, the Court concludes that the object of this condemnation proceeding, the use of the water system, is a public use for which the right of eminent domain may properly be exercised” under Montana law, Townsend said.
The judge said she “considered the broad range of circumstances,” and weighed “the benefits to be derived from the proposed public use against the impairments to the existing use.”
Her conclusion: “The proposed public use is more reasonable” and “proper.”
The city made its case, she continued, and proved that “the taking is a more necessary public use.”
The city did try to purchase Mountain Water Co. from its owner, global equity firm The Carlyle Group, Townsend said, “and the final written offer was rejected.” It is now, she said, Missoula’s “right to acquire” the water system by exercising its power of eminent domain.
Basically, Mountain Water Company is not performing timely maintenance on the infrastructure (after all, some resources have to go toward paying inflated private equity “Management Fees”):
………
The water system pumps groundwater from the Missoula aquifer through 37 wells and 327 miles of water main. The system serves 23,500 customers, with 1,500 of them outside the city limits. The city of Missoula estimates that an investment of $66 million to $95 million is needed to bring the system to industry standards.
- Nearly 50 percent of the mains are more than 45 years old. Twenty percent of the mains have exceeded their useful life.
- While 81 percent of the system is metered, only 40 percent of the water is measured through meters. The average age of the meters is 20 years and will require $16 million to $20 million to achieve industry standards.
- Nearly 75 percent of the service lines are galvanized steel and have exceeded their useful life. The cost to bring the lines up to industry standards is roughly $25 million.
- Rattlesnake Dam and the intake dam have not been maintained and show problems with erosion, slope and stability, requiring $3 million in repairs.
- The water system leaks at a rate of 50 percent. An estimated 8,000 gallons leak every minute, well above the national Infrastructure Leakage Index.
A 50% leakage rate? Seriously? In a locality that is already abnormally dry, and in a world that is drawing down its aquifers at an alarming rate?
And the Carlyle Group thinks that this is all hunky dory?
And then there is the attempt by the Carlyle Group to represent the purchase of a $945.00 coffee maker as a capital expenditure.
Clearly, the private sector is not working the way that all those free market mousketeers would lead us to believe.
Full disclosure: I worked for a few years at United Defense, which was owned by the Carlyle Group, before it was sold to BAE Systems.
H/T Naked Capitalism.
The airline trade group, the The International Air Transport Association (IATA), has mooted a proposal to further shrink the size of carry-on luggage:
The International Air Transport Association has put out a recommendation that cabin bags be 21.5 x 13.5 x 7.5 inches to create more space for passengers to store luggage.
Airlines set their own carry-on limits but the recommendation, if adopted, could lead them to trim bag sizes at most major carriers.
No North American carriers have yet accepted the IATA guidance but Emirates, Lufthansa (DLAKF) and seven others have.
Southwest Airlines (LUV) and American Airlines (AAL) said they don’t have any plans to change carry-on guidelines. Southwest passengers would be among the hardest hit if IATA’s recommendation becomes standard across the industry. They would lose about 40% in bag space.
Yes, the secret to the airlines is making the cargo customer experience crappier and crappier, until the consumer longs for the bliss of dealing with Comcast customer service.
I long for the invention of the Star Trek transporter system.
Every time that someone looks at a charter school’s operation we find repeated instances of corruption, self dealing, and dodgy accounting:
Dennis Mope’s dream of running a network of military-themed charter schools for at-risk students ended quickly and with little warning this month in Jacksonville and Orlando.
Two of Mope’s Acclaim Academy charter schools closed abruptly, displacing hundreds of students just three weeks before the end of the school year.
A third school in Kissimmee was supposed to close in March but Osceola County’s school district took it over last month and will keep it open until the school year ends in June.
Five other of Mope’s planned Acclaim Academies never got off the ground.
Although one received district approval to open in Palm Beach next August, the plan was scrapped. Four other charter school applications in Pinellas, Hillsborough, Volusia and Lee counties were all withdrawn, some before they were rejected by the school districts involved.
In Jacksonville, the fallout was immediate and unexpected.
Parents of 229 students scrambled over three days to find new schools for their children. Some students still had to take final tests or state-mandated exams at new schools.
Duval County School Board members said they are not sure why the school “ran out of money” and had to close, saying the children were hurt most.
“They should be focused on passing their exams; they shouldn’t have to worry about what school they’re going to go to,” said Becki Couch, a School Board member, “all because their charter school [operator] didn’t have its act together.”
Scott Shine, another Duval County School Board member wrote that “The actions of Acclaim are, at minimum, irresponsible and reckless. This could go much deeper,” in an email.
Acclaim’s teachers were shocked to find out that their last paycheck, issued late April or early May, was to be their last. Some teachers, who had arranged for the school to save parts of their paycheck to repay them over the summer, were told not to expect it.
Some Duval School Board members questioned what the school district knew, and when, about Acclaim Academy’s troubles.
“We knew they were beginning the school year under a deficit,” Couch wrote in an email to Duval Superintendent Nikolai Vitti.
“Do you think the Board should have been notified of the declining financial status of the school so we could make the determination how we wanted to proceed so as not to disrupt student academic learning during this pivotal time of the year? I am disturbed that we have been completely blind-sided by this when according to state statute the Charter School is required to provide an annual audit report and monthly financial statements.”
………
Through it all, Acclaim Academy’s founder has yet to answer questions.
Dennis Mope, an Orlando-area businessman, said “no comment” to news crews on the scene of the Orlando school closure, and he did not return phone calls or emails about Duval’s closure.
Public documents, including a Chapter 13 bankruptcy he filed in 2009, reveal some information about him.
………
Of the three Acclaim charter schools that operated in the past two years, the oldest was in Osceola County. Since the school opened in 2012, it had two consecutive F grades on its state report cards, triggering a law that caused the state to begin the process of shutting down the school.
Acclaim’s parent company applied for a waiver of the state law but, when it was denied, it made plans to close the school at the end of March.
………
The school started last fall with 416 students, but that fell to 332 by February. In March enrollment was down to 310 prompting Orange County administrators to request an amended school budget showing how the school could survive with fewer students than expected.
But, upon closer inspection, the district noted other irregularities in the school’s operations and finances:
- Some teachers listed as heading classes left the school and others have become assistant principals and deans. Too many substitutes were teaching classes.
- School reading teachers weren’t qualified for the subject, the county said, possibly violating federal Title 1 poverty funding rules.
- The school did not employ the required instructors to serve its students with disabilities.
- A student who missed 51 days had changes to her records to make it appear she had attended and had passed classes for that period.
………
There were financial irregularities, too.
In its April letter, Orange County said Acclaim violated state law by borrowing $350,000 when its school was already $151,061 in the hole Feb. 28.
The school also cut a deal to transfer future per-pupil state funding to a charter asset management fund. The deal promised $150,000 in April and May and $222,000 in June, though the school would likely face “severe reductions” in state funding because of enrollment declines and misrepresentations, Orange County said, adding that the deal’s promise to turn over other school assets may violate state law.
Orange County also questioned how Acclaim’s four “corporate” positions, including Mope’s, were being funded, saying it’s improper to use students’ money from the three charter schools for non-education functions.
Those salaries and some loans among the Acclaim schools amounted to commingling funds in a way that may violate state law, the district wrote.
………
That explanation wasn’t good enough for Heyta Diaz, whose two freshman daughters were placed at Ed White High and were told they might have to take a virtual course to catch up.
Diaz said she wants to confront Acclaim’s founder and ask him and the district some questions about why the Duval Acclaim closed.
“This guy opens and closes schools like its a day care,” she said. “This is our future. This is our kids.”
Charter schools are petri dishes for corruption and looting, and they need to be regulated accordingly.
H/t Atrios
In addition to killing off most of the hemophiliacs in the United States because of their unwillingness to test blood for HIV and discard HIV tainted clotting factor, of course.
It turns out that the America Red Cross raised $½ Billion for post earthquake aid to Haiti, and built just 6 homes:
The neighborhood of Campeche sprawls up a steep hillside in Haiti’s capital city, Port-au-Prince. Goats rustle in trash that goes forever uncollected. Children kick a deflated volleyball in a dusty lot below a wall with a hand-painted logo of the American Red Cross.
In late 2011, the Red Cross launched a multimillion-dollar project to transform the desperately poor area, which was hit hard by the earthquake that struck Haiti the year before. The main focus of the project — called LAMIKA, an acronym in Creole for “A Better Life in My Neighborhood” — was building hundreds of permanent homes.
Today, not one home has been built in Campeche. Many residents live in shacks made of rusty sheet metal, without access to drinkable water, electricity or basic sanitation. When it rains, their homes flood and residents bail out mud and water.
The Red Cross received an outpouring of donations after the quake, nearly half a billion dollars.
The group has publicly celebrated its work. But in fact, the Red Cross has repeatedly failed on the ground in Haiti. Confidential memos, emails from worried top officers, and accounts of a dozen frustrated and disappointed insiders show the charity has broken promises, squandered donations, and made dubious claims of success.
The Red Cross says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 people. But the actual number of permanent homes the group has built in all of Haiti: six.
After the earthquake, Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern unveiled ambitious plans to “develop brand-new communities.” None has ever been built.
Aid organizations from around the world have struggled after the earthquake in Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country. But ProPublica and NPR’s investigation shows that many of the Red Cross’s failings in Haiti are of its own making. They are also part of a larger pattern in which the organization has botched delivery of aid after disasters such as Superstorm Sandy. [They f%$#ed up Katrina and 911 too, and my father’s recollections of their help during the Anchorage earthquake in 1964 is similar. He remembers the Salvation Army outperforming them by all metrics] Despite its difficulties, the Red Cross remains the charity of choice for ordinary Americans and corporations alike after natural disasters.
One issue that has hindered the Red Cross’ work in Haiti is an overreliance on foreigners who could not speak French or Creole, current and former employees say.
In a blistering 2011 memo, the then-director of the Haiti program, Judith St. Fort, wrote that the group was failing in Haiti and that senior managers had made “very disturbing” remarks disparaging Haitian employees. St. Fort, who is Haitian American, wrote that the comments included, “he is the only hard working one among them” and “the ones that we have hired are not strong so we probably should not pay close attention to Haitian CVs.”
The Red Cross won’t disclose details of how it has spent the hundreds of millions of dollars donated for Haiti. But our reporting shows that less money reached those in need than the Red Cross has said.
Lacking the expertise to mount its own projects, the Red Cross ended up giving much of the money to other groups to do the work. Those groups took out a piece of every dollar to cover overhead and management. Even on the projects done by others, the Red Cross had its own significant expenses – in one case, adding up to a third of the project’s budget.
The American Red Cross has a long history of over promising, excessive fund raising, and under delivering.
This is not a well run organization in my lifetime.
If you want to give blood, find a local non profit blood bank.
If you want to donate money to the victims of a disaster, find a bit less ponderous and self-aggrandizing organization.
*http://articles.latimes.com/1994-05-29/news/mn-63591_1_blood-banks
Whoever came up with the site Ship Your Enemies Glitter is clearly of a deeply diabolical bent, and having a silly revenge web site is better than having a lair in a volcano with nuclear weapons.
As such, I heartily endorse this product, and state for the record that I have received no considerations from this enterprise for my review:
We hate glitter. People call it the herpes of the craft world. What we hate more though are the soulless people who get their jollies off by sending glitter in envelopes.
We’ve had enough so here’s the deal: there’s someone in your life right now who you can’t stand. Whether it be your sh%$ty neighbour, a family member or that bitch Amy down the road who thinks it’s cool to invite you to High Tea but not provide any weed.
So pay us money, provide an address anywhere in the world & we’ll send them so much glitter in an envelope that they’ll be finding that sh%$ everywhere for weeks. We’ll also include a note telling the person exactly why they’re receiving this terrible gift. Hint: the glitter will be mixed in with the note thus increasing maximum spillage.
Like I said. It’s this, or going full Bond Villain.
H/T Neo at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
Rather unsurprisingly, the thing that they did right was dissing New York Times columnist, and perpetual middle school doyenne Maureen Dowd.
It seems that our lady of shallow cattiness was in Hollywood, and called for an Uber ride, and she saw the cars fleeing her on the app:
………
Even in the land of movie stars, you could feel like a movie star when your Uber chauffeur rolled up. Standing in front of the Sunset Tower Hotel, I tapped my Uber app and saw five little cars swarming around my location. But, suddenly, they scattered in the opposite direction. I stood in the driveway, perplexed. Finally, a car pulled up, and the driver waved me in.
“Do you know why no one wanted to pick you up?” he asked. “Because you have a low rating.”
(Uber drivers see your rating once they accept the request and then can cancel.)
I was shocked. Blinded by the wondrous handiness of Uber, I had missed the fact that while I got to rate them, they got to rate me back.
Revealing that I had only 4.2 stars, my driver continued to school me. “You don’t always come out right away,” he said, sternly, adding that I would have to work hard to be more appealing if I wanted to get drivers to pick me up.
To the degree that we can tell, the firms fares are opaque and confusing, Uber does not charge by the hour, it charges on the basis of distance + some sort of weird “special sauce”.
The drivers are paid on the basis of what is charged, so by leaving drivers to cool their heels while she does her nails, or finishes packing, or whatever, she is requiring the drivers to wait unpaid for her.
Given that with a glance at the app, you can see where the nearest drivers are, it would be a simple thing to wait until just before she was ready to leave, or to post for a driver at some point in the near future so that you can be assured that she is ready to ride when they arrive.
Ms. Dowd comes to a completely different conclusion:
Except then I learned that sitting in an Uber car was pretty much like sitting in my office: How much have you developed your audience? How much have you been shared? How much have you engaged your reader? Are you trending?
I was trending on Uber, all right, and not in a good way. I had avoided Lyft not only because of that pink mustache but because I had heard that you were encouraged to sit up front with drivers and give them fist-bumps. It seemed more like The Flintstones’ car than Cinderella’s pumpkin coach.
But, now, instead of quietly sitting in the back seat of my Uber and checking my phone or reading the paper, I had to start working to charm.
“Your husband likes oysters?” I enthused to one woman driving me in San Francisco.
“What are the kids up to this summer?” I chirped to another.
It was starting to have the vibe of friending, liking and sharing on Facebook, and that always gives me acid flashbacks to the ’80s when I was forced to go to my brother’s house and watch slides of his wedding. Finally, my nephew explained that I didn’t need to grovel or gush. I simply needed to say, as I got out of the car, “Five for five.” If I promised to give them five stars — even in the Wild West of Uber X, where the drivers often seem so unfamiliar with the local terrain it’s as though they’ve arrived from Mars — they would give me five stars.
So her solution is to go and subject the drivers that she is paying to be her hostage to the wondrous personality that is Maureen Dowd.
You are treating Uber drivers like sh%$, and no amount of small talk will fix that.
Just don’t leave the driver waiting.
Also, tips, particularly in cash, where Uber won’t take a cut, can’t hurt.
Kudos to the “City of Angels” which has raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour, including tipped workers:
The nation’s second-largest city voted Tuesday to increase its minimum wage from $9 an hour to $15 an hour by 2020, in what is perhaps the most significant victory so far for labor groups and their allies who are engaged in a national push to raise the minimum wage.
The increase, which the City Council passed in a 14-to-1 vote, comes as workers across the country are rallying for higher wages and several large companies, including Facebook and Walmart, have moved to raise their lowest wages. Several other cities, including San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle and Oakland, Calif., have already approved increases, and dozens more are considering doing the same. In 2014, a number of Republican-leaning states like Alaska and South Dakota also raised their state-level minimum wages by ballot initiative.
The effect is likely to be particularly strong in Los Angeles, where, according to some estimates, almost 50 percent of the city’s work force earns less than $15 an hour. Under the plan approved Tuesday, the minimum wage will rise over five years.
………
Even economists who support increasing the minimum wage say there is not enough historical data to predict the effect of a $15 minimum wage, an unprecedented increase. A wage increase to $12 an hour over the next few years would achieve about the same purchasing power as the minimum wage in the late 1960s, the most recent peak.
Many restaurant owners here aggressively fought the increase, saying they would be forced to cut as much as half of their staff. Unlike other states, California state law prohibits tipped employees from receiving lower than the minimum wage. The Council promised to study the potential effect of allowing restaurants to add a service charge to bills to meet the increased costs.
The restaurant owners can, to quote Bender Rodriguez, “bite my shiny metal ass.”
There is no justification to pay slave wages to your employees, and there is no reason for a wait person to have to tolerate bad behavior from a customer because they depend on tips for their livelihood.
If your business cannot make it if you have to pay your employees a fair wage, then your business should not make it, no saving throw.
A whistle blower at Tiversa is alleging that the company manufactured false evidence of breaches to gin up business:
A bombshell lawsuit is raising eyebrows in the cybersecurity industry.
A former cybersecurity forensic examiner named Richard Wallace is claiming that his former employer — cybersecurity company Tiversa — “would typically make up fake data breaches to scare potential clients,” CNNMoney reports.
Wallace claims that Tiversa would routinely do this then “pressure firms to pay up” by buying its cybersecurity services, according to a federal courtroom transcript obtained by CNNMoney. This came to a head when Tiversa allegedly approached cancer testing services company LabMD about a supposed hack. LabMD refused to buy into Tiversa’s services, so Tiversa allegedly reported the cancer-testing company to the FTC for having a data breach.
………
This lawsuit raises some potentially worrisome issues about practices in the cybersecurity industry.
Gee you think?
It’s the f%$#ing Wild West out there, with no standards of what constitutes a breach, and no meaningful certification of the security firms.
People have been selling cyber Armageddon, with only one concrete example of their horror stories panning out (Stuxnet which was created by the US and Israeli government), why is it a surprise when we discover that people are selling “breaches” that are either non existent or minor.
I guess being a cybersecurity consultant beats working for a living.
Toyota has discovered that robots cannot do it all, and that they need highly experienced experts to maximize the productivity at their plants:
Inside Toyota Motor Corp.’s oldest plant, there’s a corner where humans have taken over from robots in thwacking glowing lumps of metal into crankshafts. This is Mitsuru Kawai’s vision of the future.
“We need to become more solid and get back to basics, to sharpen our manual skills and further develop them,” said Kawai, a half century-long company veteran tapped by President Akio Toyoda to promote craftsmanship at Toyota’s plants. “When I was a novice, experienced masters used to be called gods, and they could make anything.”
These gods, or “kami-sama” in Japanese, are making a comeback at Toyota, the company that long set the pace for manufacturing prowess in the auto industry and beyond. Toyota’s next step forward is counterintuitive in an age of automation: Humans are taking the place of machines in plants across the nation so workers can develop new skills and figure out ways to improve production lines and the car-building process.
“Toyota views their people who work in a plant like this as craftsmen who need to continue to refine their art and skill level,” said Jeff Liker, who has written eight books on Toyota and visited Kawai last year. “In almost every company you would visit, the workers’ jobs are to feed parts into a machine and call somebody for help when it breaks down.”
The return of the kami-sama is emblematic of how Toyoda, 57, is remaking the company founded by his grandfather as the chief executive officer has pledged to tilt priorities back toward quality and efficiency from a growth mentality. He’s reining in expansion at the world’s-largest automaker with a three-year freeze on new car plants.
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“What Akio Toyoda feared the company lost when it was growing so fast was the time to struggle and learn,” said Liker, who met with Toyoda in November. “He felt Toyota got big-company disease and was too busy getting product out.”
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Learning how to make car parts from scratch gives younger workers insights they otherwise wouldn’t get from picking parts from bins and conveyor belts, or pressing buttons on machines. At about 100 manual-intensive workspaces introduced over the last three years across Toyota’s factories in Japan, these lessons can then be applied to reprogram machines to cut down on waste and improve processes, Kawai said.
In an area Kawai directly supervises at the forging division of Toyota’s Honsha plant, workers twist, turn and hammer metal into crankshafts instead of using the typically automated process. Experiences there have led to innovations in reducing levels of scrap and shortening the production line 96 percent from its length three years ago.
Toyota has eliminated about 10 percent of material-related waste from building crankshafts at Honsha. Kawai said the aim is to apply those savings to the next-generation Prius hybrid.
The work extends beyond crankshafts. Kawai credits manual labor for helping workers at Honsha improve production of axle beams and cut the costs of making chassis parts.
Though Kawai doesn’t envision the day his employer will rid itself of robots — 760 of them take part in 96 percent of the production process at its Motomachi plant in Japan — he has introduced multiple lines dedicated to manual labor in each of Toyota’s factories in its home country, he said.
“We cannot simply depend on the machines that only repeat the same task over and over again,” Kawai said. “To be the master of the machine, you have to have the knowledge and the skills to teach the machine.”
True dat.
Guys on the shop floor are an invaluable source of knowledge and wisdom.
This time it’s Chris Christie cutting a sweetheart deal for his brother’s law firm:
As one of its first moves in its state takeover of financially strapped Atlantic City, Chris Christie’s administration has awarded a lucrative government contract to the financial services firm that employs the Republican governor’s brother, Todd Christie. The deal followed an even bigger contract given to the firm by Christie officials only weeks after the governor’s brother began working there.
In January, Chris Christie signed an executive order installing an emergency management team to develop “a plan to place the finances of Atlantic City in stable condition on a long-term basis.” Two months later, Reuters obtained documents showing that Christie administration officials signed a contract with Ernst & Young, which hired Todd Christie as a New Jersey-based director in March 2013. Todd Christie is listed as working on the firm’s “business development” in campaign finance records.
The Christie administration contract will pay Ernst and Young more than $250,000 to provide financial analysis of Atlantic City. As the casino town faces a $101 million deficit and hotel closures, the deal cemented by Christie’s Department of Law also will allow Ernst & Young to bill taxpayers $455 per hour for other services, according to Reuters. The Christie administration gave the contract to Todd Christie’s firm at a time when New Jersey’s executive branch ethics code says that public officials may not use their positions “to secure a job, contract, governmental approval or special benefit for yourself, a friend or family member.”
“I hope the governor’s advocacy for the state takeover of Atlantic City was not simply to repay a favor to his brother, Todd Christie, for all of the support Todd has given him over the years,” said Assemblyman John Wisniewski, the Democrat who co-chairs the legislature’s investigative committee. “It is fair to ask questions any time you have the executive branch taking actions that at least on the surface appear to uniquely benefit somebody very close to the governor.”
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The Christie administration’s Atlantic City-related contract to Todd Christie’s firm follows Todd Christie delivering more than $50,000 to the Republican Governors Association, which backed his brother’s election campaigns. The governor’s brother also delivered a maximum $3,800 contribution to his brother’s reelection campaign after he started at Ernst & Young.
This is not the first time Todd Christie’s business has intersected with the government business his brother oversees.
Only weeks after Todd Christie started at Ernst & Young, Christie administration officials awarded the firm separate contracts worth more than $550,000 for auditing services in connection with the state’s expenditures on Hurricane Sandy recovery. Ernst & Young has said Todd Christie was not involved in the deal, and noted that Ernst & Young is a large company with many employees.
Todd Christie also was part of a group of investors who purchased and sold properties near public transit facilities that his brother’s appointees redeveloped, according to the Bergen Record. At an event touting the redevelopment, the governor joked that his father was the “lobbyist in the Christie family for this project.”
So totally not corrupt, right?
This is not the sort of sh%$ that goes unnoticed in a Presidential race, even if it is business as usual in New Jersey, and even if Christie is a Republican.
Uber is at it again.
This time, they are refusing to give rides to people with service animals:
A federal judge in San Francisco has allowed a civil lawsuit filed against Uber by an advocacy group for the blind to proceed.
The case was initially filed in September 2014 by the National Federation of the Blind of California and one individual plaintiff, who alleged that the quasi-taxi company is in violation of the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), along with other state disabilities laws.
Uber had initially filed to have the case dismissed, but the judge’s ruling last Friday means the case will proceed.
According to the initial civil complaint, UberX drivers routinely refused to serve blind riders who travel with service animals:Further, UberX drivers across the United States are likewise refusing to transport blind individuals, including identified UberX drivers who repeatedly denied rides to one blind woman on twelve separate occasions, charged blind riders cancellation fees, and abandoned blind travelers in extreme weather, all because of guide dogs.
In total, Plaintiffs are aware of more than thirty instances where drivers of UberX vehicles refused to transport blind individuals with service animals. UberX drivers that refused to transport these blind individuals did so after they initially agreed to transport the riders. The UberX drivers denied the requested transportation service after the drivers had arrived and discovered that the riders used service animals.
In addition, some UberX drivers seriously mishandle guide dogs or harass blind customers with guide dogs even when they do not outright deny the provision of taxi service. For example, Leena Dawes is blind and uses a guide dog. An UberX driver forced Ms. Dawes’ guide dog into the closed trunk of the UberX sedan before transporting Ms. Dawes. When Ms. Dawes realized where the driver had placed her dog, she pleaded with the driver to pull over so that she could retrieve her dog from the trunk, but the driver refused her request. Other blind customers with guide dogs have been yelled at by Uber drivers who are hostile toward their guide dogs.
In its motion to dismiss, Uber argued that the plaintiffs lacked standing, and that as a private company, it is not bound by the provisions of the ADA—an argument that United States Magistrate Judge Nathaniel Cousins found did not hold water.
If they think that Title III of the ADA (public accommodations and commercial facilities) doesn’t apply to them, they are desperately trying to avoid treating their employees as employees, why should they give a damn about things like Sarbanes-Oxley?
Investing with Objectivist psychopaths who think they are supermen who are above the laws of mere mortals who does not appear to me to be a sensible thing.
The kicker is that he is a bankruptcy attorney:
In a mocking open-letter to a Michigan auto repair shop owner following his anti-gay Facebook rant, a Grand Rapids bankruptcy attorney has offered his services to deal with the economic consequences of the business owner’s “inane, incoherent and just plain dumb comments.”
On Tuesday, Grandville auto shop owner Brian Klawiter posted a rambling attack on gays on Facebook, saying he would not service their cars, adding, “Homosexuality is wrong, period. If you want to argue this fact with me then I will put your vehicle together with all bolts and no nuts and you can see how that works.”
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Sensing a business opportunity, Grand Rapids bankruptcy attorney Jeffrey Mapes, posted an open letter on Michigan Live, saying he too is “white, male, Christian, a business owner, and a gun owner,” and is willing to handle Klawiter’s future needs despite his “inane, incoherent and just plain dumb comments” on Facebook.
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He then offered words of inspiration in the wake of the Facebook post that has caused Klawiter grief , quoting from the Adam Sandler film, “Billy Madison.”
“What you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”
Heh.
A private bill collector and police conspired to use the threat of immediate arrest to extort cash from poor defendants:
Minutes after a court sentenced Adel Edwards to pay a $500 fine for burning leaves in his yard without a permit, the private probation company tasked with supervising his monthly payments told him he actually owed more than $1,000 and demanded $250 up front. Because Edwards couldn’t pay the full amount on the spot, the company had him thrown in jail for several days until a friend came up with the money, according to a new federal lawsuit.
The suit, filed by the Southern Center for Human Rights, charges that Red Hills Community Probation conspired with local police in two small Georgia towns to jail poor people without any court approval or legal authority, effectively holding them for ransom.
The plaintiffs, who live in Bainbridge and Pelham, GA, were ordered by the court to pay exorbitant fees for misdemeanor offenses. Edwards pleaded guilty to burning leaves, while others were told they needed to pay hundreds of dollars for speeding, failing to come to a complete stop at a stop sign, and driving with a suspended registration.
At this point, these stories are reminiscent of reports coming out of Ferguson and the surrounding area, where municipalities exploit a murky labyrinth of court fees and traffic tickets to make money off poor defendants. But private probation companies like Red Hills, which are used by more than 1,000 court systems in ten states, further feed on these moneymaking schemes by tacking on their own share of fees. In Pelham and Bainbridge, the suit alleges, the probation firm went even further, committing false imprisonment and fraud, among other charges.
Like Edwards, the other plaintiffs met with Red Hills probation officers, who told each of them they could not leave the courthouse until they paid a certain amount of money that same day. Even though they weren’t legally required to pay the company the same day as their sentencing, the lawsuit states that police officers were stationed at the doors to keep them from leaving. One woman says she was detained in the courthouse while her fiance pawned her engagement ring to come up with the funds the company demanded.
Why am I not surprised that this is going on in what was once a part of the Confederacy?
Silly black folks, justice is for whites.