Category: Evil

Facebook is a Ponzi Scheme

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I have noted for some time not that even by the rather loose standards of internet advertising, Facebook stands out because of the fraudulent nature of its ad metrics.

Now we have a whistle-blower:

A Facebook employee warned that the company reported revenues it “should have never made” by overstating how many users advertisers could reach, according to internal emails revealed in a newly unsealed court filing.

The world’s largest social media company has since 2018 been fighting a class-action lawsuit claiming that its executives knew its “potential reach metric”, used to inform advertisers of their potential audience size, was inflated but failed to correct it.

According to sections of a filing in the lawsuit that were unredacted on Wednesday, a Facebook product manager in charge of potential reach proposed changing the definition of the metric in mid-2018 to render it more accurate.

However, internal emails show that his suggestion was rebuffed by Facebook executives overseeing metrics on the grounds that the “revenue impact” for the company would be “significant”, the filing said.

The product manager responded by saying “it’s revenue we should have never made given the fact it’s based on wrong data”, the complaint said.

………

Facebook has argued that the metrics are only estimates. Indeed, advertisers do not pay the company based on potential reach, rather for actual impressions and clicks on ads.

………

Facebook itself acknowledged that the metric was “arguably the single most important number in our ads creation interfaces” in an internal document cited in the unsealed filing.

The filing also claimed that in early 2018, internal Facebook research found that removing duplicate accounts from potential reach would result in a 10 per cent drop in the figure.

………

In March 2019, Facebook made some changes to its potential reach, making it based on how many people matching an advertiser’s criteria had been shown an ad in the past 30 days, rather than the number of active users over the same time period. However, the lawsuit alleges that as of 2020, the company “still has not removed the fake and duplicate accounts from its potential reach calculation”.

………

The lawsuit over potential reach is the second major suit brought by advertisers regarding misleading metrics at Facebook. Several years ago the company settled a complaint filed after it disclosed it overstated video-viewing metrics in 2015 and 2016.

(emphasis mine)

I really want to see Mark Zuckerberg marched out of Facebook headquarters in handcuffs one day. 

Of course, that would require a Department of Justice that wasn’t generally opposed to prosecuting white collar crime.

Worse Response to a Bad Idea

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The Australian government is in the process of passing a law that requires payment for linking to news sites, which to my mind is a horrible idea, and Mark Zuckerberg’s response to all of this is to have Facebook ban all Australian news content from their platform. 

Granted, Australia is not a huge market, at 25 million people, it’s only about 5 million more people than the New York City metropolitan area, but this ham-fisted response is going to do a lot of damage to Facebook while mildly inconveniencing the people of Australia.

I don’t expect Zuckerberg to cave, and in that case, I see Australia generally moving to some other source of rumors, genocidal racists, fascism, and cat pix.

The Australians are a hardy and inventive people:

Facebook has followed through on its threat to ban Australians from seeing or posting news content on its site in response to the federal government’s news media code.

The tech giant’s Australian and New Zealand managing director, Will Easton, said this would block links to Australian publishers from being posted, while no Australian users would be able to share or see content from any news outlets, both Australian and international.

“The proposed law fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between our platform and publishers who use it to share news content,” he said in a blog post published on Thursday morning. “It has left us facing a stark choice: attempt to comply with a law that ignores the realities of this relationship, or stop allowing news content on our services in Australia.

“With a heavy heart, we are choosing the latter.”

………

Users on Thursday reported seeing a pop-up error window when they attempted to post links to news, stating these cannot be posted in response to the news media code.

………

Facebook’s move is in contrast to the approach from the other major platform subject to the code, Google.

Although Google had threatened to withdraw its search engine from Australia if the code went ahead, in the past week, Google has signed agreements with some of Australia’s biggest publishers, including News Corp, Nine Entertainment and Seven West Media, for payment for its News Showcase product. The Nine deal is reportedly worth $30m a year.

As several people have pointed out to me, Facebook blocked itself. pic.twitter.com/LVhyJMAHfp

— Josh Taylor (@joshgnosis) February 17, 2021

Yes, Facebook banned Facebook, I think that the Aussies would call this an “Own Goal”

It gets even worse, because Facebook f%$#ed up the rollout of the ban, shutting down non-profits and government agencies as well:

The Bureau of Meteorology, state health departments, the Western Australian opposition leader, charities and Facebook itself are among those to have been hit by Facebook’s ban on news in Australia.

On Thursday morning Facebook began preventing Australian news sites from posting, while also stopping Australian users from sharing or viewing content from any news outlets, both Australian and international.

The social media giant said it made the decision in response to the news media bargaining code currently before the Senate, which would force Facebook and Google to negotiate with news companies for payment for content.

………

As Australia prepares to begin the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines, state health departments, including SA Health and Queensland Health, were unable to post.

St Vincent’s Health in Melbourne said it was “extremely concerning”its Facebook page had been blocked “during a pandemic and on the eve of crucial Covid vaccine distribution”.

Facebook is claiming that this was a “Mistake.”

If you believe that, I have a bridge in Melbourne made completely of Koala poop to sell you.

Can We Give Texas Back to Mexico?

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Wind turbines in, you guessed it, Antarctica

Snow and cold weather has hit Texas hard, and because of what can only be called high Texas idiocy, the power grid has collapsed.

So, the answer to the question, “Has privatization failed Texas utility customers?,” is F%$# yes.

In order to evade federal regulation the Texas electricity grid is largely separate from the rest of the country, and because it is Texas, suppliers of both natural gas, used to make electricity, and the electricity generators, make more profit from shutting down their plants to spike the prices.

This is what caused the California energy crisis in 2000 and 2001, deregulatory mania leading to market manipulation:

Privatizers use the one-size-fits-all economic theory of “retail choice-free market competition” to promote the deregulation of Texas electric utilities. Privatizers promise that lower electricity prices and higher system reliability will follow electric utility deregulation. Privatizers’ sloganeering convinces on-the-take politicians and the unsuspecting electorate to approve their lobbyist-written deregulation rules and laws.

Privatizers say the deregulation of Texas electric utilities is successful and other states should follow suit. This is misinformation. Relative electricity prices have increased dramatically, and dangerously lower electrical system reliability is the result of Texas electric utility deregulation in 2002.

But Texans, and Trotskyites, are never ones to let facts get in the way of their free market mousketeer theories, so Texas Governor Greg Abbot is claiming that the problem has come from renewables like wind and solar being disproportionately impacted by the weather.

It is a nice theory.  The problem is that it is complete bunk:

Frozen wind turbines in Texas caused some conservative state politicians to declare Tuesday that the state was relying too much on renewable energy. But in reality, the wind power was expected to make up only a fraction of what the state had planned for during the winter.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas projected that 80% of the grid’s winter capacity, or 67 gigawatts, could be generated by natural gas, coal and some nuclear power.

An official with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas said Tuesday afternoon that 16 gigawatts of renewable energy generation, mostly wind generation, were offline. Nearly double that, 30 gigawatts, had been lost from thermal sources, which includes gas, coal and nuclear energy.

By Wednesday, those numbers had changed as more operators struggled to operate in the cold: 45 gigawatts total were offline, with 28 gigawats from thermal sources and 18 gigawatts from renewable sources, ERCOT officials said.

“Texas is a gas state,” said Michael Webber, an energy resources professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

While Webber said all of Texas’ energy sources share blame for the power crisis, the natural gas industry is most notably producing significantly less power than normal.

“Gas is failing in the most spectacular fashion right now,” Webber said.

………

He went on to note the shutdown of a nuclear reactor in Bay City because of the cold and finally got to what energy experts say is the biggest culprit, writing, “Low Supply of Natural Gas: ERCOT planned on 67GW from natural gas/coal, but could only get 43GW of it online. We didn’t run out of natural gas, but we ran out of the ability to get natural gas. Pipelines in Texas don’t use cold insulation —so things were freezing.”

This was compounded by looting from the various energy suppliers. 

It actually pays for them to have a significant amount of their generation capacity go offline, as shown by this anecdote:

As a historic winter storm raged across Texas over the weekend, Akilah Scott-Amos received an alarming message from her power company: Please switch services because “prices are about to explode.”

The 43-year-old owner of an organic skincare and apothecary shop was initially confused by the message from Griddy, which sells wholesale power for a monthly membership, but she began to look for other providers.

Then she checked her bill.

“I paid $450 for one day. I was in shock,” Scott-Amos told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. “It made no sense because we have a gas heater, a gas fireplace, and we have been keeping the temperature around the house at 65 degrees. With that amount of money, and the labeled amount of usage Griddy said was used—we would have to be lighting up the whole neighborhood.”

The nightmare only got worse on Monday, when she realized her bill had increased by another $2,500. In comparison, Scott-Amos paid $33.93 last year for the entire month of February. 

The cost per kWh went from a bit more than 2¢ to more than $2.

………

But data from ERCOT suggests the price of getting the lights back on might be too steep for some Texans. As first reported by Reuters, the market prices on the power grid spiked more than 10,000 percent on Monday in the aftermath of the deep freeze. Prices skyrocketed to more than $9,000 per megawatt-hour—compared to the pre-storm prices of less than $50 per hour.

The amped-up wattage costs have affected Griddy customers in particular because of the company’s distinctive business model. In Texas’ hypercharged market for electricity, Griddy makes money by debiting its subscribers a flat $9.99 monthly fee—and then selling them raw power at its going wholesale value, effectively stripping out any insulation between consumers and the oscillations in supply and demand.

New business models and cute names translating into ripping off consumers, yeppers, there’s a deregulated market.

It’s just another excuse to pick your pocket.

It ain’t the weather, it’s the corruption.

Please, אִם יְרצֵה הַשֵׁם, Henry Kissinger ( יִמַּח שְׁמו ) Next*

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Rush Limbaugh has died of cancer at the age of 70.

Finally, he has done something to improve the world:

Rush Limbaugh, who has died aged 70 after suffering from cancer, virtually created the style of political “shock jock” radio that made him so influential. His broadcasts, featuring attacks on opponents as purveyors of what we now call “fake news”, became the template for television’s Fox News, and at its peak played a huge part in Newt Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution” of 1994, which recaptured the House of Representatives from Bill Clinton’s Democrats.

Limbaugh set the tone for the internet age of politics, calling women’s rights activists “feminazis”, referring to HIV/Aids as “Rock Hudson’s disease” and claiming “environmentalist wackos” were “a bunch of scientists organised around a political position”.

He argued that the existence of gorillas disproved evolution, characterised both the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (2010) and the mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand (2019) as “false flag” operations organised by leftists, and accused the Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe of allowing the Charlottesville rioting in 2017 to worsen in order to boost his presidential ambitions. “Have you ever noticed how composite sketches of criminals always look like [the black activist] Jesse Jackson?” he asked his listeners.

Whether he was a vile person who was revealing himself, or just an actor playing a role does not mater.

The man was a stain upon humanity.

Spoiler: This incident from early in his career shows that he was just an asshole:

Limbaugh (pronounced “LIM baw”) was born in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, into a family of conservative judges that included his father, whose name was also Rush. His mother, Mildred (nee Armstrong), was the family clown, and encouraged “Rusty” in his love of radio. He did poorly at school, then quit Southeast Missouri State University after a year and found a job with a radio station in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, as “Bachelor Jeff Christie”, but was fired after he told a black caller he claimed to find difficult to understand to “take the bone out of your nose and call again”.

You will not be missed.
*A loose translation is, “God willing, Henry Kissinger (May his name be effaced) Next.

Of Course They Are

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Despite the Pandemic, despite the new variants spreading across the nation, despite the fact that sick workers coming into work further spread the disease, Republicans are still trying to kill paid sick leave, because if your employer cannot exploit you, they want you dead:

Pennsylvania state Rep. Seth Grove introduced legislation last month to block cities and municipalities from imposing paid sick leave requirements on businesses, even as COVID-19 cases are raging throughout his state and the country. Last week, local news media reported that the Republican lawmaker was now quarantining after exhibiting coronavirus symptoms and awaiting test results.

Grove’s preemption bill is the latest salvo in an ongoing war over stripping worker protections that continues to be fought in statehouses and Congress, even as the coronavirus pandemic spirals out of control. With Democrats in Washington preparing to drop paid sick leave from President Joe Biden’s first COVID relief bill, potentially leaving 87 million workers without protection, the responsibility for providing the benefit to workers now falls squarely on states — the very place the war has been waged for the last decade.

Paid sick leave statutes require businesses to provide employees with medical leave for ailments and injuries. Grove has been pushing for legislation to bar localities from imposing such requirements since 2013. His latest bill, reintroducing the measure, would be retroactive to 2015 — the year Democratic strongholds Philadelphia and Pittsburgh passed laws mandating paid sick leave.

 F%$# them, and the horse they rode in on.

People Are No Longer Afraid of Rat-Faced Andy

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Democratic members of the New York House and Senate are considering rescinding the Covid powers that they granted Andrew Cuomo in the budget bill following credible allegations that he and his administration covered up nursing home deaths for political advantage.

The fact that they are considering this at all is significant, Cuomo is known for his vindictive nature, and the fact that they are considering going against him means that they think that the time is right to do this.

It may be better to be feared than liked, but at some point, if the fear goes away, and everyone hates you, things can get unpleasant: 

Some Democrats in Albany have floated the legally dubious idea of threatening to rescind Gov. Cuomo’s pandemic powers and issue subpoenas as leverage in upcoming budget negotiations.

Over the weekend, the governor’s fellow Democrats, who control both houses in the Legislature, continued to hold discussions about scaling back Cuomo’s sweeping pandemic powers after a top aide admitted the state paused the release of nursing home death data over concerns it would be politicized by the Trump administration.

Senate Dems met virtually Sunday to consider rescinding the governor’s executive authority or potentially creating a commission that could outright reject executive orders, similar to a 10-member panel used in Connecticut, sources said.

The Legislature already has the ability to overturn any COVID-related executive order via a majority vote.

On Friday, 14 Democratic state senators, including a handful from the city, joined Republicans in backing the idea of taking away Cuomo’s emergency powers before they expire in April.

………

But threatening such actions, especially subpoenas, without intent to follow through in order to influence fiscal talks could backfire big time, insiders said. “It could legally be seen as extortion,” a source said.

Yeah, much in the same way that Marty Walsh’s insisting on a concert promoter using competent workers in Boston could be legally seen as extortion? (see prior post)

………

Barclay and others have spent months demanding subpoenas, hearings or a federal probe into the state’s nursing home policies amid the pandemic.

The Cuomo administration came under renewed fire last week, facing accusations of a coverup and mounting backlash over its failure to release a full count of nursing home deaths for nearly six months.

In a call meant to bridge a growing divide with fellow Dems, the governor’s most trusted confidant, Melissa DeRosa, told lawmakers that officials “froze” last year when the Department of Justice made an inquiry into elder care facilities.

DeRosa said the administration postponed responding to legislative requests and failed to include nursing home residents who died in hospitals in publicly available data because President Trump had turned the matter “into a giant political football.”

The call came two weeks after a report from Attorney General Letitia James estimated that the state was under-counting deaths of nursing home residents by as much as 50%.

Cuomo was not concerned about Trump, he delighted in fighting with him.

This was about his attempting to cast his incompetent and corrupt management of the Covid-19 crisis (It only looked good in comparison to Donald Trump) as a triumph rather than a disaster.

New York State needs to raise taxes on the wealthy, and to end the corrupt environment that Cuomo thrives in.

I Never Realized How Much of a Menace She Was

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Former Carmen Ortiz is perhaps best known for knowingly prosecuting Aaron Swartz to death, but it turns out that she was a corrupt piece of sh%$ on a par with Trump’s worst appointments, though somehow she managed to stay in office throughout the entire Obama administration, probably due to her friendship with Eric “Place” Holder.

Among other things, she prosecuted Teamsters for picketing the show Top Chef for not using union drivers, and went after Mayor, now Labor Secretary, Marty Walsh for pressuring a concert promoter to hire experienced union workers as stage hands, claiming racketeering.  (She also made no secret of wanting to be Mayor, and Walsh’s actions followed a spate of injuries and deaths resulting from sloppy stage work, including a fire in Rhode Island that killed over 100)

Particularly after her egregious behavior in the Shwartz case, there was a lot of pressure for Obama to fire her, but she stayed on through 2017.

It is that Marty Walsh has been picked by Biden as labor secretary is a sort of nail in the coffin for whatever shred of a political career she hoped to have.

It also might be a not so subtle way of throwing some (extremely mild) shade in Obama and Holder’s way:

The last time Joe Biden was in the White House, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh seemed an unlikely nominee for a future labor secretary. Carmen Ortiz, President Barack Obama’s U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, had Walsh in her crosshairs. One summer dawn in 2016 she sent FBI agents to arrest two of his staff under a federal racketeering indictment.

The Boston Globe, New England’s most powerful news outlet, known for its coverage of the Roman Catholic Church child abuse scandals, laid siege to the mayor’s office over his labor practices and union ties. The Globe had named Ortiz its 2011 “Bostonian of the Year.” Its reporters dug their foxholes wherever she pointed, and the paper cheered on her prosecution of Walsh’s staffers.

When “Top Chef” had filmed in Boston two years earlier, Walsh visited on set with the show’s host Padma Lakshmi. Outside, the Teamsters picketed for union jobs. Ortiz indicted them, also for racketeering extortion. And in a city obsessed with haute cuisine, Ortiz leveraged star power: At trial, Lakshmi would take the stand for the prosecution.

In Boston, Ortiz was considered a rising star and was expected to run for mayor herself, a task made easier by softening Walsh up. Hey, this is Boston. If you want finesse, watch a Bruins game; if you want blood, watch a City Council race. She was regularly talked of as a top-tier statewide candidate. The only question was whether she was destined for attorney general, the Senate, the governor’s mansion, or beyond.

………

Between Kennedy’s funeral and Holder’s exile, Ortiz and her then-chief of cybercrime, Stephen Heymann, indicted internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz on 14 felony counts for allegedly downloading too many academic journal articles. Swartz had used a simple script to download academic journal articles from the platform JSTOR, which provided its articles free to anyone on the MIT network. It’s not clear Swartz even violated the company’s terms of service; finding a crime anywhere in what he did took an awfully creative prosecutor.

………

Looking to avoid a trial, Heymann compared Swartz to a rapist. By refusing to plead guilty, the line went, Swartz had “revictimized” MIT. Swartz fervently resisted, but Ortiz and Heymann had a trump card.

The Honorable Nathaniel M. Gorton is well known to the Massachusetts Bar, whose members whisper he rarely meets an indictment he doesn’t like. He’s noted as a hanging judge; prosecutors go out of their way to get high-profile cases assigned to him. A legacy admission from the Gorton’s Seafood family to Dartmouth and then Columbia Law School, he was appointed to the bench by President George H.W. Bush after Bush campaigned beside his brother Sen. Slade Gorton.

After Swartz drew Gorton, his defense lawyers told Heymann the pressure of the case had rendered Swartz suicidal, his attorney later said he told prosecutors.

“Fine, we’ll lock him up,” Heymann responded.

Swartz killed himself shortly thereafter, in January 2013.

Within days of Swartz’s death, over 61,000 people digitally signed a White House petition to fire Ortiz — a singular distinction for a U.S. attorney. The Senate and House judiciary committees pilloried her.

Ortiz told the media that she and Heymann hadn’t known Swartz was on the brink of suicide and that if they had known, things might’ve been different. (Heymann’s knowledge only surfaced much later, along with his “Fine, we’ll lock him up” response.)

Ultimately Obama refused to sack Ortiz. She in turn refused to sack Heymann, though she did pick a new chief of cybercrime. Obama thus allowed Ortiz to save face, but she never recovered politically. Try as she might, it all went downhill for her from there, eventually culminating with Biden nominating Walsh for labor secretary.

Refused to sack Ortiz, because as I have noted, Barack Obama was the worst Constitutional law professor ever. ™

Outside the Boston Globe and Ortiz’s few remaining allies, the racketeering charges against Walsh’s staff garnered Ortiz all the wrong attention.

Merriam-Webster defines a racketeer as “a person who obtains money by an illegal enterprise usually involving intimidation.”

But Ortiz never accused Walsh or his staff of pocketing anything for themselves, or for his campaign, or for his administration. The indictment instead alleged that Walsh’s staff required a producer to hire local union stagehands for an outdoor rock concert. That’s business as usual for many in the heavily unionized capital of America’s bluest state.

“Is this illegal now?” mused CBS Boston anchor Jon Keller.

Legality aside, requiring experienced stagehands familiar with the particular outdoor venue was arguably a prudent public safety measure. A few years earlier, an outdoor stage collapsed during a Sugarland show in Indiana, killing seven.

A much deadlier incident eight years before that hit closer to Boston. One hundred people perished in smoke and flames in nearby West Warwick, Rhode Island, when a nightclub named The Station burned to the ground; over 200 were injured. The blaze started when the manager of a rock band ignited indoor stage pyrotechnics.

Yet when Walsh’s office insisted on better-vetted stagehands, Ortiz tried to make a federal case out of it.

………

Those cases would continue for years after Ortiz left office. Ortiz, however, had more immediate concerns. She had to find a job outside government. The Senate was no longer in the cards.

At or near the top of Ortiz’s list was Harvard Kennedy School. Philip Heymann, Ortiz’s mentor and the father of her former cybercrime chief, was a longtime Harvard professor. And of course the school is named after the family of her late supporter, Theodore E. Kennedy. Harvard nonetheless rejected Ortiz.

You have to f%$# up pretty badly for the Kennedy School to reject a former US Attorney.

………

A while later, Padma Lakshmi failed to fully convince a Boston jury. All four Teamsters tried were acquitted.

Because picketing people who hire non-union workers is not, or at least should not be a crime.

U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin at first threw out the separate case against Walsh’s staff. It required a trip to the U.S. Court of Appeals before it made it to trial. The second time around Sorokin deep-sixed it beyond any likely reinstatement. He ruled that the aides hadn’t received anything of benefit, so couldn’t be charged with anything.

Now Biden has driven the final nail into Ortiz’s political coffin by nominating Walsh for labor secretary despite Ortiz’s indictments — or perhaps to signal his loyalty to union organizers, he nominated Walsh because of her indictments. Either way, Ortiz is now the former prosecutor who is linked to the suicide of a once-in-a-generation talent and who fought Biden’s labor secretary nominee over his labor practices and lost. Not exactly where one wants to start a Democratic primary or confirmation hearing.

I do think that Joe Biden is sending a message with this, both about support of union activities and that he is less naive about the intersection of politics and prosecutions than was Barack Obama.

Have You Heard the One About the LAPD Valentine?

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Celebrating the murder of a Black man at the hands of police demonstrates a profound absence of humanity.

The mock valentine underscores problematic & racist perceptions of law enforcement culture regarding the communities we are sworn to protect & serve.https://t.co/w52m2mEK9U

— George Gascón (@GeorgeGascon) February 15, 2021

Pretty much

It has a picture of George Floyd with the caption, “You take my breath away.”

If you think that this is a sick and disgusting joke, you are not alone, though it appears that many in the LAPD found the image hilarious and passed the image around. 

Yes, the folks who nearly beat Rodney King to death think that slowly suffocating a black man to death is all fun and games.

And they wonder why some people make allusions to police officers being members of the genus sus:

The Los Angeles district attorney and the police department are investigating after a police officer reported that an image of George Floyd had been made into a mock-Valentine meme featuring the words “You take my breath away” and circulated among officers.

The district attorney, George Gascón, decried the reported meme of Floyd, who was Black and killed by police in Minneapolis last spring.

Gascón posted on Twitter: “Celebrating the murder of a Black man at the hands of police demonstrates a profound absence of humanity. The mock valentine underscores problematic and racist perceptions of law enforcement culture regarding the communities we are sworn to protect and serve.”Gascón hailed LAPD leadership for swiftly investigating and also tweeted that his office “will be looking into this matter to determine if the integrity of any of our cases may have been compromised by biased police work”.

The LAPD police chief, Michel Moore, earlier announced an internal examination of the situation and said investigators would try to determine how the image may have come into the workplace and who may have been involved, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Moore said the officer who made the complaint would be interviewed on Monday and added: “Our investigation is to determine the accuracy of the allegations while also reinforcing our zero tolerance for anything with racist views.”

Here is hoping that the ratf%$#s behind this get nailed to the wall.

What a Surprise

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A school district in Marin County has been stripping resources from largely black schools to funnel them to a largely white charter school. This is a feature, not a bug

Members of the community and school officials will meet Wednesday evening to discuss a scathing report that found a Marin County school district has been funneling resources to a Sausalito charter school away from a nearby Marin City school that’s attended by a majority of black students, potentially segregating the schools in violation of federal civil rights laws.

The focus of the report, authored and issued this month by the state’s Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team, adds to the problems facing the Sausalito Marin City School District, which boasts one K-8 school — Bayside Martin Luther King Jr. in Marin City — and was recently embarrassed when its superintendent resigned after being indicted in February on a felony charge in San Diego County.

In looking at the relationship between the district’s board and Sausalito’s Willow Creek Academy, an independent charter school attended by a majority of white students, investigators found that leaders of the charter school “exercise significant control” over most of the district’s board members, making for a “clearly biased financial arrangement” that benefits Willow Creek Academy.

Students at the underperforming Bayside MLK, meanwhile, continue to fall behind as money is diverted from the school to pay for the charter school.

One of the hidden appeals of the charter school movement that is its implication that they will resegregate public schools.

Once Again, Scalia Makes the World a Better Place by His Absence

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The Supreme Court will not allow North Carolina’s voter suppression law to be in force for election day. It was a 4-4 tie:

A deadlocked Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to revive parts of a restrictive North Carolina voting law that a federal appeals court had struck down as an unconstitutional effort to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

The court was divided 4 to 4, with the court’s more conservative members voting to revive parts of the law. The court’s brief order included no reasoning.

North Carolina’s law, which imposed an array of voting restrictions, including new voter identification requirements, was enacted by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature in 2013. It was part of a wave of voting restrictions enacted after a 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision that effectively struck down a central part of the federal Voting Rights Act, weakening federal oversight of voting rights.

Challenges to the laws have met with considerable success in recent months, and Wednesday’s development suggested that the current eight-member Supreme Court is not likely to undo those victories.

If Scalia were still on the court, it would be gleefully reinventing Jim Crow.

They Can Find it In Their Couch

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Apple was just assessed a €13 billion ($14.4 B) fine tax delinquency for using Ireland as a tax haven. Essentially the European Commission ruled that Apple received tax breaks from Ireland that amounted to an illegal subsidy to the computer and phone maker:

Apple has warned that future investment by multinationals in Europe could be hit after it was ordered to pay a record-breaking €13bn (£11bn) in back taxes to Ireland.

The world’s largest company was presented with the huge bill after the European commission ruled that a sweetheart tax deal between Apple and the Irish tax authorities amounted to illegal state aid.

The commission said the deal allowed Apple to pay a maximum tax rate of just 1%. In 2014, the tech firm paid tax at just 0.005%. The usual rate of corporation tax in Ireland is 12.5%.

“Member states cannot give tax benefits to selected companies – this is illegal under EU state aid rules,” said the European competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, whose investigation of Apple’s complex tax dealings has taken three years.

Here is where it gets weird: Ireland, which stands to benefit to the tune of €2800 for every man, woman, and child in the country is fighting this, as is the US Treasury department, which one would expect to fight this sort of illegal tax scheme:

Vestager’s ruling prompted an angry response from Apple and from Ireland and is likely to spark a political row between the US and the EU. The US Treasury said the ruling threatened to damage “the important spirit of economic partnership between the US and the EU”.

………

The commission said Ireland’s tax arrangements with Apple between 1991 and 2015 had allowed the US company to attribute sales to a “head office” that only existed on paper and could not have generated such profits.

………

The Irish government, however, wants the ruling reversed because it wants to preserve its status as a low-tax base for overseas companies.

Ireland’s finance minister, Michael Noonan, said Dublin would appeal against the ruling. He said: “The decision leaves me with no choice but to seek cabinet approval to appeal. This is necessary to defend the integrity of our tax system, to provide tax certainty to business and to challenge the encroachment of EU state aid rules into the sovereign member state competence of taxation.”

This was money laundering, pure and simple.

And this won’t really hurt Apple:

Apple, which changed its tax arrangements with Ireland in 2015, should easily be able to pay the huge tax bill because it has a cash mountain of more than $230bn (£176bn) of cash and securities, mostly held outside the US. The tech group keeps the money outside the US because it would be forced to pay US tax charges if it repatriated the money.

It’s pocket change for them, but hopefully this will make further Irish tax shenanigans less common.

I would hope that we would see some more movement in this direction, but the Obama administration, in the person of Jacob Lew, seems determined to prove that only little people pay taxes.

Do You Want Some Cheese With That Whine?

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Ordinary investors who are paying attention understand that aggressively managed mutual funds almost always under perform the market over any significant time horizon.

These same investors also understand that you pay more in fees for this lackluster performance, and so they tend to invest in passive investments.

You cannot continue this, because it is worse than Communism:

The rise of passive asset management threatens to fundamentally undermine the entire system of capitalism and market mechanisms that facilitate an increase in the general welfare, according to analysts at research and brokerage firm Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., LLC.

In a note titled “The Silent Road to Serfdom: Why Passive Investing is Worse Than Marxism,” a team led by Head of Global Quantitative and European Equity Strategy Inigo Fraser-Jenkins, says that politicians and regulators need to be cognizant of the social case for active management in the investment industry.

“A supposedly capitalist economy where the only investment is passive is worse than either a centrally planned economy or an economy with active market led capital management,” they write.

High fees and subpar returns, coupled with the creation of a plethora of relatively inexpensive exchange-traded funds that track major equity indexes have helped fuel a massive shift in asset flows away from active management in favor of passive. While policymakers are quick to praise the benefits of these low-cost options for retail investors, Bernstein argues that this is a short-sighted view that doesn’t take into account the potential downsides involved with the increase in passively-managed assets.

………

The social function of active management, in a capitalist society, is that it seeks to direct capital to its most productive end, facilitating sustainable job creation and a rise in the aggregate standard of living. And rather than be guided by the Invisible Hand and profit motive, capital allocation under Marxism is conducted by an oh-so-visible hand aimed at producing use-values that satisfy each member of the society’s needs. Seen through this lens, passive management is somewhat tantamount to a nihilistic approach to capital allocation.

No.

The mutual fund is a relatively new phenomenon.

You are having a kitten over this because, to quote Blazing Saddles, “We’ve gotta protect our phony baloney jobs!”

This Explains Why College Costs So Much

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Here is a little sample of the corruption and self dealing that is increasingly at the heart of elite colleges.

The attached link is a series of vignettes, but read the penultimate paragraph, and then read the rest:

So, what we’ve got here is an NYU President handing a New York apartment, meant for faculty, to his son, and what looks rather like powerful faculty members feathering their own nests with cheap housing; we’ve got a Baylor President not wanting to cross a powerful and wealthy football team, even to the extent of failing to handle a rape scandal; and at Penn State we’ve got a President who’s a member of the “innovation cult,” when it’s not at all clear this will benefit the student body as a whole. Have any of these institutions learned from these experiences? No. Are these college Presidents personally responsible for corruption at their universities — for converting a public institution to serve private purposes? Sexton and Start, yes. For Barron, the jury is still out.

Go read.

Those Old Family Ties

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Bummer of a Birth Mark, Jim

One of the stories floating around right now is that Mylan Pharmaceuticals jacked up the price of EpiPens by over 400% over the past few years.

Given the state of the American pharmaceutical industry, we’ve seen something similar from the 3 manufacturers of insulin colluding on price hikes,  it’s not a particularly surprising or unique state of affairs.

What is news however is that Heather Bresch, the company’s CEO, is the daughter of Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), and Mylan is one of the most generous donors to him.

In fact, a former Mylan lobbyists, Michael Garrison, appointed  president of the University of West Virginia by Manchin when he was governor had to resign in disgrace when he bent the rules to give Heather Bresch an unearned MBA.

So now this linkup is hitting the mainstream news:

The growing congressional scrutiny of pharmaceutical giant Mylan over the high cost of EpiPens could prove awkward for Sen. Joe Manchin.

 The West Virginia Democrat’s daughter, Heather Bresch, is chief executive of the company, which appears to have hiked the price of the epinephrine auto-injector by 400 percent since 2007. The device, which is used to treat severe allergic reactions, now costs more than $600 per dose.

 This price increase has become a public relations disaster for Mylan and at least four of Manchin’s Senate colleagues are either pressing the company to reduce the cost of EpiPens, asking it to explain the price increase or requesting federal regulators to investigate the matter. Manchin is not a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has shown the most interest in probing Mylan’s pricing practices, and so far the senator is not discussing the issue.

Manchin has spent his time in the Senate being a Joe Lieberman Democrat, so I have absolutely no sympathy for the fact that he is getting jammed up by this.

Wait ……… Who is Calling the EpiPen Manufacturer Vultures?

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The manufacturer of the EpiPen, Mylan pharmaceuticals, has been raising the price of the pens by 15% every 6 months for years.

It’s gotten so bad that pharmaBro Martin Shrelki has just called the company vultures:

A growing chorus is calling on the Mylan pharmaceutical company to justify its price hikes on EpiPens, a potentially life-saving medication for children and others facing fatal allergies that has little real competition.

In 2007, a two-pack of the epinephrine-filled devices went for $56.64 wholesale, according to data gathered by Connecture, a health insurance data specialist. Now it’s jumped to $365.16, an increase of 544.77 percent. Since the end of 2013, the price has gone up by 15 percent every other quarter.

Doctors, parents, patients, and a former presidential candidate are speaking out on social media — and negative comments are filling up Mylan’s Facebook page following an NBCNews.com story Wednesday.

………

Even Martin Shkreli, the disgraced former chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals, has weighed in.

“These guys are really vultures. What drives this company’s moral compass?” he told NBC News in a phone interview.

In 2015, Shkreli famously jacked up the price of Turing’s malaria and HIV medicine Darapim overnight, from $13.50 to $750, a move that earned him a grilling by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in February — and the nickname “Pharma Bro” for his seemingly carefree attitude toward affordable medication.

Our model of pharmaceutical production and research and development is fundamentally broken.

We have expanded IP protections on drugs over the past 40 years, and what we have seen is that drugs have become less affordable, and efforts of the drug companies have moved from cures to finding ways to evergreen those IP protections.

How Utterly Proper

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Hillary Clinton has selected right wing pro-fracking pro TPP DINO Ken Salazar to head her transition team:

Two big issues dogged Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary: the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement (TPP) and fracking. She had a long history of supporting both.

Under fire from Bernie Sanders, she came out against the TPP and took a more critical position on fracking. But critics wondered if this was a sincere conversion or simply campaign rhetoric.

Now, in two of the most significant personnel moves she will ever make, she has signaled a lack of sincerity.

She chose as her vice presidential running mate Tim Kaine, who voted to authorize fast-track powers for the TPP and praised the agreement just two days before he was chosen.

And now she has named former Colorado Democratic Senator and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to be the chair of her presidential transition team — the group tasked with helping set up the new administration should she win in November. That includes identifying, selecting, and vetting candidates for over 4,000 presidential appointments.

As a senator, Salazar was widely considered a reliable friend to the oil, gas, ranching and mining industries. As interior secretary, he opened the Arctic Ocean for oil drilling, and oversaw the botched response to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Since returning to the private sector, he has been an ardent supporter of the TPP, while pushing back against curbs on fracking.

He said this:

“We know that, from everything we’ve seen, there’s not a single case where hydraulic fracking has created an environmental problem for anyone,” Salazar told the attendees, who included the vice president of BP America, another keynote speaker at the conference. “We need to make sure that story is told.”

He is ignoring many cases of contaminated water, including some cases where the water would burn.

And he claims that there is not one single case of a problem.

As interior secretary, he was waiving environmental reviews for BP project as its as its Deepwater Horizon was still spewing thousands of barrels a day in to the Gulf of Mexico,

And this ratf%$# will be vetting her staff, which means that in a very real way, he will have more impact on the shape of her administration than anyone but her.

If you think that Clinton is a progressive, I have some of Donald Trump’s debt to sell you.

WalMart Doesn’t Just F%$# the Taxpayer Over Welfare, Medicaid, and Foodstamps

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It also deliberately avoids engaging in actions that might reduce drime so as to put the load on the local police as well:

………

 Police chiefs and their officers on the ground say that’s just not so. Ross likes to joke that the concentration of crime at Walmart makes his job easier. “I’ve got all my bad guys in one place,” he says, flashing a bright smile. His squad’s sergeant, Robert Rohloff, a 34-year police veteran who has to worry about staffing, budgets, and patrolling the busiest commercial district in Tulsa, says there’s nothing funny about Walmart’s impact on public safety. He can’t believe, he says, that a multibillion-dollar corporation isn’t doing more to stop crime. Instead, he says, it offloads the job to the police at taxpayers’ expense. “It’s ridiculous—we are talking about the biggest retailer in the world,” says Rohloff. “I may have half my squad there for hours.”

 Walmart knows police departments are frustrated. “We absolutely understand how important this is. It is important for our associates, it is important for our customers and across the communities we serve,” says Judith McKenna, Walmart’s chief operating officer for the U.S. “We can do better.”

 But when? That’s what law enforcement around the country wants to know. “The constant calls from Walmart are just draining,” says Bill Ferguson, a police captain in Port Richey, Fla. “They recognize the problem and refuse to do anything about it.”

 There’s nothing inevitable about the level of crime at Walmart. It’s the direct, if unintended, result of corporate policy. Beginning as far back as 2000, when former CEO Lee Scott took over, an aggressive cost-cutting crusade led many stores to deteriorate. The famed greeters were removed, taking away a deterrent to theft at the porous entrances and exits. Self-checkout scanners replaced many cashiers. Walmart added stores faster than it hired employees. The company has one worker for every 524 square feet of retail space, a 19 percent increase in space per employee from a decade ago.

 ………

 Police departments inevitably compare their local Walmarts with Target stores. Target, Walmart’s largest competitor, is a different kind of retail business, with mostly smaller stores that tend to be located in somewhat more affluent neighborhoods. But there are other reasons Targets have less crime. Unlike most Walmarts, they’re not open 24 hours a day. Nor do they allow people to camp overnight in their parking lots, as Walmarts do. Like Walmart, Target relies heavily on video surveillance, but it employs sophisticated software that can alert the store security office when shoppers spend too much time in front of merchandise or linger for long periods outside after closing time. The biggest difference, police say, is simply that Targets have more staff visible in stores.

 “Target doesn’t have these problems,” says Ferguson. “Part of it may be the lower prices at Walmart or where Walmart is located, but when I walk into Target I see uniformed security or someone walking around up front. You see no one at Walmart. It just seems like an easy target.” A Target spokeswoman declined to comment on the two companies’ security policies.

 ………

 Dennis Buckley found a way to get Walmart moving faster on crime: shaming and threats. A blunt former fire chief, Buckley is the mayor of Beech Grove, Ind., an Indianapolis suburb with a population of 14,000. He’d been swamped with complaints from his police chief about the daily calls to Walmart. He demanded action from Walmart’s local lawyer, as did the City Council. Nothing happened. Then, in June of last year, Buckley reached his limit. He received news that a local woman had been killed and her grandson seriously injured in a car crash caused by a Walmart shoplifter fleeing police. Later that day, he learned his town had become a laughingstock. A YouTube video of a fight at the Beech Grove Walmart was going viral. It showed two women, one riding a motorized scooter, the other accompanied by a 6-year-old boy, in a furious fistfight that turned into a profane wrestling match in the shampoo aisle. The video also contained glimpses of jeering bystanders recording the action on their phones. By the time Buckley saw the video, it had been viewed millions of times.

 Enraged by the circus atmosphere around the video, he denounced Walmart on Facebook and in the local media. “The Beech Grove Walmart is NOT a good corporate partner,” he posted. The YouTube video “was embarrassing to the City of Beech Grove and the people who live in our beautiful city. Walmart should be ashamed of itself once again for failing to control the people who enter their store.”

 Regional Walmart executives asked for a meeting with Buckley and Craig Wiley, the city attorney. “You could tell by their body language that they came to the meeting with a very conciliatory tone, and they were going to get their arms around the problem,” Wiley says. Walmart promised to hire security and extend a fence on the rear of its property, which barred an easy exit for shoplifters into a retirement community. It said it would skip calling the cops for first-time offenders shoplifting merchandise valued below $50 if the shoplifter completes the company’s theft-prevention program.

 Buckley was pleased. But in the weeks following the meeting, Walmart dragged its heels. Buckley went public again, this time appearing on national cable news. “Walmart Beech Grove is draining our police resources,” he told Fox Business Network. “It’s the string of terrible events that have been occurring down there over the past two months that have led me to instruct our police chief to declare the Walmart a public nuisance.”

 That meant the threat of a $2,500 fine for every call to the police. Walmart now pays for off-duty police to man the store, and the pressure on the local police has eased. A year later, Buckley is pleased, but it still irks him that he had to go to such measures to get Walmart to act. “Cities really need to put their thumb down and get them to the table,” he says. “It’s taken a long time, but they can really be good partners if they want to be.”

(emphasis mine)

Yet another reason to avoid the stores.

For many years their business model has been to suck the marrow out of society for profit, and I do not see this changing.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

Metadata Fail

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California State Assemblyman Adam Gray demanded an expensive and potential paralyzing audit of the California Air Resources Board, in what was a blatant attempt to hamstring the organization.

Environmentalists, and anyone with two brain cells to rub together, suggested that he was doing the bidding of lobbyists.

Mr. Gray denied that he was carrying water for the fossil fuel industry, but it turns out that not only was he metaphorically carrying their water, he was literally carrying their letter.

Metadata from the document showed that it had been drafted by a lobbyist:

………

“I think the environmentalists are going to point you over here and say he’s taking oil money, he’s trying to block the program,” Gray said in an interview. “I’m not trying to block the program. I’m for fighting climate change.”

But in pushing for the audit, Gray got a big assist from the oil industry. The industry’s main lobbyist wrote the request.

Metadata in the Microsoft Word document in the draft request obtained by the Los Angeles Times shows that its author is Eloy Garcia. Garcia is the lead lobbyist for the Western States Petroleum Assn. or WSPA, which represents oil companies in Sacramento.



The letter that Gray and more than a dozen other lawmakers sent to the Joint Legislative Audit Committee on Aug. 4 was word for word the same as Garcia’s draft.

First, Adam Gray is completely, and most deservedly, owned.

Second, how many times does this have to happen before people get a clue? 

Information on removing the metadata is a quick Google search away.

The Nefarious Ammosexual Agenda Forces Its Way into Our Houses of Worship

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In Oregon, a girl’s softball team in Lake Oswego raffled off an AR-15 to fund a team trip.*

A pastor there did not like this, and when he found that tickets were already sold, he bought a large number, in the hopes of getting the weapon, and destroying it.

Well, he won the raffle/rifle, and announced his plans, and the gun fondler crowd started issuing death threats and demanding his prosecution:

The Rev. Jeremy Lucas brought an olive branch to a gun fight recently, hoping for a mellow outcome. It began when he won a semi-automatic rifle in a local raffle, then revealed his plan to destroy it and was mostly congratulated for his stand.

But the 44-year-old Episcopal priest’s token attempt to take another gun off the streets did little to keep the peace. In response to his gesture, Lucas got threats and demands for his arrest.

………

Lucas grew up in Alabama owning and shooting guns. But he sees the AR-15, America’s most popular rifle, as a danger to society. It is one of the weapons of choice among today’s mass shooters, from Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012 to the shooting last month of four teens, three fatally, by another teen near Seattle.

………

When news about his win and plans to destroy the gun began to spread, Lucas got Facebook thank-yous from relatives of some of the Sandy Hook victims and encouragement from hundreds of others.

Donors replenished the $3,000 he’d used from the church coffers and then some. Bishop Michael J. Hanley, head of the Episcopal Diocese of Oregon, sent his huzzas as well. “It was a wonderful thing and actually filled me with a certain amount of glee that he could pull it off,” Hanley said in a statement. “Probably more of us need to act in this way, jumping into the unknown consequences of doing good deeds.”

But not everyone saw it that way.

Some unhappy commentators suggested Lucas had violated Oregon’s new gun law by failing to have a background check conducted on a parishioner to whom he’d given the weapon for safekeeping.

Then there were the “critics and trolls” on social media and on news websites, Lucas wrote on his blog, “lobbing their hate and vitriol.”

There are lots of responsible gun owners out there, and then there is the Ammosexual contingent, who shouldn’t be trusted with a butter knife.

*I know what you are thinking, “In Oregon, you must be kidding?” That’s because you don’t know that Oregon in the 1920s was the most KKK dominated state in the nation.†
†Oregon’s original constitution literally banned black people from the territory.

From Libertarian Ubermensch to Sucking at the Taxpayer’s Tit

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The city of Arlington Virginia is looking at paying Uber to take people to metro stops:

Arlington County is looking to partner with transportation providers such as Uber and Lyft to offer residents rides from more remote residential areas of the county where bus service to Metro stations is limited.

The on-demand option would replace some fixed bus service in north Arlington.

“What we would be supporting is picking up residents in their neighborhood and taking them to one or two designated stops, most likely a transit station,” said Marti Reinfeld, the county’s interim transit bureau chief. “The county will subsidize that at some level.”

It could take a couple of years before such a program launches, but county transportation officials say they want to do so as soon as possible. Arlington joins a growing number of U.S. transit agencies that are exploring partnerships with the popular app-based companies to leverage their success and improve service to residents.

I guess that Uber is changing its business plan:  Instead of just abusing and endangering drivers and passengers, they will now also suck up taxpayer money that would otherwise go to providing decent mass transit.

This has “fail” written all over it.