Tag: FAIL

46 Years of Anti-Union Politics Will Do That

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This is an Embarrassment

The United States hasn’t had a President who was not hostile to Organized labor since at least the Ford administration, so it is no surprise that America has been ranked as having the worst worker’s rights environment among all the developed nations:

The U.S. has the worst record among major developed countries when it comes to workers’ rights, according to a survey of labor unions.

The world’s largest economy is ranked a 4 in a scale by the International Trade Union Congress, meaning there are “systematic violations of rights.” Every other Group of Seven country ranks 3 or better.

How about card check and repealing Taft-Hartley the next time the Democrats controll the White House, House of Representatives, and the Senate?

Slaughterhouses, AGAIN!

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Not good

In Germany there has been a major Covid-19 outbreak at an abattoir, (I love the word, “Abattoir.” I need to use it more often) with over a thousand cases linked to the meat processing plant.

This has taken the R-Number,  the infection rate of an epidemic, from about .75 to 2.88, meaning that infections are growing again, not shrinking: (Any number over 1 indicates an increase in the number of cases)

The owners of Europe’s largest meat-processing plant must be held to account for a mass coronavirus outbreak that has infected more than 1,500 of its workers, Germany’s labour minister has said.

Hubertus Heil said an entire region had been “taken hostage” by the factory’s failure to protect its employees, most of whom come from Romania and Bulgaria.

Germany’s coronavirus reproduction or R rate leapt to 2.88 over the weekend largely as a result of the outbreak at the plant at Gütersloh in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW). About 7,000 people have been sent into quarantine as a result of the outbreak, and schools and kindergartens in the region that had been gradually reopened have been forced to close until at least after the summer holidays.

Health authorities have accused Tönnies, the family-run business that owns the plant, of breaking regulations around physical distancing that were introduced to dampen the spread of coronavirus. Authorities say Tönnies has also been reluctant to give them access to workers’ contact details, allegedly hampering the tracking and tracing of the workers and their contacts. Tönnies said delays in handing over personnel data had been due to Germany’s strict data protection laws.

Clemens Tönnies, the company’s billionaire CEO, held a press briefing at the weekend at which he apologised for his company’s management of the crisis, and said it would take “full responsibility” for what had to be done to combat it. Within his own family there have also reportedly been attempts to oust him from his role. He has ruled out resigning.

Of course he has ruled out resigning.

This is exactly the same sort of apology as was given by Volkswagen executives.

Epic Ownage

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John Oliver Explains

It appears that K-Pop fans may have sabotaged the attendance predictions for the Trump rally in Tulsa:

President Trump’s campaign promised huge crowds at his rally in Tulsa, Okla., on Saturday, but it failed to deliver. Hundreds of teenage TikTok users and K-pop fans say they’re at least partially responsible.

Brad Parscale, the chairman of Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign, posted on Twitter on Monday that the campaign had fielded more than a million ticket requests, but reporters at the event noted the attendance was lower than expected. The campaign also canceled planned events outside the rally for an anticipated overflow crowd that did not materialize.

Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said protesters stopped supporters from entering the rally, held at the BOK Center, which has a 19,000-seat capacity.

But reporters present said there were few protests. According to a spokesman for the Tulsa Fire Department on Sunday, the fire marshal counted 6,200 scanned tickets of attendees. (That number would not include staff, media or those in box suites.)

Reports are that attendance after removing Trump’s entourage are included in the total so the real number was even lower.

TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music groups claimed to have registered potentially hundreds of thousands of tickets for Mr. Trump’s campaign rally as a prank. After the Trump campaign’s official account @TeamTrump posted a tweet asking supporters to register for free tickets using their phones on June 11, K-pop fan accounts began sharing the information with followers, encouraging them to register for the rally — and then not show. 

Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was impressed:

Actually you just got ROCKED by teens on TikTok who flooded the Trump campaign w/ fake ticket reservations & tricked you into believing a million people wanted your white supremacist open mic enough to pack an arena during COVID

Shout out to Zoomers. Y’all make me so proud. ☺️ https://t.co/jGrp5bSZ9T

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 21, 2020

Behold the power of K-Pop.

Supreme Court Calls Trump Administration a Blithering Idiot

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The Supreme Court has ruled against the Trump administration’s attempt to repeal DACA.

The ruling was not on constitutional grounds, it was essentially a statement that the way that they had repealed DACA was so incompetently done as to be invalid.

Oh, Lord, thank you for making the evil so inept:

It has been eight years since the Obama administration created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, which allows undocumented young adults who came to the United States as children to apply for protection from deportation. In 2017, the Trump administration announced that it would end the program, which it believed had been illegal in the first place. Today, by a vote of 5-4, the Supreme Court ruled that the administration acted improperly in terminating the program, and it sent the case back for the Department of Homeland Security to take another look. The ruling means that the DACA program will remain in place, at least for the foreseeable future.

………


The battle over DACA came to the Supreme Court in November 2018, when the Trump administration asked the justices to take up three different challenges, filed in California, the District of Columbia and New York, to the decision to end DACA. The challengers – which include states, cities, universities, DACA recipients, civil rights groups and even Microsoft – argued that the decision to rescind DACA violated the rights of DACA recipients and the Administrative Procedure Act, the federal law governing administrative agencies. In all three cases, the lower courts ruled for the challengers and ordered the government to keep DACA in place. At the end of June 2019, the Supreme Court announced that it would review the three cases.

………

Roberts then turned to the central question in the case: whether the Trump administration followed proper procedures in terminating DACA. Under the APA, Roberts stressed, courts should not substitute their own judgment for that of the agency. Instead, he explained, their job is to determine whether an agency made its decision “based on a consideration of the relevant factors and whether there has been a clear error of judgment.” In the majority’s view, the Trump administration had failed to meet even this relatively low bar.

“Even this relatively low bar.” 

Indeed.

Annointed by Chuck Schumer

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Deer, meet headlights

And flailing horribly in the primary.

Shumer’s “Great White Hopes” of the US Senate races this year are Amy McGrath in Kentucky and John Hickenlooper in Colorado, and things are not going well fore either of them.

Amy McGrath, who has a compelling life story but little in the way of policy, has had a terrible horrible no good very bad week.

The largest papers in the state endorsed her primary opponent Charles Booker, as has Alison Lundergan Grimes, who is part of the Democratic Party aristocracy in the state. (Useless, but all aristocracy is useless)

I’m thinking that her deer in the headlights performance when asked about police protests in the last debate which was lame beyond belief: (See vid)

Remember Amy McGrath? Maybe you do. In 2018, the Kentucky Democrat was briefly famous for a viral campaign ad and an ultimately doomed campaign to represent her state’s Sixth Congressional District. A moderate and a former Marine fighter pilot, McGrath is the apotheosis of a particular Democratic electoral strategy: to win in a conservative state, dispatch a veteran with lukewarm politics. That strategy didn’t put McGrath in the House in 2018. But two years later, Senate Democrats tried it again, pitting McGrath against a top prize: Mitch McConnell.

Now she might be lucky to win her primary race.

McGrath faces a robust challenge from Charles Booker, the youngest Black legislator in the Kentucky House of Representatives. Booker has run to her left, and while McGrath holds a major fundraising advantage, Booker is gaining significant momentum ahead of the primary on June 23. Two of the state’s largest newspapers have endorsed him, and on Tuesday, Booker earned another major supporter. Alison Lundergan Grimes, who challenged McConnell in 2014, endorsed him over McGrath.

Proud to endorse my friend @Booker4KY for U.S. Senate in the Kentucky Democratic Primary! Together, let’s elect a new generation of leadership in KY! #Booker4KY https://t.co/mv7TymBLIe pic.twitter.com/PsD43HrcEt

— Alison Lundergan Grimes (@AlisonForKY) June 16, 2020


The Grimes endorsement might be the clearest sign yet that McGrath is in real trouble. Booker already had the backing of a number of progressive politicians and groups, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, but Grimes is no leftist. She’s firmly part of the Kentucky Democratic Establishment, which makes her endorsement something of a surprise — and an unignorable vote of no confidence in McGrath. The retired Marine is backed by the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, but locals are less convinced.

Also, Booker progressive icon Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) just endorsed Booker as well.

Her life story failed to defeat a vulnerable Republican Representative in the last election, and she has added nothing to her toolbox.

And then there is John Hickenlooper in Colorado, whose campaign is turning into a horror show, even if you ignore the fact that he literally drank a glass of fracking fluid to demonstrate his support for the fossil fuel industry.

Now, in addition to his record, we have his his being fined for serious ethical violations as well as having made jokes about slavery, both of which are EXTREMELY problematic in the current moment:

Democrats’ best pickup opportunity in their battle for the majority in the U.S. Senate has suddenly been complicated by not one but two unforced errors from their star candidate in Colorado, former governor John Hickenlooper. But it’s not clear whether either or both are enough to turn the tide of the race in favor of Republicans. The two controversies:

  1. An independent ethics commission in Colorado said Hickenlooper violated state law on gifts when he was governor in 2018 by accepting rides on a private jet and, separately, in a Maserati limousine.
  2. He appeared to compare a job as a political scheduler to the slave trade, in 2014 comments that were unearthed Monday. His campaign immediately apologized for them. “Imagine an ancient slave ship,” he said, “with the guy with the whip, and you’re rowing. We elected officials are the ones that are rowing.”

………

The first controversy carries a more immediate impact for Hickenlooper. The commission, which was set up as part of an anti-graft law Colorado voters approved more than a decade ago, fined him almost $3,000 for the luxury rides as he was traveling as governor. The commission also held him in contempt for not showing up for the first day of video hearings even though he was subpoenaed.

………

Hickenlooper’s most immediate contest is a June 30 primary. He’s facing Andrew Romanoff, a former Colorado House speaker, who has his supporters but is not seen as a major threat to Hickenlooper. Romanoff is campaigning on Hickenlooper’s left in support of Medicare-for-all and the Green New Deal and has the support of some younger, liberal activists. (But no endorsement from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) or his liberal allies in Congress.)

That may still be the case, given how late Hickenlooper’s ethics violation is coming in the primary and how much Hickenlooper has been billed as the best candidate to beat Gardner among Democrats. Romanoff is trying to leverage Hickenlooper’s ethics troubles to reverse that narrative. “He represents a threat we cannot afford,” Romanoff told The Washington Post recently.

I am not sure how much Romanoff is a long shot. Romanoff won the Democratic Party endorsement at the state convention, though that does not count for much in the primary.

Still, this raises serious questions about Hickenlooper’s electability, which is really the only reason to vote for him, because, as I have noted before, he literally drank a glass of fracking fluid to demonstrate his support for the fossil fuel industry.

This Exceeds my Capacity for Mockery

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Movie intercuts are not a part of the newscast

Fox News was reporting on the Seattle Capitol Hill occupation, and unironically reported dialogue taken from Monty Python and the Holy Grail as evidence of growing tension within the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.”

Does the phrase, “We’re an Anarcho-Syndaclyst Commune,” sound familiar?

Seriously?

I am left staring at the screen like a cow that has just stepped on its own udder.

H/t Crooks and Liars.

Boeing Cannot Make Aircraft Anymore, Part XXXIV

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The delivery of one of the first two KC-46 tankers has been delayed after debris was found in the fuel tanks.

This is aircraft manufacture 101, and it happened on one of the first air frames that was supposed to been accepted by the Air Force.

Boeing really cannot make airplanes any more:

The delivery of a new KC-46 Pegasus tanker aircraft to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina has been delayed after foreign object debris was found inside the plane by Boeing inspectors.

The delayed aircraft was to have been one of the first two KC-46s delivered to Air Force Reserve Command at Seymour Johnson on June 12. But while the first was successfully delivered, debris was found in the fuel tank of the second during its pre-acceptance inspections.

In a statement provided to Air Force Times and Defense News on Monday, the Air Force said the debris came from “non-standard factory rework,” and not the kind of “production line quality escapes” that caused the Air Force to halt KC-46 deliveries in March 2019.

Those problems with foreign object debris, or FOD, led the Air Force to put a plan in place to correct the problem.

………

Just a month after Boeing began delivering the KC-46 to the Air Force in January 2019, the service found foreign object debris — tools or other materials used to build the aircraft — left behind in multiple KC-46s, creating a potential safety hazard. As a result, the Air Force stopped accepting new tankers over a weeks-long period in March and April 2019 as it investigated the issue.

I’m not sure that Boeing can be fixed without burning the whole rotten edifice down and rebuilding from the ashes.

Support Your Local Police

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In yet another example of how the Boyz in Blue are covering with glory, while protests were raging, a squad of officers, including supervisors, hung out in Representative Bobby Rush’s office drinking his coffee and popping his microwave popcorn.

One took a nap on the office couch.

The others just hung out, instead of  ……… you know ……… Doing Their F%$#ing Jobs.

Then again, considering that their job right now is basically basically brutalizing people for engaging in First Amendment protected behavior.

Still, their asses should be fired:

As protests across Chicago devolved into chaos last week and residents started to loot nearby stores, police officers were making popcorn and drinking coffee while “lounging” inside Congressman Bobby Rush’s office, officials said in a stunning news conference on Thursday.


This is F%$#ed Up & Sh%$

Speaking alongside Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Rush said at least 13 Chicago Police officers were loitering inside his South Side campaign office in the early hours of June 1 and were “relaxing” while nearby stores were being looted and burned, and their fellow officers were clashing with demonstrators.

“They even had the unmitigated gall to make coffee for themselves and to pop popcorn, my popcorn, in my microwave, while looters were tearing apart businesses within their sight and within their reach,” Rush (D-IL) said.

………

The incident, which Rush and Lightfoot said was captured on CCTV, showed the officers—and at least three supervisors—with feet up on desks. One officer “was asleep on my couch” while another “was on his cellphone,” Rush said.

“They were in a mode of relaxation and did not care about what was happening. They did not care. They absolutely did not care,” Rush added.

………

Lightfoot, at times visibly angry and tearful during the Thursday press conference, said the officers “demonstrated a total disregard for their colleagues [and] for the badge” and should be held accountable. She said she and her team were “enraged” when they learned of the incident. None of the 13 officers has been identified, and she urged them to come forward before investigators find them.

They’re not going to come forward, because ……… COPS.

That being said, when they get caught, I think that the statement from the Chicago police union defending them is going to HAVE to be one for the ages.

We Now Know Where Microsoft® Bob® Works

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Microsoft’s MSN network is attempting to replace human editors with artificial “Intelligence”.

Much fail ensues:

Microsoft’s decision to replace human journalists with robots has backfired, after the tech company’s artificial intelligence software illustrated a news story about racism with a photo of the wrong mixed-race member of the band Little Mix.

A week after the Guardian revealed plans to fire the human editors who run MSN.com and replace them with Microsoft’s artificial intelligence code, an early rollout of the software resulted in a story about the singer Jade Thirlwall’s personal reflections on racism being illustrated with a picture of her fellow band member Leigh-Anne Pinnock.

………

Microsoft does not carry out original reporting but employs human editors to select, edit and repurpose articles from news outlets, including the Guardian. Articles are then hosted on Microsoft’s website and the tech company shares advertising revenue with the original publishers. At the end of last month, Microsoft decided to fire hundreds of journalists in the middle of a pandemic and fully replace them with the artificial intelligence software.

………

In advance of the publication of this article, staff at MSN were told to expect a negative article in the Guardian about alleged racist bias in the artificial intelligence software that will soon take their jobs.

Because they are unable to stop the new robot editor selecting stories from external news sites such as the Guardian, the remaining human staff have been told to stay alert and delete a version of this article if the robot decides it is of interest and automatically publishes it on MSN.com. They have also been warned that even if they delete it, the robot editor may overrule them and attempt to publish it again.

Staff have already had to delete coverage criticising MSN for running the story about Little Mix with the wrong image after the AI software decided stories about the incident would interest MSN readers.

Epic fail.

I Think that We Have Identified the Problem

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In an article about cuts colleges are making in response to Covid-19, we have the case of Johns Hopkins cutting retirement contributions.

The details include a list of overpaid and underperforming executives at the University that goes a long way to explaining why higher education has become ridiculous expensive over the past few decades.

The management of the university is increasingly a part of MBA culture, which involves overspending on non-teaching executives, who have bullsh%$ jobs, and who in turn make the people who actually have productive work generate endless reports instead of actually doing their f%$#ing jobs:

My university, Johns Hopkins, recently announced a series of exceptional measures in the face of a coronavirus-related fiscal crisis. Suddenly anticipating losses of over $350 million in the next 15 months, the university imposed a hiring freeze, canceled all raises, and warned about impending furloughs and layoffs. Most extraordinarily of all, it suspended contributions to its employees’ retirement accounts. “Many of our peers are grappling with similar challenges,” wrote our president, Ronald Daniels.

That is true. The University of Michigan recently announced anticipated losses of at least $400 million this calendar year. George Washington University likewise anticipates losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Stanford University, meanwhile, predicted a $200 million reversal in its consolidated budget. But while many colleges face challenges, no major research university moved with as much haste or revealed as acute vulnerabilities as Johns Hopkins did.

How does a university with a $6-billion endowment and $10 billion in assets suddenly find itself in a solvency crisis? How is one of the country’s top research universities reduced, just a month after moving classes online, to freezing its employees’ retirement accounts?

………

For years, the AAUP and other faculty critics have wrung their hands as norms of shared and deliberative governance disappeared, replaced by the consolidation of administrative power in the hands of corporate executives. With little appreciation for transparency or inclusiveness, and little understanding of the academy’s mission, these managers increasingly make decisions behind closed doors and execute them from above.

………

Consider the process that led to Johns Hopkins’s decision to freeze employee retirement contributions, which came as a surprise to nearly everyone affected. In his announcement, the president explained that the decision had been taken after consultation “with our trustees, deans and cabinet officers, and a subcommittee of the Faculty Budget Advisory Committee.” There was no mention of consulting employee unions, staff associations, or other institutions of faculty governance. There was no mention of possible alternatives, or of careful, deliberative assessments about who should bear the financial sacrifices. Certainly, there were no meaningful faculty votes. (The faculty budget committee is composed of a small number of members hand-picked by administrators, and lacks formal authority.)

………

This administrative centralization has come at a serious cost to the university’s sense of community. In the last few years, decisions taken by the upper administration have generated a series of controversies over policing, the power to grant tenure, and government contracts, to name a few. Last spring, students frustrated with the university’s governance occupied the university’s central administration building.

………

The president’s cabinet is a curious body — one that has proliferated throughout higher education, as the values of corporate America infiltrate university administrations. One would hardly think, based on the cabinet’s makeup, that it comprises the senior leadership team for an eminent research university. It looks much more like the C-suite at a public corporation, with two senior vice presidents, 12 vice presidents, an acting vice president, a vice provost, a secretary, and three senior advisers. Of the vice presidents, it seems that only the provost has significant classroom and research experience. Good as he is, he can hardly provide a counterweight to the rest of the cabinet members, who mostly have government, business, finance, or law backgrounds. Collectively, the number of J.D.s and M.B.A.s far exceeds the number of Ph.D.s.

(emphasis mine)
Gee, if you assume that each of these people, excluding the secretary, gets AT LEAST $½ million a year, you are looking at $9million a year in remuneration.

Maybe this is why college is so expensive these days, particularly when you consider that each of the these folks probably have (at least) 3-4 Evil Minions™ in their offices who also have to be paid, so we’re talking serious bucks, and not a penny of it goes to actually educating the students.

As with most universities, the president reports to a Board of Trustees. But this body, like many across the country, has become a funhouse mirror of corporate America. At Johns Hopkins, 36 members sit on the board, almost all hailing from outside academia.

Johns Hopkins executives are paid much like their counterparts in the corporate world. According to the latest available public information, from 2018, the university’s president earned $1.6 million in salary plus $1.1 million in deferred and other compensation for a total of $2.7 million. That tidy sum doesn’t include the money he receives for serving on other boards, including the $310,000 he received that year from T. Rowe Price — whose chief executive happens to serve on the Johns Hopkins Board of Trustees.

But the president is hardly alone. That same year, the university’s senior vice president for finance earned $1.2 million, its vice president for development made over $1 million, the vice president for investments made over $950,000. Even the president’s chief of staff earned over $670,000. Although he earns a salary high in the six figures, the provost, ostensibly in charge of the university’s academic mission, did not rank even in the top 10 earners at the university.

Like I said, not chump change, and an interlocking series of boards of directors/trustees so that it’s all one big game of, “You scratch my back, and I scratch yours.”

It’s self dealing and corruption:

All told, the compensation of the 28 key employees reported to the IRS in 2018 amounted to over $29 million. That sum alone exceeds by nearly 50 percent the costs of the pay raises the university would have granted this year to all of its employees.

And note that this does not including the direct reports to those “Key Employees”.

Like said, not chump change.


Then there is the issue of deferred compensation for top executives. According to the university’s latest audit, total liabilities related to deferred compensation amounted to over $130 million — or $30 million more than the institution will save by suspending contributions to its thousands of employee retirement accounts this year.

………

Alas, we now learn that Johns Hopkins’s managers failed to position the institution to weather unanticipated disruptions in its revenue streams.

And if there is ANY sort of expertise that MBA types should bring to their management positions, it’s basic finance and accounting.

I guess that makes me naive.

………

If a president and his leadership team have one principal responsibility, it is to ensure that the university is on sound enough financial footing to weather unanticipated crises. Ours have not.

By the way, not everyone was unprepared. Dozens of scholars right here at Johns Hopkins have spent years studying and preparing for events like the ones we are now experiencing. So good are these people at their jobs, millions of people today turn to them for data and guidance about how to navigate the pandemic. The Johns Hopkins Hospital has had an Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response for nearly 20 years.

………

The university set virtually nothing aside in anticipation of these or any other risks. Instead, the leadership began recklessly expensive building projects, including the purchase of a $372.5-million building in Washington, D.C., — a white elephant that had already brought a large foundation to the brink of collapse.

And I f%$#ing guarantee you that someone in the university president’s cabinet or the board of trustees personally benefited from both of these decisions.

Perhaps that is to be expected: university leaders, like their corporate counterparts, are rewarded for their splashy acquisitions and grandiose construction projects, not for cautious stewardship. In this short-term thinking, university executives resemble the airline executives who spent years buying back their own company’s stock only to find they had no cash on hand when a crisis arrived. People are told to set aside money to cover six months of expenses in case of emergency. It took just one month for Johns Hopkins to launch its dramatic cuts.

What about that $6-billion endowment? “Unfortunately, we cannot rely on our endowment or philanthropic support to fill the breach,” Daniels wrote in his announcement. Much of it is held in illiquid investments. But exceptional times call for exceptional actions. Is it really better to fund current deficits with employee retirement accounts than to damage the university’s credit rating with further borrowing? Do those in a position of power even bother asking what the purpose of an endowment is? Shouldn’t it serve as a bulwark of financial stability? Or did that idea disappear with the gradual accumulation of financiers on university boards and in senior management?

I would note that even if these investments are unbelievably illiquid, they could still be used as collateral for a loan to make sure that there was sufficient cash on hand, and since interest rates are so low that many businesses are moving from shorter term loans to longer term loans to lock in those rates, it would also make sense from a finance or accounting perspective.

They are f%$#ing their workers instead because they think that real managers screw their employees, as opposed to doing their damn jobs.

Today, university endowments all too often function like giant casinos, putting more than 75 percent of their capital in risky and illiquid assets. Some wealthy universities pay far more in fees to investment managers than they do in scholarships to students. We’ve entered a world where, instead of having an endowment to support a university, the university serves as a tax shelter for the endowment.

Johns Hopkins does not publicly reveal its investments. Available IRS filings do, however, show that over nine years it paid more than $88 million in fees to an investment firm whose founder formerly served as chair of the university’s board. Quite possibly, our endowment pays out more to its investment managers than our university contibutes, annually, to employee retirement accounts. Was there ever much doubt which would be cut in a crisis?

Again, self-dealing and corruption.

The problem is not, as the writer suggests, a narrow set of decision makers who don’t understand the mission of a university.

The problem is control fraud.  These executives are acting in their own personal interest, and not that of the organization, and it’s not only tolerated, but considered normative behavior.

H/T Atrios.

And the Billionaire Sociopath Not Named Zuckerberg or Bezos Strikes Again

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It turns out that the least safe automotive factory in America, Tesla, is once again putting its employees at risk, this time by ignoring Covid-19 precautions.

This is not a surprise.  Elon Musk is a sociopath.

SF Weekly, the Bay Area’s muckraking newspaper, today published an exposé about poor health and work conditions at Tesla’s Fremont plant. One Tesla factory worker said, “This is a life and death situation.” Another worker, who refused to return to work, said, “It’s a modern-day sweatshop.” Unfortunately, we’ve heard similarly harsh words from Tesla non-unionized employees, who helped build the company into a major success.

Carlos Gabriel, the worker who refused to return because social distancing is not being observed, said:

There’s really no room, and this is a factory with recycled air. You’re basically just breathing on each other.

………

In March, another employee who also wanted to remain anonymous informed Electrek about conditions at the plant when it was formally shut down.

I arrived at work this morning. We are still running full production. Does not look like they cut down on the workforce. They give us a mask and take our temperature when we walk in. They are not practicing safe social distance.

………

Tesla continues to call more employees back to work. Nonetheless, the company warns that employees who don’t come back to work might lose unemployment benefits.

A set of site-specific pandemic safety guidelines were created on May 12 via meetings between Alameda county and Tesla officials. The guidelines called for changes to the breakroom, temperature screenings, and having employees dispersed throughout the plant.

………

However, SF Weekly reports that workers say the measures outlined in the HR memo and Return to Work playbook are “not being implemented consistently on the Fremont factory floor, where plant management is still fumbling to establish safety guidelines on the fly.”

………

However, SF Weekly reports that workers say the measures outlined in the HR memo and Return to Work playbook are “not being implemented consistently on the Fremont factory floor, where plant management is still fumbling to establish safety guidelines on the fly.”

Go Sweden!

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Sweden’s handling of the Coronavirus is so bad that its neighbors are considering strengthening a cordon sanitaire around the Nordic nation:

Denmark, Finland and Norway are debating whether to maintain travel restrictions on Sweden but ease them for other countries as they nervously eye their Nordic neighbour’s higher coronavirus death toll.

 Sweden has the highest mortality rate per capita at this stage of the epidemic, according to a Financial Times tracker that uses a seven-day rolling average of new deaths. It has overtaken the UK, Italy and Belgium in recent days.

 Frode Forland, specialist director in infectious diseases at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, told the Financial Times keeping borders closed had “a certain infectious-disease logic” while a big difference in infection rates remained between countries. “The situation is quite different now between Norway and Sweden,” he said.

 ………

 “Norway, Denmark and Iceland have managed to stabilise their situation, but in Sweden the situation is more alarming,” she said last week.

The Swedes are now doing worse than the UK.

Your actions make Boris Johnson look smart by comparison.

What the f%$# is wrong with you?

Tweet of the Day

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I'll just remind you that the same tech community that hasn't been able to solve simple computer virus issues for the last 35 years, or create secure systems, or usable crypto, or even keep their shit running consistently isn't likely to swoop in and fix an actual virus.

— Quinn Norton (@quinnnorton) May 19, 2020

It does seem to me that people who make money by breaking the law (Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Lime, Bird, PayPal), overselling AI (Tesla, Uber, Lyft, Waymo), spying on people and claiming that they don’t (Google, Facebook), or actually engage in fraud about their medical technology (Theranos), are not well equipped to save us from a pandemic.

What a Sh%$ Show

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The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) was a failure, largely because it hot swappable mission module system created an underarmored and under performing frigate, though they were rather speedy.

Well, now the Navy is trying to replace their latest failure with the FFG(X), which would replace the long serving Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate.

The problem is that, because of the inevitable mission creep, the cost and weight are completely out of line with a frigate.

They will be replacing the 4100 ton displacement Perry frigate with a 7400 ton ship, which continuing to procure the 9,700 ton Arleigh Burke class, only it’s supposed to be half the price.

Ships, much like hamburger, and purchased by the pound, so the navy’s promise of a relatively inexpensive ship was always a fools errand, but even so the original estimate of $940 million, which is a ripoff to begin with, since the FREMM from which it is derived costs about €600M ($650M), but it now appears that it will cost about $1.4B a ship.

This is insane and unsustainable:

The Navy truncated orders for its ill-fated Littoral Combat Ship because the small vessels were vulnerable to attack and too lightly armed. Now, a new report suggests that the frigate intended to replace it may cost 56% more than projected partly because it’s bigger.

The service projects that 18 of 20 new frigates will cost an average of $940 million each in inflation-adjusted dollars. The first two are estimated at about $1 billion each because of one-time costs.
relates to Big Navy Frigate Risks Oversized $1.4 Billion Cost Per Ship

But the Congressional Research Service alerted lawmakers this week to “a potential issue” worth reviewing: the accuracy of Navy cost estimates considering that “ships of the same general type and complexity that are built under similar production conditions” tend to have similar — and substantially higher — costs per ton of displacement.

CRS raised a warning because, at 7,400 tons, the frigate to be built in Wisconsin by a unit of Italy’s Fincantieri SpA is about three-fourths the size of an Arleigh Burke destroyer and carries many of the same weapons systems. The latest of the destroyers are estimated to cost $1.9 billion apiece.

That could put the cost for most of the frigates at as much as $1.47 billion each, “an increase of about 56%,” based on comparing their tonnage to the destroyers’, the research service said.

CRS suggested lawmakers ask the Navy the basis for “its view that the frigate — a ship about three-quarters as large” as the destroyer, with installed capabilities that are “in many cases” similar — “can be procured for about one-half the cost.”

It can’t, and it’s over priced, and they are demanding too much from the platform, and they making the ship even larger than the model from which it is derived, (The FREMM is about 6,400 tons) so it’s likely to end up costing more than the Burkes.

Cancel this now, and procure a frigate, and not a destroyer with a slightly smaller gun.

Good Riddance

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Seriously, having Google running your life sounds even worse than George Orwell’s worst nightmares:

When Google sibling Sidewalk Labs announced in 2017 a $50 million investment into a project to redevelop a portion of Toronto’s waterfront, it seemed almost too good to be true. Someday soon, Sidewalk Labs promised, Torontonians would live and work in a 12-acre former industrial site in skyscrapers made from timber—a cheaper and more sustainable building material. Streets paved with a new sort of light-up paver would let the development change its design in seconds, able to play host to families on foot and to self-driving cars. Trash would travel through underground chutes. Sidewalks would heat themselves. Forty percent of the thousands of planned apartments would be set aside for low- and middle-income families. And the Google sister company founded to digitize and techify urban planning would collect data on all of it, in a quest to perfect city living.

………

But Sidewalk Labs’ vision was in trouble long before the pandemic. Since its inception, the project had been criticized by progressive activists concerned about how the Alphabet company would collect and protect data, and who would own that data. Conservative Ontario premier Doug Ford, meanwhile, wondered whether taxpayers would get enough bang from the project’s bucks. New York-based Sidewalk Labs wrestled with its local partner, the waterfront redevelopment agency, over ownership of the project’s intellectual property and, most critically, its financing. At times, its operators seemed confounded by the vagaries of Toronto politics. The project had missed deadline after deadline.

The partnership took a bigger hit last summer, when Sidewalk Labs released a splashy and even more ambitious 1,524-page master plan for the lot that went well beyond what the government had anticipated, and for which the company pledged to spend up to $1.3 billion to complete. The redevelopment group wondered whether some of Sidewalk Labs’ proposals related to data collection and governance were even “in compliance with applicable laws.” It balked at a suggestion that the government commit millions to extend public transit into the area, a commitment, the group reminded the company, that it could not make on its own.

Seriously, giving your city to a profit driven ghoulish mega-corporation seems to be hihg on the list of really stupid ideas.

Good that it is over.

More Mistake Jet Follies

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It appears that the Pentagon’s solution to problems with the F-35 is to declare that it’s not really a problem, or at least not a serious problem.

Cases in point, the F-35 will literally melt the back of the plane if it spends more than about a minute at supersonic speed, and the response is to remove this as a requirement:

An issue that risks damage to the F-35’s tail section if the aircraft needs to maintain supersonic speeds is not worth fixing and will instead be addressed by changing the operating parameters, the F-35 Joint Program Office told Defense News in a statement Friday.

The deficiency, first reported by Defense News in 2019, means that at extremely high altitudes, the U.S. Navy’s and Marine Corps’ versions of the F-35 jet can only fly at supersonic speeds for short bursts of time before there is a risk of structural damage and loss of stealth capability.

The problem may make it impossible for the Navy’s F-35C to conduct supersonic intercepts.

“This issue was closed on December 17, 2019 with no further actions and concurrence from the U.S. services,” the F-35 JPO statement read. “The [deficiency report] was closed under the category of ‘no plan to correct,’ which is used by the F-35 team when the operator value provided by a complete fix does not justify the estimated cost of that fix.

This is what happens when you have a deeply corrupt and completely dysfunctional acquisition process.

But wait, there’s more:

The F-35 Joint Program Office has put in place stopgap fixes for five key technical flaws plaguing America’s top-end fighter jet, but the problems have not been completely eliminated.

Last June, Defense News reported exclusive details about 13 major technical issues, known as category 1 deficiencies, impacting the F-35. The JPO has since quietly downgraded five of those issues to the lesser category 2.

A category 1 deficiency is defined as a shortfall that could cause death, severe injury or illness; could cause loss or damage to the aircraft or its equipment; critically restricts the operator’s ability to be ready for combat; prevents the jet from performing well enough to accomplish primary or secondary missions; results in a work stoppage at the production line; or blocks mission-critical test points.

In comparison, a category 2 deficiency is of lesser concern — something that requires monitoring, but not something that should impact operations.

But downgrading the category doesn’t mean the problems are solved, said Dan Grazier, who tracks military issues for the Project on Government Oversight.

………

The ALIS sovereign data transfer solution does not meet information assurance requirements.

………

Incorrect inventory data for complex assemblies continues to result in grounding conditions.

………

The F-35B and F-35C experienced incongruous lateral and longitudinal control response above a 20-degree angle of attack.

One of the most eye-opening issues identified in the initial report was that the F-35B and F-35C models used by the Marine Corps and Navy become difficult to control when operating above a 20-degree angle of attack — which would be seen in the extreme maneuvers a pilot might use in a dogfight or while avoiding a missile.

Pilots reported the aircraft experiencing unpredictable changes in pitch, as well as erratic yaw and rolling motions when coming in at that angle of attack

………

There were unanticipated thrust limits in jetborne flight on hot days.

That last one could cause the lost of an aircraft executing a vertical landing.

You can get a good summary from POGO, but the bottom line is that the aircraft is not combat ready.

I Can’t Even

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I don’t know why centrist Democrats hate progressives more than they hate Donald Trump, but it is clear that they are willing to destroy themselves to troll progressives.

Case in point is the public admission that the Biden campaign is consulting with Larry Summers on the economy.

It appears that the whole “Own the Libs” shtick is something that is shared by both Republicans and centrists.

Why else hire a glib, obnoxious, incompetent, (Obama stimulus, repealing Glass Steagall) and corrupt (Andrei Shleifer) lightning rod.

It’s pretty clear that the self-declared “Adults in the room” simply aren’t:

Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers is advising Joe Biden’s presidential campaign on economic policy, including its plans to revive the U.S. economy after the coronavirus pandemic, according to five people familiar with his involvement.

The Obama and Clinton administration veteran’s role will likely roil progressives who view his past work on the 2009 recovery as too favorable to big banks. That’s awkward for the Biden campaign at a time when it is trying to win the trust of former supporters of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
Summers was the first name on the “Biden do not reappoint list” published last month by the American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner, who wrote that Summers in 2009 “not only lowballed the necessary economic stimulus and ended it prematurely, but he successfully fought for rescuing the biggest banks rather than taking them into temporary receivership.”

………

Opposition from the left kept Summers from being nominated for Federal Reserve Chairman by President Barack Obama in September 2013, when a handful of Senate Democrats, including Warren, Sherrod Brown, Jon Tester and Jeff Merkley, complained to the White House that he was too lax on financial regulation. Summers withdrew his name from consideration after weeks of debate within the White House about a possibly difficult confirmation fight.

I would note that Jon Tester is one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate, as well as being from one of the most conservative states to have a Democratic Senator.

This is a stupid and self-destructive, but hell, stupid and self-destructive seems to be what passes for  Democratic Party branding, I guess.

The Washington Generals of ……… Well ……… Washington

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I swear, the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) plays to lose.

In the most recent abomination, Democrats have completely folded to Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump in the latest pandemic stimulus package, where (I sh%$ you not) the Democrats are claiming victory because they got additional funding for testing.

NO ONE OPPOSES ADDITIONAL RESOURCES FOR TESTING.

Calling this a victory, or even a meaningful negotiation is delusional:

Progressive groups are outraged with the nearly $500 billion interim coronavirus rescue package the Senate passed on Tuesday, urging House Democrats to oppose the “pathetic” deal they say doesn’t come close to providing the relief vulnerable people need while giving away all Democratic leverage for future legislation.

The “Phase 3.5” bill, which is expected to sail through the House this week, left out almost everything Democratic leaders were advocating for. There’s no additional funding for state and local governments, no expanded food stamp benefits, no hazard pay for front-line workers, nor money for the U.S. Postal Service, which had all been basic Democratic priorities. The lack of progressive opposition in Congress has been

The Democrats control the house, and over the past 15 months, they have spent their time doing nothing but passing feel-good that will never get a vote in the Senate.

This is a recipe guaranteed to depress voter enthusiasm and voter turnout for the Democratic Party.

especially noteworthy, after members of the progressive caucus promised to help make future legislation more comprehensive following the hastily passed Phase 3 bill.