Linkage

We are the most powerful warship in the world:

The Republican Politician in a Nut Shell

For those of you not living in the Garden State, you may be unaware that New Jersey is in the middle of a government shutdown.

Hizzoner wants to get money earmarked for handling the opioid crisis to avoid breaking his no new tax pledge.

As a result of the shutdown, all but emergency government services are shut down.

This includes things like government offices and state parks, unless you are Governor Chris Christie, in which case you have the beach to yourself:

People hoping to visit Island Beach State Park this holiday weekend were not allowed in because of the state government shutdown Gov. Chris Christie ordered amid the state budget standoff in Trenton.

But there was one family there: Christie’s. They are using the summer beach house provided by the state for a weekend down the Shore.

And here are exclusive aerial photos by NJ Advance Media showing Christie surrounded by wife, Mary Pat Christie, and others.

It was taken early Sunday afternoon before the governor headed to Trenton to hold another news conference about the shutdown.

At that news conference, Christie was asked if he got any sun Sunday.

“I didn’t,” he said. “I didn’t get any sun today.”

When later told of the photo, Brian Murray, the governor’s spokesman, said: “Yes, the governor was on the beach briefly today talking to his wife and family before heading into the office.”

“He did not get any sun,” Murray added. “He had a baseball hat on.“

(emphasis mine)

Bad move Governor.  I’ve seen your poll numbers, and they are so low that about the only way for you to salvage your political career would be to get cancer.

It make some voters feel sympathy for you.  (Not me, but some voters ……… maybe)

Take off the hat, and no sunscreen.

About that Minimum Wage Study in Seattle


The weepy table

The state of Washington commissioned a study of Seattle’s minimum wage, and found that low wage workers lost money as a result.

This comes as a surprise, since all the other studies found no effect, but this has not stopped the economic journalist community from touting this as conclusive evidence that raising the minimum wage does now work.

What the study concluded was that for low wage workers, the number of hours worked decreased, resulting in a loss of wages, but the devil is in the details.

The study appears to have been deliberately structured to deliver this results:

  • They did not include any multi-location employers, about 40% of the data set.
  • It defines “low wage” as earning less than $19 an hour, in a labor market where wages have increased by 18% over the period in question, so if a worker’s pay goes from $16.50/hour to $19.25/hour, (a 16% increase), this would be counted as lost low wage hours. (Bracket creep)
  • Downplays the fact that employment at the single site employers that they survey increased total hours worked at all wage levels by 18% as well. 
  • Assumes that increases in higher wage jobs NEVER involved lower wage employees making more.

This is complete crap:

Words cannot describe the torment experienced by the data before they confessed what the University of Washington team got them to confess. I can only urge readers with an open mind to study Table 3 carefully. The average wage increase, from the second quarter of 2014 to the third quarter of 2016, for all employees of single site establishments was 18 percent. Eighteen percent! That is an annual increase of almost 8 percent. For two and a quarter years in a row. Not bad. And the number of hours worked of ALL employees of single site establishments? Up 18 percent in a little over two years. That too is an increase of almost 8 percent per annum.

Now multiply that wage by those hours and the total payroll for all employees rose 39.5 percent over the course of nine quarters. An annual rate of increase of 17.5 percent. These are BIG numbers. They are freaking HUGE numbers.

It must have taken a team of at least six academics to extract a 9.4 percent decline in hours from the 86,842 workers (out of a total of 336,517) earning under $19 dollars an hour at these single-site establishments. Look at the Table and weep.

(emphasis original)

Sources as diverse as the Economic Policy Institute and the Financial Times have excoriated the methodology here as well for much the same reasons.

Since the study has not yet been peer reviewed, I’d like to see the results, because I think that the the authors had a conclusion, and then cherry picked data to confirm their desired outcome.

Quote of the Day

Nothing against new ideas. Some of them might even be good ones! But just because a company is based in the Bay Area and does something on your smartphone doesn’t really make it “tech” at this point any more than something which uses that new-fangled electricity is tech.

—Duncan “Atrios” Black

He’s right.  Uber is basically a taxi service.  Grubhub is food delivery.  Air B&B is a B&B.  Stubhub is a scalper.

But all these guys think that they are geniuses of the first order, because ……… Internet. (or because ………Smart Phone)

This is why we find Silicon Valley to be a lot like Lord of the Flies. 

It’s the only way to keep the all balls into the air is to never stop.

This is a Grammatically Correct Use of the Term Irony

Donald Trump has commissioned vote fraud commission to prove that he actually won the popular vote in 2016. (Yes, this is Narcissistic insanity)

He has appointed prominent figures in the voter suppression movement including Kansas Secretary of State Kris Korbach and Hans “Der novotenführer” von Spakovsky, whose primary goal has been to keep blacks and Hispanics from voting, primarily through purging them from voter rolls.

This commission is a clear attempt to go national with the voter purges in an attempt to gain partisan political advantage, and, in an attempt to go national programs to disenfranchise minorities.

Basically, the commission will manufacture data, and then manufacture outrage, and use this to jump start national legislation to suppress minority voting.

This is clear to anyone with two brain cells to rub together, so when the commission requested complete voter registration data from the states and the District of Columbia, over half of the states election officials have told the commission to go pound sand.

It turns out that, due to vagaries in state election law, one of the Secretaries of State that is telling Kris Korbach to go pound sand, is Kansas Secretary of State Kris Korbach:

Kris Kobach, the co-chair of Donald Trump’s glorious Find The Five Million Illegals Who Voted For Hillary Commission, has been running into a bit of pushback to his letter asking all 50 states to submit detailed voter information to be used in a great big study that would supposedly root out all the voter fraud. At least 25 states have said they won’t or can’t comply — or will not submit all the data Kobach requested, either because they’re restricted by state law, or they don’t trust the commission, which is expected to skew the data to support Republican claims of massive voter fraud, and to recommend restrictions on voting rights.

Among the states that won’t be giving the “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity” all the data Kris Kobach wants is Kansas, where Secretary of State Kris Kobach explained that under state law, he can’t release the last four digits of voters’ Social Security numbers. The state will release all other information requested in the letter, like voters’ names, addresses, dates of birth, voting history, party affiliation, and felony criminal history. Kobach explained,

 “If the commission decides that they would like to receive Social Security numbers to a secure site in order to remove false positives, then we would have to double check and make sure Kansas law permits,” Kobach said.

“I know for a fact that this information would be secured and maintained confidentially,” he added in response to security concerns.

He happens to personally know the commission’s co-chair, after all, and he trusts Kris Kobach not to pull any funny stuff.

 Several other states, however, know exactly who Kris Kobach is, and have decided not to play along with Kobach, like Virginia, where Gov. Terry McAulliffe issued a statement saying

This entire commission is based on the specious and false notion that there was widespread voter fraud last November […] At best this commission was set up as a pretext to validate Donald Trump’s alternative election facts, and at worst is a tool to commit large-scale voter suppression.

Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, was a bit more blunt. His statement not only said Mississippi wouldn’t comply with the request for voter records, he also told Kobach that while he hadn’t yet received the letter, based on the copies he’d seen, his reply to the commission would be “They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great state to launch from.”

(emphasis mine)

I think there is a method to Republican madness here: They want to institute nationwide voter suppression, and they are using Trumps ego to push this whole effort along.

Unlike prior Republican Presidents, who had the hubris to believe that they could pick the lock of the minority vote, Trump is personally hurt by the 2.8+ million voter deficit, and really believes that this was from widespread voter fraud.

As such, Trump is the perfect patient zero for the plague of voter suppression.

Who Found Pictures of the Registrar of the Copyright Office Engaging in Carnal Congress with a Goat?

After decades of interpreting copyright in the most bone headed and restrictive way possible, the US Copyright Office has come out in favor of a “Right to Repair”.

This means that , which will allow people who own products to repair them, despite licensing terms that lock down the products and attempt to force them to drive them to expensive service arrangements.

John Deer for example, is attempting to force farmers to do even the most basic maintenance on their tractors, oil changes, new spark plugs, etc., at the dealers.

This office literally had to be overruled by an act of Congress, the Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act, because the office decided that consumers should have no right to unlock the phone that they owned.

I think that what happened was that the interim registrar (the last permanent registrar was fired in part for IP extremism) has realized that some common sense needed to be applied:

Last week, to little fanfare, the US Copyright Office took its first baby steps towards stopping auto-makers wrapping their software in copyright rules.

The decision is important because auto-makers use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s “technical protection measures” (TPMs) provisions to restrict diagnosis and repair to an approved ecosystem.

That’s especially galling for farmers in remote locations who have argued that they can’t always wait for a factory rep to okay fixes to agricultural machines, while in the more mundane world of automobile mechanics, legitimate repair shops complain that Detroit uses the DMCA to exert market power.

In a lengthy report (PDF) that also canvasses how exceptions to the TPM rules could apply to accessibility technologies, device unlocking, and library archives, the office proposes legislation that sides at least in part with the “right to repair” lobby.

………

Since “bona fide repair and maintenance activities are typically non-infringing”, the report suggests using the DMCA to tie up the repair market wasn’t a legitimate use of the law.

Hence “to the extent section 1201 precludes diagnosis, repair, and maintenance activities otherwise permissible under title 17, the Office finds that a limited and properly‐tailored permanent exemption for those purposes, including circumventing obsolete access controls for continued functioning of a device, would be consistent with the statute’s overall policy goals”.

While this sounds like basic common sense, but the application of common sense to IP law has been virtually non-existent over the past 30+ years.

This constitutes a revolutionary shift in culture, even if it is a minor change in policy.

We are finally seeing meaningful push-back against a copyright and patent regime that increases inequality, reduces innovation, and perverts our economy and our society.

I Know That Stereotypes Are Bad, but ………

I was just listening to NPR, and they were talking about the Canada Day celebrations, which is a big deal because this is the sesquicentennial (150th year) since the founding of the Canadian Confederation.

There was a mention of security precautions being taken, and mention was made of an, “Elite Canadian Anti-terrorism Unit,” (This would probably be JTF2) being on alert as a precaution. (No mention of any specific threats.)

I know that this is rank stereotyping, but the image that came into my head was of a bunch of guys in cardigans apologizing profusely.

This is clearly an inaccurate characterization of Canadian soldiers in general, but the image remains in my head.

Does this make me a bad person?

This Has Disaster Written All Over It


Theodore Roosevelt Full Ship Shock Test

The US Navy wants to defer shock testing on the Ford class carriers until the 2nd ship and got a provision in the latest defense appropriation bill allowing them to do this, because, after all, it’s not like it’s ever going to see combat, or have a weapons handling accident, or run aground, or collide with a garbage scow.

Seriously?

This ship has a new catapult and arresting gear using a new electromagnetic technology, a new reactor, a new radar, a different computer architecture, a new ordinance handling system, a modified hull, and increased automation to reduce crewing.

Any of these systems could be impacted very differently by shock than the legacy systems on the Nimitz class, and the Navy wants to deploy the first ship in class without testing.

This is simply insane.

What a Useless Self-Important Narcissistic Sphincter

I am, of course, referring to Cory Booker, the junior Senator from New Jersey, who after being excoriated for voting against drug reimportation after taking thousands in donations from big pharma, had had an epiphany.

He “Will “Pause” Fundraising from Big Pharma Because It “Arouses So Much Criticism”.”

According to him, the problem is not that he sold out his constituents and the American public for campaign donations, but people were mean to him for doing so.

Cory Booker, go Cheney yourself.

It’s Like Asking for Mercy as an Orphan after Murdering Your Parents

In examining the much ballyhooed “rescue” of the New York City subway by Governor Andrew Cuomo, people are noting that his complete hostility to mass transit, particularly his hostility to the subway, created this mess in the first place:

The New York City subway system, by far the largest and best public transit system in the United States, has reached a crisis level of dysfunction over the past few months, with serious congestion, delays, and a recent derailment in Harlem that injured 34 passengers. In a delayed response, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) declared a “state of emergency” on Thursday and ordered the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to produce a reorganization plan to fix the problem.

Don’t fall for his shtick.

Cuomo has been directly responsible for the subway for over six years. It has been obvious since he took power that something like this would happen and he’s done nothing but make it worse. The crisis is a clear result of his incompetence, his abysmal politics, and his odious personality.

I’ve seen commentary in the same vein from The New Republic, the Village Voice, and on the cover of the New York Daily News (sorry, no link, I saw it on a news stand), so I think the upside to all of this is that I don’t think that Cuomo will be able to run for President in 2020 as the savior of the system.

Instead, he will have to defend the fact that he broke them in the first place.

California is F%$#ed Up and Sh%$

We’ve all heard that the head of the California State Assembly killed the single payer bill.

While you are condemning lobbyists and timid Democrats, it should be noted that the bill had no funding mechanism, and because of California’s out of control initiative petition system, which passes bills with all the sophistication of the saying in fortune cookies, every dollar of benefits would require two dollars in taxes:

In the days since California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon shelved for the year SB562, which intends to establish a state single-payer health care system, he’s been subject to mass protests and even death threats. The bill’s chief backers, including the California Nurses Association and the Bernie Sanders-affiliated Our Revolution, angrily point to Rendon as the main roadblock to truly universal health care.

They’re completely wrong. What’s more, they know they’re wrong. They’re perfectly aware that SB562 is a shell bill that cannot become law without a ballot measure approved by voters. Rather than committing to raising the millions of dollars that would be needed to overcome special interests and pass that initiative, they would, apparently, rather deceive their supporters, hiding the realities of California’s woeful political structure in favor of a morality play designed to advance careers and aggrandize power.

………

It’s because you can’t do the funding without help from the voters, because of California’s fatal addiction to its perverse form of direct democracy. The blame, in other words, lies with ourselves.

To figure this out, you need only turn to the actual legislative analysis of the Senate bill, which passed in early June. It states very clearly what Rendon alluded to in his announcement shelving SB562: “There are several provisions of the state constitution that would prevent the Legislature from creating the single-payer system envisioned in the bill without voter approval.”

To cut through the clutter, let’s focus on the biggest constitutional hurdle, known as Proposition 98. Passed in 1988, Prop 98 requires that roughly 40 percent of all general fund revenues — money the state receives in taxes — must go to K-12 education. If you include community college spending, it must exceed 50 percent.

Prop 98 was itself a reaction to the notorious Prop 13, which sharply limited state property taxes. It was intended to ensure that education received its fair share of funding. But it also created a budgetary straitjacket that affects virtually anything that costs California money.

………

Substituting a centralized state program for the skyrocketing premiums people pay today would actually be relatively affordable. But if half the money has to be siphoned off to education, that rationale becomes harder to sell.

Self-appointed experts have countered that the state can suspend Prop 98 with a two-thirds vote of the legislature. This has been done twice in the past, during downturns in the economy. But the suspension can last for only a single year; it would have to be renewed annually to keep single payer going. More important, as the California Budget and Policy Center explains, after any suspension, “the state must increase Prop 98 funding over time to the level that it would have reached absent the suspension.”

So legislators would have to vote year after year to suspend Prop 98, but add more money back to cover it in subsequent years. That backfill would grow with every budget, and over time lawmakers would need to vote for ever-increasing giant tax hikes. If this didn’t return Republicans to power in Sacramento within a few years, some enterprising lawyer would sue the legislature for violating the spirit of Prop 98. Suspension is not politically, legally, or financially sustainable.

Until California fixes the network of stupid and dysfunctional initiative petitions that have completely f%$#ed up state government, the best that they can expect is the, “Same Sh%$ Different Day.”

Linkage

Here is a your feel good story of the day, Luftwaffe ace flies in Spitfire: (BBC)

What Part Of, “Working with Peter Thiel,” Don’t You Get?

Peter Thiel is a gay bashing gay man, an Ayn Rand loving sociopath, and one of the founders of the Big Brother wannabee software company Palantir.

Needless to say, his history should be a red flag for anyone who would want to do business with him.

Subscribing to a philosophy which maintains that self-interest is the only form of morality does not imply that they would deal fairly or honestly with clients.

Case in point, the New York Police are terminating their contract with the firm, and Palantir is refusing to transfer to the department as is required in the contract, because supplying an overpriced and difficult to use product, your business model has to be lock in:

A showdown over law enforcement information — and who controls it — is taking place between the New York Police Department and Palantir Technologies, the $20 billion Silicon Valley startup that for years has analyzed data for New York City’s cops, BuzzFeed News has learned.

The NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract and intends to stop using the software by the end of this week, according to three people familiar with the matter who weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The department has created a new system to replace Palantir, and it wants to transfer the analysis generated by Palantir’s software to the new system. But Palantir, the NYPD claims, has not produced the full analysis in a standardized format — one that would work with the new software — despite multiple requests from the police department in recent months.

Lawyers from each side have gotten involved, showing that this dispute — which hasn’t previously been reported — has the potential to escalate into a legal fight. And given the work Palantir does for a host of other government clients, the standoff over a seemingly arcane technical issue has implications for a range of services, from international espionage to battlefield intelligence.

………

The NYPD has been a Palantir customer since at least 2012, and Palantir has touted the relationship to help it drum up other business. The software ingests arrest records, license-plate reads, parking tickets, and more, and then graphs this data in a way that can reveal connections among crimes and people. In late 2014, for example, the police department used Palantir’s analysis to plan a sting that landed the rapper Bobby Shmurda behind bars, just as his career was taking off, according to an internal Palantir email seen by BuzzFeed News.

………

The NYPD quietly began work last summer on its replacement data system, and in February it announced internally that it would cancel its Palantir contract and switch to the new system by the beginning of July, according to three people familiar with the matter. The new system, named Cobalt, is a group of IBM products tied together with NYPD-created software. The police department believes Cobalt is cheaper and more intuitive than Palantir, and prizes the greater degree of control it has over this system.

The NYPD was paying Palantir $3.5 million a year as of 2015, according to an internal Palantir email that describes a contract to be signed in late 2014. Other Palantir customers — including Home Depot, which canceled late last year — have also raised concerns about Palantir’s prices.

The emerging dispute is not over the data that the NYPD has fed into Palantir’s software, but over the analysis that the software has produced — all the insights like the one that underpinned the Shmurda arrest.

The NYPD asked Palantir in February for a copy of this analysis, and for a translation key so that it could put the analysis into its Cobalt system, the people familiar with the matter said. But when Palantir delivered a file in May, it declined to provide a way to translate it, arguing that doing so would require exposing its intellectual property, the people said.

The NYPD then asked Palantir for the information in a translated format — asking Palantir to do the translation itself — according to the people. Palantir responded this month, providing a file that was indeed readable. But according to the NYPD’s examination of the file, it contained only the original data the NYPD had fed into the system, the people said. The analysis appeared to be missing.

If the dispute is not resolved by the end of this week, the NYPD can continue to view the analysis by using Palantir software, given that customers retain a perpetual software license even after canceling, two people familiar with the matter said. But this could mean having to switch between systems to see information relating to a case, a situation the NYPD wants to avoid. Plus, as an ex-customer, the NYPD will not have access to the same product upgrades or support should the software fail.

The standoff highlights a thorny issue for companies and governments that outsource their data-mining tasks to outside contractors. Technology experts say software companies have little incentive to smooth a customer’s transition to a rival’s product. In some situations, a software company would genuinely risk devaluing its intellectual property if it shared information with a customer, since that could show the customer how the information was created, according to Tal Klein, chief marketing officer of IT monitoring company Lakeside Software.

I may be a bit unfair to Thiel and Palantir here:  It appears to me, at leastdescribed Mr. Klein, that this is a part and parcel of privatized IT operations and the cloud.

In a truly competitive and open market, the profits approach zero, so any business would put as much friction into changing services so as to maximize its power over its clients.

This is why you should not privatize this sh%$ or move it to the cloud. 

It’s a computerized roach motel:  Your data checks in, but it never checks out.

Speaking of Democratic Party Consultants

In an article belittling the standard Democratic Party “The Sky is Falling” fundraising email, this little factoid is thrown in:

And that means the party’s relationship with its consultant class will have to change. Amidst the wreckage of Ossoff’s campaign there emerges only one winner: Mothership Strategies, which reportedly earned $3.9 million for its work. Everyone else—voters, the party, the candidate Mothership promoted—lost.

This is economics 101:  The incentives for consultants are for spending money profligately, not on winning campaigns, or efficient allocation of resources, because they are given a cut of that spending. 

All the pious assertions otherwise are unmitigated crap.

Giving Money as an Insult

When Bernie Sanders did his tour with Tom Perez in their mutual political tour, he paid his way for his expenses so as not to be beholden to the DNC:

Sen. Bernie Sanders, who clashed with the Democratic National Committee during his 2016 presidential campaign and continues to criticize the party, gave $100,000 to the DNC in May to help cover costs from his cross-country spring tour with DNC Chairman Tom Perez.

Sanders and Perez embarked on the nine-state “unity tour” earlier this year after Sanders’ endorsed candidate, Rep. Keith Ellison — who supported Sanders in the 2016 presidential race — lost the race for DNC chairman to Perez. Sanders moved the money from his presidential campaign account to the DNC to help pay for the tour, according to campaign finance records and Sanders spokesman Josh Miller-Lewis.

The rare transfer of money from Sanders to the national Democratic Party comes after the unity tour and addition of Ellison as a “deputy chair” at the DNC, two changes that could signal a thaw in a high-profile, often-icy relationship. Former DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Donna Brazile, who led the DNC after Wasserman Schultz resigned, were both Hillary Clinton allies — a fact that roiled Sanders supporters when hacked emails showed DNC staffers discussing Sanders unfavorably during the primary.

The Sanders campaign also filed a lawsuit against the DNC in 2016, alleging the party wrongly revoked his campaign’s access to voter data during that year’s campaign. The lawsuit had marked a particularly low point in relations between Sanders and the party, which pulled Sanders campaign access to certain databases before the first 2016 primaries and caucuses, after discovering that Sanders staffers had improperly accessed data used by Clinton’s rival campaign. Sanders withdrew the lawsuit last year.

But despite the unity tour and the May donation, Sanders is still outwardly critical of the Democratic Party, which he recently said needs “fundamental change” and “fundamental restructuring.” During the 2016 presidential race, Sanders set up a joint fundraising committee with the DNC — but no money ever passed through it.

Claiming that the money transfer, “Signals a thaw in a high-profile, often-icy relationship,” seems to me to be a little bit clueless.

If Bernie Sanders explicitly raised money for the DNC, that might constitute a thaw.

Refusing to let the DNC pay his way on a DNC tour is a way of staking out his independence of the Democratic Party establishment.

This is a f%$# you to the DNC, not a rapprochement.

DNC Fails Where the Rubber Meets the Road

After Barack Obama stood up Tom Perez for DNC chair in order to prosecute a petty f%$# you to the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, Perez promised to end unpaid internships at the DNC.

Unpaid internships at a place like the DNC are dishonest (they are doing real work, not just shadowing people and learning), an abusive way of dealing with labor, and discriminatory, because poor people cannot afford to work for free.

Well, it looks like Tom Perez was just kidding:


While running for Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Tom Perez pledged to eliminate unpaid internships at DNC.

“Millennials need more than just a seat at the table, they need a voice in every part of the conversation at the DNC,” tweeted Perez during a DNC chairman’s debate in February. “And creating a paid internship program is a part of my plan to bring in more millennials.”

However, it’s been nearly four months since Tom Perez became chairman, and now the DNC— under Perez’s watch—is employing another set of unpaid summer interns and is currently accepting applications for unpaid internships for the fall.

According to the DNC’s website, unpaid interns are required to work 40 hours per week, leaving little time for interns to work part-time jobs to pay their bills.

It’s unclear if the internships meet the U.S. Department of Labor criteria that determine whether the internships financially benefit the employer. The DOL’s six point test is intended to clarify whether unpaid or educational arrangements are truly beneficial to the intern, and whether or not interns must be paid at least a minimum wage.

Hypocrite.

I understand that money is tight, but paying these people minimum wage is just a rounding error of the money kicked back to various Democratic Party consultants.

There is no excuse for this.

FAIL

So, Mitch McConnell has put off a vote on the Senate version of Trumpcare because he doesn’t have the votes.

I am amused, though unlike some people, I don’t think that this is the beginning of the complete unraveling of the Republican party, even though they have been promising to kill the ACA for 8 years.

Never underestimate the capacity of Republicans for self-delusion.  In comparison, Trotskyites look like steel eyed realists.