Could I Have this Translated Please?

In the Telegraph, they had a headline that is uniquely British:

More Than 600 Health QUANGO Chiefs on Six-Figure Salaries amid NHS Cash Crisis

The translation is as follows:

Now that the Conservatives have privatized much of the British National Health Service, not only is there no money, but much of what there is is being wasted on overpaid executives.

 QUANGO stands for, “Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organization”.

Basically, it’s where you screw the taxpayers, and make your friends rich(er) by privatizing essential government services, creating private profits and poorer services: (1£= about $1.22)

More than 600 NHS quango chiefs are now on six-figure salaries, with a doubling in the number earning more than the Prime Minister in just three years, new figures show.

 Many of the highest earners have made repeated demands on the Government to increase NHS funding as it battles against its worst financial deficit in history.

 But figures uncovered by the Telegraph, show that the nine main health quangos are now employing 628 officials on salaries of at least £100,000.

 They include 93 taking home more than Theresa May’s £149,440 salary – up from 48 at their predecessor bodies three years earlier.

 Among the highest paid is the NHS deputy medical director, earning around £225,000 a year.

 Dr Jonathan Fielden is currently suspended from work and banned from contact with patients, after being arrested on suspicion of voyeurism.

 The findings come as the NHS attempts to make £22 billion in savings. On Friday Simon Stevens, who earns around £195,000, said the NHS needed more money. He told an audience: “We do need capital; we’ve said that from the get go.”

His plea came the day after the Chief Inspector of Hospitals, Prof Sir Mike Richards, who is paid around £240,000, said the health service was standing on a “burning platform”.

 And last year Jim Mackey, who earns between £215,000 and £220,000 as head of another watchdog, NHS Improvement, spoke of how he believed there was “a door open” at the Treasury , saying the NHS needed to “get our case together” to get more funds.

 Patients groups said the scale of the spending on salaries was “truly shocking” and “eyewatering”.

While this is going on, medical professionals are increasingly underpaid, and so are fleeting the system, but the top 1% has got to get their vig.

The Tories are trying to run the NHS like a business: Burn it down for the insurance money.

Working for the public good has been replaced by looting, and we see this in the United States as well.

Even If He Weren’t an Anti-Vaxxer, Patrick Kennedy Would Have Just Jumped the Shark

I didn’t realize it, but Patrick Kennedy and Newt Gingrich have a lobbying firm together and they have been hired by a pharmaceutical firm to push their product:

A company that sells a new opioid-addiction medication is a secret funder of an advocacy group fronted by Newt Gingrich and Patrick Kennedy that is pushing for more government funding and insurance coverage of such treatments.

Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker and a Trump confidant, and Kennedy, a former congressman and son of former US Senator Edward Kennedy, are paid advisors to Advocates for Opioid Recovery. They have generated a flurry of media attention in those roles, including joint interviews with outlets ranging from Fox News to the New Yorker.
Gingrich told STAT this week he didn’t know who was funding Advocates for Opioid Recovery, and the nonprofit group’s officials refused to disclose its financial backers.

The answer, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, is Braeburn Pharmaceuticals Inc. The private company, based in Princeton, N.J., won approval last year to market an implant that continuously dispenses the opioid addiction medicine buprenorphine.

In a prospectus filed with the SEC in late January as part of a now-postponed effort to take the company public, Braeburn disclosed it entered into an agreement to make a $900,000 charitable donation to Advocates for Opioid Recovery. The filing indicates the company had paid $675,000 to the nonprofit group as of Sept. 30. It did not specify when the remaining funds would be paid. 

………

Kennedy declined to be interviewed this week, as did Van Jones, the CNN commentator and former Obama aide who is another paid adviser. Earlier this week, Woodbury and a spokesman for the nonprofit refused to say who was funding it, adding that the donors wanted to remain anonymous.

Yeah, they would want to remain anonymous.

Patrick Kennedy needs to get an honest job.

As to Van Jones, I just find it kind it kind of depressing:  Everyone in DC eventually sells out.

This Should Surprise No One

Uber has for years engaged in a worldwide program to deceive the authorities in markets where its low-cost ride-hailing service was resisted by law enforcement or, in some instances, had been banned.

The program, involving a tool called Greyball, uses data collected from the Uber app and other techniques to identify and circumvent officials who were trying to clamp down on the ride-hailing service. Uber used these methods to evade the authorities in cities like Boston, Paris and Las Vegas, and in countries like Australia, China and South Korea.

Greyball was part of a program called VTOS, short for “violation of terms of service,” which Uber created to root out people it thought were using or targeting its service improperly. The program, including Greyball, began as early as 2014 and remains in use, predominantly outside the United States. Greyball was approved by Uber’s legal team.

Greyball and the VTOS program were described to The New York Times by four current and former Uber employees, who also provided documents. The four spoke on the condition of anonymity because the tools and their use are confidential and because of fear of retaliation by Uber.

Uber’s use of Greyball was recorded on video in late 2014, when Erich England, a code enforcement inspector in Portland, Ore., tried to hail an Uber car downtown in a sting operation against the company.
At the time, Uber had just started its ride-hailing service in Portland without seeking permission from the city, which later declared the service illegal. To build a case against the company, officers like Mr. England posed as riders, opening the Uber app to hail a car and watching as miniature vehicles on the screen made their way toward the potential fares.
But unknown to Mr. England and other authorities, some of the digital cars they saw in the app did not represent actual vehicles. And the Uber drivers they were able to hail also quickly canceled. That was because Uber had tagged Mr. England and his colleagues — essentially Greyballing them as city officials — based on data collected from the app and in other ways. The company then served up a fake version of the app, populated with ghost cars, to evade capture.

………

This is where the VTOS program and the use of the Greyball tool came in. When Uber moved into a new city, it appointed a general manager to lead the charge. This person, using various technologies and techniques, would try to spot enforcement officers.

I am an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit,* but it appears to me that a this strategy has 4 letters written all over it, R.I.C.O.

I’d love to see someone get seriously medieval on their ass.

*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

Another Stopped Clock Moment

Trump has suspended the accelerated review program for the H1B program.

Short version of this is that for an additional $1,225.00, you can have your application reviewed in a guaranteed 15 days or less, rather than the could be as long as 6 months normal review.

The people who are most likely to use this are the Indian body shops who provide temps to tech firms:

The Trump administration’s decision to halt expedited processing of H-1B visas could abruptly disrupt the plans of thousands of immigrant workers in a range of businesses from technology to health care, immigration experts say.

H-1B visas allow employers to bring in skilled foreign workers; about 85,000 will be given out this year. The visas are in high demand and given out by lottery. It can take six months or longer for an application to be reviewed.

But the government announced Friday that, as of April 3, it will suspend the “premium processing” option, which ensures an application will be reviewed within 15 days. It costs $1,225. 

………

Neil Ruiz, executive director of the Center for Law, Economics and Finance at George Washington University, said the Trump administration’s decision to stop expedited processing could be the first step away from the lottery system.

“I think that removing premium processing may allow the administration to pick who to prioritize in the wait times for H-1B visas,” Ruiz told CNNMoney.

Watson called the move a “big deal” because certain “employers and individuals require premium processing in certain situations.”

If the employees are truly essential and have a skill set unavailable in the United States, you can wait.

If you are looking for cheap labor, time is money, and you look elsewhere .

Good moments are going to be few and far between for the next few years, so I’ll take pleasure in small wins.

Linkage

Machiavelli’s Advice For Nice Guys.

It is an interesting, though by no means definitive, analysis which has echos of existentialism, particularly the money quote, “It’s not enough to dream well, the true measure is to achieve.”

Well, It’s a Start


Republican Contributor, Casino Mogul, and Lawn Gnome Sheldon Adelson

For the first time ever, employees at one of Sheldon Adelson’s casinos have joined a union:

When Sheldon Adelson’s casino empire opened a new branch in 2009 on the grounds of the old Bethlehem Steel mill in Pennsylvania, the interior designers played up the link to faded industrial glory.

The gaming floor drips with lights the color of liquified iron ore. There’s a Steelworks Buffet & Grill, and the late-night lounge is called Molten.

But there was another bit of Bethlehem Steel’s legacy that the casino company might not have counted on: labor unions.

The ratification of a new union contract by security guards at the Sands Bethlehem Casino on Wednesday night marked the first time that a workforce within Adelson’s global empire, the Las Vegas Sands Corp, had successfully unionized, despite years of efforts by the Culinary Workers’ union and others in Las Vegas.

Security employees at Sands Bethlehem voted 70-6 in favor of a contract that gives 146 workers an 8% wage increase, and that sets up a seniority system and grievance process. The vote was the result of five years of work by organizers and a year of negotiating between the Sands Corp and the Security Police Fire Professionals of America.

Adelson is one of the most vociferous union opponents in the US, and I hope that this leads to more of the same for him.

Lessons Not Learned

Specifically, the old saying that, “It ain’t the crime, it’s the coverup.”

It appears that one Jefferson Beauregard Sessions has not learned this lesson:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Thursday that he will recuse himself from investigations related to the 2016 presidential campaign, which would include any Russian interference in the electoral process.

 Speaking at a hastily called news conference at the Justice Department, Sessions said he was following the recommendation of department ethics officials after an evaluation of the rules and cases in which he might have a conflict.

 “They said that since I had involvement with the campaign, I should not be involved in any campaign investigation,” Sessions said. He added that he concurred with their assessment and would thus recuse himself from any existing or future investigation involving President Trump’s 2016 campaign.

 The announcement comes a day after The Washington Post revealed that Sessions twice met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the campaign and did not disclose that to the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearing in January.

(emphasis mine)

“Did not disclose,” is pretty mealy mouthed. Session explicitly denied any contact with Russian officials at the hearing.

Of course, IOKIYAR,* so nothing is going to happen to him.

*It’s OK If You’re A Republican.

Modern Pinkertons, Paid for by Your Tax Dollars

It appears that the Memphis Police department decided to offer their services to McDonald’s franchises as private anti-union thugs:

Police claimed they had “authorization from the president of McDonald’s” to arrest protesting fast food workers, according to a civil rights lawsuit filed on Wednesday against the city of Memphis, Tennessee.

The suit alleges that local police engaged in a “widespread and illegal campaign of surveillance and intimidation” against a local chapter of the Fight for $15 fast-food worker organization as it campaigned for an increase in the minimum wage and union rights for fast food workers.

Officers followed organizers home after meetings, ordered workers not to sign petitions and blacklisted organizers from city hall, according to the suit. They claimed to have been authorized by McDonald’s, the world’s largest fast food chain, and in one incident a McDonald’s franchisee joined police in tailing protesters.

The suit alleges that a campaign of harassment began after Memphis workers participated in a nationwide day of protest on 4 September 2014. Since then, police officers have repeatedly threatened workers with arrest during protests, at one point telling them they had “authorization from the president of McDonald’s to make arrests”. On “multiple occasions” officers “seemed to take direction from McDonald’s”, the complaint charges.

I kind of preferred the old days, when the companies actually had to pay their own money for their thugs.

These days, “Business friendly” politicians use the taxpayer’s money to brutalize their own citizens.

Some Perspective from Sweden

Driving to work this morning, I heard that Sweden was re instituting military conscription.

The story had a heavy “Red Menace”, angle, implying that the Russians are freaking out the Swedes.

While the history of Russia and Sweden is rather frought, it appears that the actual reasons for this are rather less dramatic:

For readers from countries that haven’t had the draft since the mid 20th century like the UK or US, the idea that young Swedes can now be called up for obligatory military training may sound archaic. So what’s the background to Sweden bringing back conscription? Here are four things to help you understand.

1. Not enough people are joining the military

This one kind of falls in the category of, “Well, duh.” If they didn’t have recruiting fhortages they would not be reinstituting the draft.

2. The situation in the Baltic region has changed

Yeppers, this is the Russians.

3. Public support is strong

A mind-boggling 72% of Swedes like the return of the draft, and elections are going to happen next year, and a little bit of dick swinging plays well with the electorate.

4. It hasn’t even been away that long

The draft only ended in 2010, so both the military and public are still familiar with the concept.

My guess is that the first bit is the main driver of this, and that electoral considerations are a close second.

In either case, it’s rather less alarming that it was presented to me on my morning commute.

Well, This is an Interesting Take on the Problems in Indian IT

According to this report by the Indian web site Scroll.in. cheating is so endemic that many of the most prestigious schools in India are unable to do basic coding.

It appears to be the result of a toxic mix of entitlement and credentialism.

This is not to say that all Indian programmers are incompetent, though an Indian IT executive basically gave up on ⅔ of all IT grads in the country, which is a remarkably high failure rate for the elite institutions.

Reports of mass copying during school and college examinations in several states, including Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, are common. But a blog post by a computer science professor indicates that students at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, and other engineering colleges, indulge in it too.

 Earlier this month, Dheeraj Sanghi, a professor at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology-Delhi, wrote a blog post on the quality of the country’s information technology engineers, which corporate recruiters also seem to be concerned about.

 In the post titled, CS education is poor because of copying, Sanghi referred to a statement by Srinivas Kandula, chief executive of information technology major Capgemeni India, at a business event in Mumbai earlier this month.

 At the event, Kandula said: “I am not very pessimistic, but it is a challenging task and I tend to believe that 60-65 per cent of them [IT recruits] are just not trainable.”

 ………

 Speaking to this reporter, Sanghi said: “In many colleges, even in some of the IITs but to a lesser extent, students either copy the code for a programme from the net, or one student writes it, and the others copy. The code is tested in the laboratory. If it runs – and it does – the student is awarded marks even if the lines are not original.” He added that these shortcuts are adopted as early as the first semester.

 ………

 In his blog post, he recounted that he was recently part of a selection committee to recruit programmers for a government department. He found that most applicants he interviewed, including those who had “several years of experience in industry”, could not perform a variety of tasks they ought to have learnt at engineering college. “These [were] all the programmes we ask our first semester students who have never programmed before,” he wrote.

 ………

 But Indian Institutes of Technology have had their fair share of cheating scandals, some of which seem to have resulted in a cover-up.

 For instance, in 2011, a computer science professor at the Indian Institute of Technology-Kharagpur, was suspended for reporting a variety of irregularities at the institution, including mass cheating in examinations. It led to a court case, which is still on. With the next hearing scheduled for Friday, the professor was reluctant to talk to this reporter but his lawyer Pranav Sachdeva said that one of the charges against his client was that “he spoke to the media about it”. Sachdeva added that the IIT had “tried to impose compulsory retirement [on his client] but the Delhi Hight Court put a stop to it”.

………

 Even though engineering colleges can easily check copying if they wanted to by failing students who did not submit original programmes, there’s perhaps a valid reason why institutes hold back. “I know of one college which tried this,” wrote Sanghi in his blog. “Every single glass [pane] in all buildings were broken by the angry students.”

Any comments from people who have been through an IT education in India, or those who have experience working with Indian IT professionals would be appreciated.

Silicon Valley in All of Its Glory

We had revelations about a hostile work place at Uber last week, and this week it’s Tesla where the “Brogrammer” culture is alleged:

A female engineer at Tesla has accused Elon Musk’s car company of ignoring her complaints of “pervasive harassment”, paying her a lower salary than men doing the same work, promoting less qualified men over her and retaliating against her for raising concerns.

The allegations of AJ Vandermeyden, who still works at the celebrated electric car manufacturer, paint a picture of a hostile work environment dominated by men where inappropriate sexual behavior is tolerated and women face numerous barriers to advance their careers.
………

Vandermeyden began at Tesla in 2013 and was eventually promoted to a manufacturing engineering position in the general assembly department, which consisted mostly of men and where she was paid less than male engineers whose work she directly took over, according to her complaint.

I think that we need to reconsider the adulation that we throw Silicon Valley’s way.

There seems to be a surfeit of narcissism in around San Jose that rivals that around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Well, Here is Some Good News to Start the Month

The Supreme Court just remanded the Virginia redistricting case back to a lower court with instructions to apply a more rigorous standard regarding racial bias.

It wasn’t a complete victory, but it was a definite win for the good guys:

The Supreme Court on Wednesday gave Virginia Democrats a fresh chance to challenge parts of the legislative map for the state’s House of Delegates.

………

“The upshot of all of this is that not much has changed with these cases,” Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, wrote in a blog post. “The fight will be over the details and application to particular cases.”

Marc E. Elias, a lawyer for the challengers in the case, disagreed, calling the decision a “major victory” that will help Democrats.

………

In 2015, a divided three-judge panel of Federal District Court in Richmond, Va., upheld 11 of the challenged districts because, it said, race had not been the primary factor in drawing them. Since the districts could be justified under traditional redistricting criteria like compactness, contiguity, incumbency protection and political considerations, the court said, race could not have been the predominant reason for drawing them.

That was the wrong approach, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority. “The racial predominance inquiry concerns the actual considerations that provided the essential basis for the lines drawn,” he wrote, “not post hoc justifications the legislature in theory could have used but in reality did not.”

………

In assessing those challenges, Justice Kennedy wrote, the trial court identified “no fewer than 11 race neutral redistricting factors.” He called that kind of analysis too malleable.

“By deploying those factors in various combinations and permutations, a state could construct a plethora of potential maps that look consistent with traditional, race-neutral principles,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “But if race for its own sake is the overriding reason for choosing one map over others, race still may predominate.”

Justice Kennedy did not say the challengers would win under his less rigid standard. “The district court,” he wrote, “is best positioned to determine in the first instance the extent to which, under the proper standard, race directed the shape of these 11 districts.”

The Supreme Court affirmed one part of the trial court’s ruling, concerning a single district, which the trial court had upheld even after finding that race played the dominant role in drawing it. The trial court said the district was justified by an attempt to comply with the Voting Rights Act, which forbade the reduction of minority voters’ ability to elect candidates of their choice.

Redistricting is still a mess, but it is a bit less of a mess, and it appears that racial Gerrymanders have become more difficult.

Quote of the Day

In various times and regions, Jews have belonged to conservative parties like the UK tories or French Gaullist parties, for instance. But they are virtually absent from rightist politics. The reason is clear enough. Anti-semitism is almost inevitably and almost always part of rightist political movements. It is a natural feature. This is not always explicitly so. It is not always that way at first, but eventually it is always there.

—Josh Marshall

The right hearkens back to, and attempts to resurrect, a past that never existed, and this past is largely Judenrein.

Jews, and most other minorities, do not exist as human beings with agency in this idealized vision of the past. 

They are either absent, or meek stereotypes.

Yeah, He’s Running for President in 2020

Corey Booker, after getting savaged by the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party for voting with big pharma to ensure that people would be impoverished by their extortion, has signed on to a very similar measure to the one that he voted against:

Pilloried by his party’s left wing for voting in January against a non-binding measure with a similar goal, Sen. Cory Booker is joining Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday to unveil a bill to allow the importation of pharmaceuticals from Canada and other countries.

Booker, who has been mentioned as a potential 2020 presidential candidate, came under fire on social media and liberal blogs as too beholden to special interests after he and 12 Democratic colleagues, including fellow New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, voted against a drug-importation amendment to the 2017 budget resolution.

That amendment, sponsored by Sanders, of Vermont, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., was part of a series of votes, all defeated, to amend the budget resolution the Republican majority was using to start the process of repealing the Affordable Care Act. Sanders reacted angrily after the 46-52 vote, telling USA Today his Democratic colleagues lacked “guts” and he hoped that “in the coming weeks and months you’re going to see many of them develop the courage to stand up to Pharma.”

I am an optimist: I think that our nation might survive 4 years of Donald Trump.

I don’t think that it can survive another presidency of an Ivy League educated neoliberal who runs the country primarily for the benefit Ivy League educated neoliberals.

I really have to start looking into aliyah. 

Seriously, Are There ANY Ukrainian Nationalists without a Nazi Family Background?

Exclusive: Canada’s fiercely anti-Russian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland says her Ukrainian grandfather struggled “to return freedom and democracy to Ukraine,” but she leaves out that he was a Nazi propagandist justifying the slaughter of Jews, writes Arina Tsukanova.It really says all you need to know.

………

So, it appears Freeland’s grandfather – rather than being a helpless victim – was given a prestigious job to spread Nazi propaganda, praising Hitler from a publishing house stolen from Jews and given to Ukrainians who shared the values of Nazism.

Among other things, as editor of the Polish newspaper Nowy Dziennik, he lauded the Babi Yar massacre of Kiev’s Jews:

The Nov. 6, 1941 issue of Krakivski Visti ecstatically describes how much better Kiev is without Jews. “There is not a single one left in Kiev today, while there were 350,000 under the Bolsheviks,” the newspaper wrote, gloating that the Jews “got their comeuppance.”

That “comeuppance” refers to the mass shooting of Kiev’s Jewish population at Babi Yar. In just two days, Sept. 29-30, 1941, a total of 33,771 people were murdered, a figure that does not include children younger than three years old. There were more shootings in October, and by early November, Krakivski Visti was enthusing over a city where the Jewish population had “disappeared” making Kiev “beautiful, glorious.” Chomiak’s editorials also described a Poland “iinfected by Jews.”

It should be noted that my awareness of the history of Ukrainian nationalism going back hundreds of years, might influence my positions on the current conflict in the Ukraine.

On the other hand, it appears that Freeland would Steve Bannon’s kind of foreign minister.