Factoid from a Travelogue

Over at Obasidian Wings, Doctor Science has a review of the new Tappan Zee Bridge, and gives us this little factoid:

As for who *should* pay for the bridge, there’s no question in my mind: it should be (mostly) the trucking industry. It won’t, of course, but that would be fair.

Most of the vehicles that go over the TZB are cars, of course. But it turns out that the stress a vehicle puts on a road or bridge goes up as the fourth power of its weight per axle.

An example: my 2-axle car weighs about 4000 lbs. Empty, a typical 5-axle tractor-trailer weighs about 33,000 lbs. So the empty truck is about 3.3 times as heavy per axle, and causes almost 120 times the damage.

My toll on the TZB is $4.75. If that truck was paying its way across the TBZ, it should pay a toll of more than $500. But that’s only if it’s empty! Remember, the burden on the system goes up as the fourth power. If the truck is pretty full, weighing 72,800 lbs, it weighs 6 or 7 times as much per axle as my car — and does more than 1500 times the damage. A fair toll would be more than $8000.

In actuality, no truck pays more than $50 to go over the TZB, and that’s the rush hour price: it drops to under $25 if you cross at night. Other drivers, and the population as a whole, are subsidizing the trucking industry to a truly epic degree. And this occurs while the trucking industry has exploited its workers to the point of indentured servitude — before they start replacing most of them with robots.

If the problem in our society could be reduced to a single issue, (They can’t) it would be the various direct and indirect subsidies that the rich and powerful in our society extract from the rest of us.

Whether it’s trucking, pharma, TBTF banks, the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, charter schools, big ag, etc., their current business models would be unsustainable but for the money that they extract from the rest of us.

We are riven by parasites.

The Fruit of Almost 25 Years of Dishonest, Cowardly, and Incompetent Diplomacy


This might be comical if it weren’t an H-bomb

The DPRK just tested what they claim to be a full up thermonuclear warhead, what’s more they claim that it is deliverable by an ICBM:

North Korea says it has tested a powerful hydrogen bomb that can be loaded on to an intercontinental ballistic missile, in a move that is expected to increase pressure on Donald Trump to defuse the growing nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula.

In an announcement carried on state TV, North Korea said the test, its sixth since 2006, had been a “complete success” and involved a “two-stage thermonuclear weapon” with “unprecedented” strength.

There has been no independent verification of the North’s claims that it has achieved a key goal in its nuclear programme – the ability to miniaturise a warhead so that it can fit on a long-distance missile.

Hours earlier, the regime released footage of what it claimed was a hydrogen bomb that would be loaded on to a new ICBM.

The TV announcement – accompanied by patriotic music and images of North Korean scenery and military hardware – said the test had been ordered by the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un.

The explosion was heralded by a 6.3-magnitude earthquake about six miles (10km) from North Korea’s Punggye-ri nuclear test site in the north-east of the country. It was felt over the Chinese border in Yanji.

South Korea’s meteorological administration estimated the blast yield at between 50 to 60 kilotons, or five to six times stronger than North Korea’s fifth test in September last year.

Kim Young-woo, the head of South Korea’s parliamentary defence committee said later that the yield was as high as 100 kilotons. One kiloton is equivalent to 1,000 tons of TNT.

The previous nuclear blast in North Korea is estimated by experts to have been about 10 kilotons.

There was a earlier claim of an H-bomb, but that was almost certainly a boosted fission device, which is an important step to miniaturizing warheads for use on missiles, but it isn’t the whole megillah.

The most recent blast appears to be a significant improvement in yield.

What’s more, if it is a true two stage thermonuclear device, it is no doubt a sophisticated one, because of the relatively low yield of the device.

The first US Teller-Ulam device, Ivy Mike, was 10 megatons, and the first Soviet device, the RDS-37, was about 1.5 MT.

As the warheads became more sophisticated, they became smaller and less powerful, so a 100 KT device could either be an improvement of a boosted device, or a true thermonuclear weapon.

In either case, it does imply that their understanding of the fabrication of nuclear weapons is advancing rapidly.

This is further bolstered by their claim that the warhead has an an adjustable yield.

The response of SecDef James “Mad Dog” Mattis was to threaten a massive military response to “Any threat to the United States or its territory, including Guam or our allies.”

Because, I guess that our policy of threats and edmands for capitulation have worked so f%$#ing well.

Adults in the room, my ass.

Seriously, start by ending the f%$#ing Korean war, which is still technically going on, and then open a f%$ing embassy in Pyonyang.

It’s not like we never bombed places where we’ve had formal diplomatic relations with.

Wisdom of the Day

Commenting on the latest Wells Fargo numbers, Ian Welsh notes that “Numbers which can only be made by cheating, will be made by cheating. It is that simple.”

He is correct. The idea that the epidemic of fraudulently opened accounts were the result of anything but the direct results of the demands of upper management is simply not credible:

My old employer never did anything this bad I was aware of, they engaged in aggressive corner cutting, but tried to stay, well, legal. But what they did that was dubious was known, even at the floor level.

And it was always driven by high level executive demands for targets that simply could not be met by staying in the straight and narrow. Always. Low level employees do much of the dirty work, but they do it because it is demanded, and because if they don’t they will be let go or fired.

Unfortunately, we won’t see John Stumpf frog marched out of his home in hand handcuffs, but that is what happened.

How Utterly Proper

There goes the browsing history… Many thanks to @steamfair. Soon to be on display at @SalisburyMuseum in September https://t.co/Di8tvTO4Hi pic.twitter.com/onGGWLDYL4

— Terry Pratchett (@terryandrob) August 25, 2017

Terry Pratchett died in 2015, and he left the most Terry Pratchett of instructions regarding his unfinished works:

A hard drive containing the unfinished books of Terry Pratchett has been destroyed by a steamroller, in fulfilment of the late author’s last wishes.

The works were crushed by a vintage John Fowler & Co steamroller at the Great Dorset Steam Fair, ahead of the opening of a new exhibition about the author’s life and work. It is thought up to 10 incomplete novels were flattened.

Friend Neil Gaiman, with whom Pratchett cowrote Good Omens, had revealed in 2015 that Pratchett had instructed that he wanted “whatever he was working on at the time of his death to be taken out along with his computers, to be put in the middle of a road and for a steamroller to steamroll over them all”.

Pratchett’s former assistant Rob Wilkins tweeted that he was “about to fulfil [his] obligation to Terry”.

The hard drive will go on display as part of a major exhibition about the author’s life and work, Terry Pratchett: HisWorld, which opens at the Salisbury Museum in September.

Pratchett died in March 2015 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease aged 66.

Epic.

Why We Hate Them

Comcast has sued the state of Vermont to try to avoid a requirement to build 550 miles of new cable lines.

Comcast’s lawsuit against the Vermont Public Utility Commission (VPUC) was filed Monday in US District Court in Vermont and challenges several provisions in the cable company’s new 11-year permit to offer services in the state. One of the conditions in the permit says that “Comcast shall construct no less than 550 miles of line extensions into un-cabled areas during the [11-year] term.”

Comcast would rather not do that. The company’s court complaint says that Vermont is exceeding its authority under the federal Cable Act while also violating state law and Comcast’s constitutional rights:

The VPUC claimed that it could impose the blanket 550-mile line extension mandate on Comcast because it is the “largest” cable operator in Vermont and can afford it. These discriminatory conditions contravene federal and state law, amount to undue speaker-based burdens on Comcast’s protected speech under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution… and deprive Comcast and its subscribers of the benefits of Vermont law enjoyed by other cable operators and their subscribers without a just and rational basis, in violation of the Common Benefits Clause of the Vermont Constitution.

Rival providers Charter and Burlington Telecom don’t have to comply with these special requirements, Comcast said. Instead, the other companies “need only comply with the non-discriminatory line extension policies” established in a VPUC rule.

Comcast’s complaint also objected to several other requirements in the permit, including “unreasonable demands” for upgrades to local public, educational, and governmental (PEG) access channels and the building of “institutional networks (“I-Nets”) to local governmental and educational entities upon request and on non-market based terms.”

………

Comcast often refuses to extend its network to customers outside its existing service area unless the customers pay for Comcast’s construction costs, which can be tens of thousands of dollars.

Comcast is regularly at the top of the list on the most loathed company in America, but somehow or other, they continue to flourish.

There is some sort of profound market failure going on.

You Ever Notice What Happens When the Silicon Valley Mindset Meets the Real World?

First Theranos, and now Juicero.

In all fairness, Theranos has a harder job, they were actually in the healthcare business, which involved deceiving regulators, which is hard, while Juicero was just a f%$#ing juice machine:

It sounds like America’s favorite $400 juice machine will be no longer.

“After selling over a million Produce Packs, we must let you know that we are suspending the sale of the Juicero Press and Produce Packs immediately,” reads the company blog post.

Juicero will also be giving people money back. “For the next 90 days, we are offering refunds for your purchase of the Juicero Press,” according to the note.

Founded by Doug Evans, San Francisco-based Juicero had raised more than $118 million in funding from prominent VCs like Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. Carmelo Anthony also invested through his Melo7 Tech venture fund. Even The Campbell Soup Company threw money at it. Juicero started raising funding in 2013 and launched 16 months ago.

The company was subject to mockery, particularly after a Bloomberg piece showed that the juice packets could be squeezed by hand and did not require a fancy machine.

The emperor has no clothes.

If regulators and prosecutors did a deep dive on Silicon Valley, those that weren’t in prison would be asking, “Do you want fries with that?”

I Am Not Giving Points for Honesty Here


Unintentional Honesty

The Cobb County Police Department is moving to fire a police officer after he was caught on his dash cam saying that, “We only kill black people,” on his dash cam:

The Georgia police officer who was captured on camera telling a woman during a traffic stop that law enforcement personnel “only kill black people” says he’ll retire amid the backlash.

Lt. Greg Abbott announced his intent to leave the Cobb County Police Department on Thursday, after his superiors told him he would be fired, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

It is unclear whether officials would accept Abbott’s resignation or follow through with their plan to terminate him. With nearly 30 years of government service, the distinction could have a profound affect on his retirement benefits. Spokespersons for the police department did not immediately respond to a message from The Washington Post.

Of course, this video is over a year old, and nothing was done until it went viral.

As the saying says, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes”

H/t JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Headline of the Day

Trolling is not Opinion.

It is what I consider to be a very well reasoned critique of OP/ED pages in general, and the New York Times opinion page in particular:

Opinions. Every asshole has one, or something. Opinions are good! People who have no opinions are boring. But what about opinion sections of newspapers? Are they good? Should newspapers even have them?

First, let’s talk about me, the Leah of Leah Letter. I would like you to know more about me, and feel free to ask me personal questions at any time. One of my first jobs in journalism was in the Opinion section of the New York Times. I was mostly in charge of fixing paper jams in the printers and keeping track of Thomas Friedman’s schedule, among other things (fun fact about Thomas Friedman: whenever he sends an email, he makes the subject line “Thomas Friedman”).

………

Still, I thought the section did some good things during my time there, although I can’t really remember any of it so maybe it wasn’t that good. But I came to understand some things about opinion journalism. A good opinion section is not one that seeks to confirm its readers’ values, but challenge them. A good opinion section is provocative, thoughtful, and delightful. A good opinion section will turn down an op-ed submission from a head of state that doesn’t say anything. A good opinion section does not kowtow to blowhards.

You might say that the Times has a responsibility, in this fiery era, to present opinions that will cause Trump to resign or be impeached. But the Times is not a radical, or even particularly progressive, paper. It refused to acknowledge the AIDS crisis in in the ‘80s. It basically started the Iraq War. It could be argued that it helped give rise to Trump by hammering Hillary Clinton on everything it could possibly hammer her on. It didn’t even know what bubble tea was until a few weeks ago. Traditional newspapers are by nature conservative, not wanting to believe anything is happening until there is concrete, or official, proof, which marginalizes the oppressed who do not have means of providing such proof.

An opinion section is a crucial part of the sad business of a newspaper. Like it or not, a sh%$-ton of people look forward to reading David Brooks, the paragon of family values who married his decades-younger assistant no judgment just stating facts. The politics of idiotic centrists who pontificate on specious social trends closely mirror the politics of most of the paper’s employees: over 50, white, well-educated, and generally disdainful of the young. At the end of the day, though, the Times is a content mill, and there are deadlines, and traffic quotas, and column inches to fill. And so sometimes it publishes bullsh%$.

But there’s been a remarkable uptick in the bullsh%$ published since James Bennet, formerly of the Atlantic, became editorial page editor last year. James Bennet is the Spencer Pratt of opinion journalism. This guy loves to troll, and position his writers as martyrs for their bad opinions. He also seems kinda bad at the basics of his job (writing and making sure facts are correct).

………

But the controversial pieces the Opinion section runs under the auspices of fomenting some sort of “conversation” are done so disingenuously. The Times is not furthering useful conversation with these bad and wrong op-eds, it is spraying its readers in the eyes with tear gas and then asking them why they’re screaming. They’re not seeking to upend established, calcified viewpoints, but deliberately instigating anger and spreading disinformation in an insincere attempt to “show both sides.” This is particularly egregious when you consider that, post-Trump, the Times has widely marketed itself as a crusader for capital-T Truth and an essential component of a healthy democracy. But the Times’ version of the Truth is highly subjective, and when it lends credence to vile idiots like Erik Prince or Louise Mensch, it loses any semblance of legitimacy.

People expect a lot from the Times, much like they expect Tina Fey to solve the nation’s problems with comedy and then get mad at her when she does jokes. Newspapers are emotional! I know. But it’s fairly insane how out-of-touch the Times’ Opinion section is. Frankly, I’m tired of being trolled.

(Emphasis and %$# mine)

Of course, it doesn’t just apply to newspaper opinion pages.  It also applies to art, entertainment, at least one recently deceased Supreme Court justice, and the leaders of the the oldest and the most recent nuclear powers.

Just stop trolling.

Linkage

A hummingbird pool party

Why I Quote Rather Extensively


The Million Dollar Web Page Then


And now

Because I am aware of link rot, where much of the information on the information in the internet is peripatetic, notwithstanding the meme that the Internet is forever:

In 2005, one of the most intriguing advertising stunts of the internet age was hatched.

Alex Tew launched the The Million Dollar Homepage, where anyone could “own a piece of internet history” by purchasing pixels-plots (minimum of 10×10) on a massive digital canvas. At the price of just one dollar per pixel, everyone from individual internet users to well-known companies like Yahoo! raced to claim a space on the giant digital canvas.

Today, The Million Dollar Homepage lives on as a perfect record of that wacky time in internet history – or so it seems. However, the reality is that many of the hyperlinks on the canvas are now redirects that send incoming users to other sites, while over 20% of them are simply dead.

I feel that I need to quote extensively enough that the basic context is clear without clicking through.

I learned this lesson when the New York Times took over full management of the International Herald Tribune, and broke all the exiting links to the archives. (Also, Yahoo’s shutdown of Geocities, but Geocities really did suck.)

You may be able to find the page with a search, but link will never work.

That’s why I quote rather extensively.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

With an explosion in accusations of abuse in the execution of their duties, the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has come up with a novel solution, it wants to destroy all of its records, much like the British Colonial Dervices when they covered up their brutality as they exited former colonies in Operation Legacy:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently asked the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA), which instructs federal agencies on how to maintain records, to approve its timetable for retaining or destroying records related to its detention operations. This may seem like a run-of-the-mill government request for record-keeping efficiency. It isn’t. An entire paper trail for a system rife with human rights and constitutional abuses is at stake.

ICE has asked for permission to begin routinely destroying 11 kinds of records, including those related to sexual assaults, solitary confinement and even deaths of people in its custody. Other records subject to destruction include alternatives to detention programs; regular detention monitoring reports, logs about the people detained in ICE facilities and communications from the public reporting detention abuses. ICE proposed various timelines for the destruction of these records ranging from 20 years for sexual assault and death records to three years for reports about solitary confinement.

How convenient.

I’m Sorry Dave, I’m Afraid I Can’t Do That

What a surprise.

It turns that it is trivial to hack the most sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems by simply training them poorly:

If you don’t know what your AI model is doing, how do you know it’s not evil?

Boffins from New York University have posed that question in a paper at arXiv, and come up with the disturbing conclusion that machine learning can be taught to include backdoors, by attacks on their learning data.

The problem of a “maliciously trained network” (which they dub a “BadNet”) is more than a theoretical issue, the researchers say in this paper: for example, they write, a facial recognition system could be trained to ignore some faces, to let a burglar into a building the owner thinks is protected.

The assumptions they make in the paper are straightforward enough: first, that not everybody has the computing firepower to run big neural network training models themselves, which is what creates an “as-a-service” market for machine learning (Google, Microsoft and Amazon all have such offerings in their clouds); and second, that from the outside, there’s no way to know a service isn’t a “BadNet”.

Note that current high end AI models are not so much programmed as trained, and it appears that this provides an unprecedented opportunity to develop malicious software.

I’m thinking that you might see an AI drone that gets the whole Manchurian Candidate treatment in the not too distant future.

I Have Had It with These Motherf%##Ing Sharks on This Motherf%$#Ing Freeway

It’s actually a Photoshop hoax, which is depressing, but it’s probably actually a good thing that soulless cold blooded predators are not swimming the streets of Houston.

The cold blooded soulless predators were in Austin, but the special session of the legislature ended about 2 weeks ago, so they are scattered all over the state now.

Rule #1 of Giving Disaster Aid Is Not to Give to the American Red Cross

Rule #2 is to refer to rule #1.

Pro Publica has some quick tips for donating after a disaster in response to the massive flooding in the Houston area from hurricane Harvey, and the lede paragraph mentions the American Red Cross mismanagement in Haiti.

The comments mention their mismanagement of the super storm Sandy.

On a more personal level, I was in the Good Friday earthquake in Anchorage in 1964 (No memories, I was less than 2), and my father has vivid recollections of the general uselessness of the Red Cross, he was involved on some of the (ultimately ignored) after incident analysis and recommendations.

He recalls that the Salvation Army did a much better job than the ARC.

Just don’t give to them.  It will end up going to new carpets in their Washington, DC offices.

Linkage

Using the Sousaphone (Tuba) to Parody KKK Members

What an Evil Little Sh%$!

I am referring, of course, to a Silicon Valley type, who have honed the little sh%$ to a fine edge.

Specifically, I am referring to to Peter Thiel, who is literally a vampire who wants to use the blood of the young to extend his lifespan.

The latest bit of evil is his funding “patently unethical” human experimentation, specifically testing a live virus vaccine without any regulatory oversight on the island of St. Kitts:

Heavyweight tech investor and FDA-critic Peter Thiel is among conservative funders and American researchers backing an offshore herpes vaccine trial that blatantly flouts US safety regulations, according to a Monday report by Kaiser Health News.

The vaccine—a live but weakened herpes virus—was first tested in a 17-person trial on the Caribbean Island of St. Kitts without federal oversight or the standard human safety requirement of an institutional review board (IRB) approval. Biomedical researchers and experts have sharply rebuked the lack of safety oversight and slammed the poor quality of the data collected, which has been rejected from scientific publication. However, investors and those running the trial say it is a direct challenge to what they see as innovation-stifling regulations by the Food and Drug Administration.

………

Madden, Thiel, and other investors have invested $7 million into the vaccine’s development, according to Rational Vaccines, the company orchestrating the trial. Though Thiel could not be reached for comment, he has been openly critical of the FDA’s review process. At one point, he claimed that the agency’s processes were so overbearing that “you would not be able to invent the polio vaccine today.”

The lead researcher behind the vaccine, William Halford, formerly of Southern Illinois University, made similar claims. In a positive university press release, Halford was quoted as saying: “Many of the virus vaccines we currently put in our kids—chickenpox, mumps, measles, and rubella—were developed using live-attenuated viruses in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s when the regulatory landscape was more relaxed… and they have worked remarkably well.”

He went on to suggest that the FDA has made “barriers too high” and that countries with less regulation were better for vaccine and drug development. “There are governments around the world that the WHO [World Health Organization] has approved for vaccine development,” he said. “We’re talking to those types of governments.”

………

Other researchers and experts strongly disagreed with Halford’s stance and handling of a live, attenuated virus vaccine, which can cause infections in the uninfected or severe side-effects in those already infected. “What they’re doing is patently unethical,” Jonathan Zenilman, chief of Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center’s Infectious Diseases Division, told KHN. “There’s a reason why researchers rely on these protections. People can die.”

Robert Califf, who served as FDA commissioner during the Obama era, agreed. “There’s a tradition of having oversight of human experimentation, and it exists for good reasons,” he said. “It may be legal to be doing it without oversight, but it’s wrong.”

………

A spokesperson for Southern Illinois University, one of the vaccine’s patent holders, said that the university has no legal responsibility to ensure proper safety protocols for the trial. However, after questions about the lack of IRB [Institutional Review Board] approval (a federal requirement), the spokesperson said that the university would “take this opportunity to review our internal processes to ensure we are following best practices.”

(emphasis mine)

In addition to the quality of the study being so poor that it was refused for publication, there are also reports of skin lesions from a study size of only 17 patients.

I would have thought that this would have merited a visit from the FDA, and possibly an FBI investigation for conspiracy, but it appears that the rules do not apply to rich people, which is an even bigger problem.