If 1024 fair coins are each tossed 10 times, chances are good (> 63%) that at least one will come up heads 10 times in a row; and that coin will be proud to explain how its skill, faith, guts & determination made its achievement possible, and how that combo can work for you too.— Marian Farah (@bayesiangirl) January 8, 2020
Far too many people are born on 3rd base, and think that they have won a triple.
Winning the birth lottery does not make you a better person.
There are a lot of replies to this tweet that take the form of ‘good for her she’s educated and earned it.’ Those come from Democrats who should be kicked out of the party and replaced with the working class voters they hate. https://t.co/yJJ2VojCby
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) January 7, 2020
The fact that the elites are so invested in self-dealing, nepotism, and corruption is a very real problem.
Trump is the symptom of this problem, not the cause.
It’s often wrong to think conservatives are full of shit. They’re just not using words and phrases to mean things that they normally mean. It’s not true that they are big hypocrites or lying about “religious freedom,” it’s that to them, “religious freedom” means the freedom of members of their dominant preferred religion to enact theocracy and oppress everybody else. That is simply what it means to them.
This is a very important observation: When the Talibaptist talk, they are using language in a very different way from the mainstream.
Understand that they are not talking to you, they are talking to each other, so when they are refer to, “Compassionate Conservatism, ” they are referring to Marvin Olasky thesis that you have to force people into starvation to really help them, and when they talk about, “Religious Freedom”, they are talking about killing gay people, resegregating society, and establishing a real version of The Handmaid’s Tale on earth.
It turned out that they were dealing with a community that was hard to reach and dubious of journalists, but instead of throwing up their hands in despair, their team rolled up their sleeves, went to work, and listened to potential sources.
This is an anathema to journalists who dream of meeting “Deep Throat” in a parking garage, or who want make stories out of trial balloons from politicians, but they got their story, and the abuse stopped:
In August, we spent an evening hand-addressing more than 200 letters, mostly to residents of Memphis, Tennessee. The city is the second-poorest large metropolitan area in the country, with nearly 1 in 4 residents living below the poverty line. About half of the letter recipients had been sued by a private-equity backed doctors group because of unpaid medical bills. The other half had been sued by a separate company.
Our team, led by reporter Wendi C. Thomas of MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, was investigating the way large institutions profit off people who are poor in Memphis. She had already reported that Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare, the area’s largest hospital system, had aggressively sued poor people — and the hospital quickly suspended the practice.
Several other companies also were filing lawsuits against people unable to pay their bills. Court records showed us who these people were, but we didn’t know what these debts meant for their lives. We knew letter-writing alone wouldn’t be enough to connect with people, but it was a start.
After we put our letters in the mail, we continued to try to reach people who had been sued by posting flyers in neighborhoods, making dozens of calls (and getting hung up on plenty of times) and speaking to community leaders.
We understood, through research, that many journalists have historically covered these communities in extractive and self-serving ways, partly because of resource constraints and partly because many aren’t from the communities they cover. Our partners launched MLK50 to break patterns like these. We hoped deliberate engagement would result in real change for the people we reached.
It worked. Even before our story on the doctors group was published with MLK50, the company said it, too, would stop suing its patients.
………
Lessons
Read the whole thing.
It’s not just a demonstration of good journalism, it’s an indictment of how much of journalism is practiced today.
The Tories have won big in today’s election, having picked up about 60 seats and an absolute majority.
The SNP won big as well, gaining 12 seats, and how holding almost all the constituencies in Scotland
Labour lost about 40 seats, and the Lib-Dems lost about half of their seats (down to 8), including that of their party leader.
The singular issue for this election was Brexit, Labour tried to thread the needle on Brexit, calling for a second referendum, which was clearly a losing proposition, and the Liberal-Democrats were explicitly campaigning on not leaving the EU.
Both of these were clearly unwise politically.
Corbyn did not immediately resign, but he did announce that he would not be party leader for the next election, which provides a chance for a more orderly transition over the next few weeks.
The next few years in the OK are going to be a complete sh%$ show with the that blonde weasel Boris Johnson as PM:
Jeremy Corbyn has said he will remain in place as Labour leader while his party undertakes a “period of reflection” after suffering catastrophic election losses in its traditional heartlands.
Speaking at his own count in Islington North, Corbyn insisted Labour’s policies had proven popular with the electorate, and attacked the media’s portrayal of him and his party.
“I will not lead the party in any future general election campaign. I will discuss with our party to ensure there is a process now of reflection on this result and on the policies that the party will take going forward. And I will lead the party during that period to ensure that discussion takes place and we move on into the future,” he said.
I do hope that the party does not rush pell-mell back to Blairism, because BoJo will almost certainly try to destroy what remains of the modern British welfare state, including, despite his protestation, the National Health Service. (NHS)
From AJ Liebling’s mouth to Jeremy Corbyn’s ear:
We believe in a free press.
I just wish they would free themselves from the shackles of their billionaire owners.
— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) December 11, 2019
Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and most of the House Progressive Caucus are trying to replace Nancy Pelosi’s phony baloney prescription drug price bill with something useful.
There is no downside to this effort, except that Nancy Pelosi might lose some street cred with her lobbyist buddies.
Mitch McConnell won’t allow a vote on any version of this bill in the Senate:
Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have taken the side of the Congressional Progressive Caucus against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a dramatic fight over the details of a drug pricing bill that has been a source of intra-caucus sparring all year.
Pelosi is hoping to move quickly to a floor vote to satisfy a major 2018 campaign pledge that Democrats would work to lower drug prices. Progressives, led by Representatives Pramila Jayapal and Mark Pocan, who are advocating for changes to the legislation, are pushing back, arguing the bill is far too modest and would do little if enacted—which, given the makeup of the Senate, it won’t be.
………
The Warren-Sanders effort has already gained one new ally: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), whose spokesperson Corbin Trent ripped the bill put together by Pelosi and her staff. “They stripped out everything that looked like progress,” Corbin said.
The bill, HR 3, the Elijah E. Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act, will not become law, whether Pelosi’s version passes or whether the stronger elements preferred by the Progressive Caucus are included. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will bury it with the other 400-odd pieces of legislation in his graveyard. But the importance of this House Democratic squabble goes well beyond a single bill. It will indicate whether the 98-member Progressive Caucus, which grew in size this year, is willing and able to fight for policies it believes in. How hard progressives push back against Pelosi will determine whether she will continue to ignore progressives as she pursues her policy framework, or whether she’ll have to respect and include them.
………
The Rules Committee is expected to vote on the bill Tuesday afternoon, which would then allow it to move to the House floor for a vote. The Progressive Caucus has been surveying members the past several days, encouraging them to vote against the rule for the bill, which would block it from coming to the floor and send it back to the legislative drawing board. A source involved with the whip operation said that so far “the count is excellent,” expressing confidence that enough members of the caucus would stick together. (Before the House votes on a bill, it first votes to approve or reject the “rule” under which it would be considered. Taking down the rule is a way to block the underlying bill from a vote.)
………
The relative weakness of the bill coming to the House floor makes a mockery of the health care debate unfolding on the presidential campaign trail. While 2020 Democratic hopefuls debate a sweeping, comprehensive reform of the healthcare system, Democrats in the House are having trouble giving authority to the government to negotiate lower prices for more than a mere 25 drugs. The gap between the two debates could hardly be greater, even though Democrats in the House have a free hand policy-wise: After all, the bill has little chance of passing the Senate and becoming law, so it’s largely a messaging exercise.
………
AS THE PROSPECT documented last Friday, Pelosi and her staff, led by top health policy aide Wendell Primus, have frozen out progressives from deliberations over the Lower Drug Costs Now Act, exercising extreme control over the process. They bypassed legislation written by Representative Lloyd Doggett (D-TX), which, thanks to progressive organizing, had the support of a majority of the caucus. Instead, Pelosi and Primus sought to find a compromise with the Trump White House, only to see Trump savage the bill on Twitter, indicating that it didn’t have his support. Despite that reversal, all the provisions weakened or watered down to gain Trump’s support remain in the bill, leaving open large gaps in who will benefit from the effects.
………
In addition, the uninsured will not see any benefits from the price negotiations, and will be forced to pay whatever price drug companies can command. Nicole Smith-Holt, the mother of a diabetic who died because he had to go off her insurance at age 26 and could no longer afford insulin, explained to the Prospect last week that “People like my son Alec wouldn’t have benefited. It wouldn’t have saved his life. And a lot of other lives would be at risk too.”
………
After being shut out of a high-priority legislative action—drug prices were one of the top issues in the 2018 midterms—and having the improvements they did get in whittled down to nothing, the Progressive Caucus, co-chaired by Jayapal and Representative Mark Pocan (D-WI), decided to rebel. On Friday afternoon, they began whipping Progressive Caucus member offices on whether they would be willing to vote against the rule for the Lower Drug Costs Now Act.
A Democratic source confirmed that “a substantial number of progressives” would vote against the rule if certain priorities—restoring the Jayapal amendment, increasing the minimum drugs negotiated, striking the non-interference clause, and making sure the uninsured benefit—were not included in the final text.
Pelosi’s team seemed unmoved by this threat, with an aide telling The Hill, “Representatives Pocan and Jayapal are gravely misreading the situation if they try to stand in the way of the overwhelming hunger for HR3 within the House Democratic Caucus and among progressive Members … The Lower Drug Costs Now Act will pass next week.”
………
Pelosi appears to be banking on progressives’ past failures to follow through on their threats and defy leadership. But with Sanders and Warren siding with Jayapal and the CPC over the weekend, the progressive caucus may finally have the impetus to block the bill in its current form. The senators’ statements also mean that Pelosi now must contend not only with the left-wing elements of her caucus, but the two presidential candidates commanding a substantial chunk of the primary electorate. On the other hand, passing a messaging bill on drug pricing is a high priority for Democrats up for reelection in tight races, no matter the details, and progressive will be under intense pressure to go along on their behalf.
Once again, we see that Nancy Pelosi sees Republicans as the opposition, and progressives as the enemy.
Until and unless Pelosi gets handed a loss, she will continue to ignore progressive priorities, because, to quote XTC, “People will always be tempted to wipe their feet, On anything with ‘welcome’ written on it.”
John Maynard Keynes wrote about the dangers of destructive speculative capital flows, and now even the IMF is beginning to warm to capital controls:
Advanced economies have delivered a decade of woeful economic growth since the global financial crisis. The last thing the world needs is for emerging economies to be dragged down, too.
Such thinking is taking hold in some parts of Washington, where the IMF is rethinking the once rigidly “neoliberal” advice — stressing open markets and free-floating currencies — that it doles out to economies great and small.
David Lipton, first deputy managing director of the IMF, says one of its primary concerns is that low inflation in the developed world may, through capital flows, be “spreading in an undesirable way to emerging countries and causing them to stagnate”.
“Many of these countries are concerned about how spillovers from advanced world policies cause them to lose some degree of control over their domestic economies.” He questioned whether policies such as currency intervention could be used to “offset this transmission mechanism”.
………
Developing countries run the risk of becoming overindebted as a result of capital inflows reducing borrowing costs. For some such countries, she said, the IMF’s preliminary modelling suggested “capital controls are the appropriate instrument to tackle this overborrowing problem, and they should be imposed as prudential policy in normal times before debt limit shocks strike”.The use of the phrase “in normal times” suggests that, for some countries at least, the IMF is moving towards endorsing capital controls on a semi-permanent basis, not just in an emergency.
………One EM economist at a leading bank, who backs the rethink but asked for anonymity given the sensitivity around the subject, said that for decades the IMF “has been guilty of capital account fundamentalism”.
It only took them 74 years for them to get a clue about this sh%$.
One wonders just how many people died before they got a smidgen of a clue.
House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) has said that he wants the clear evidence of obstruction of justice in the Mueller report included in the impeachment charges:
The third most senior House Democrat wants a vote on articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump — and the charges against him to include obstruction of justice related to the findings of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
That controversial strategic position, laid out by House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., in a brief interview with McClatchy on Tuesday evening, is the strongest and most decisive statement yet by a member of the House Democratic leadership team.
It also comes amid a hushed internal debate over how best to proceed.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s top lieutenants have, until this point, been circumspect about their intentions, even as the party’s impeachment inquiry heads into its final stages. And many members of the House Democratic Caucus have been operating on an assumption the California Democrat could deny efforts to incorporate the Mueller report into impeachment articles.
………
Clyburn’s comments were also significant in that they signaled an interest in expanding the scope of potential impeachment articles beyond the investigation into whether Trump worked to withhold assistance from Ukraine unless the foreign government agreed to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a potential 2020 rival.
“Obstruction of justice, I think, is too clear not to include” in impeachment articles, Clyburn said.
The so-called “pragmatic” democrats, Pelosi and her Evil Minions™, want the impeachment to be narrowly focused on Trump’s behavior with regard to the Ukraine.
This is wrong and stupid.
First, it is clear that there will only be one chance to pass articles of impeachment, and second, by confining the impeachment investigation to Trumps attempts to capitalize on Hunter Biden’s sleazy, though legal, behavior, it reduces the legitimacy of the charges.
— Alan Bax Murderer (@AlanBaxter) September 9, 2019
This may be the truest Venn diagram ever written.
I’ve been thinking about the white cop (not mentioning her name) who murdered Botham Jean, and was (remarkably) convicted for her act, and specifically the behavior of her brother, Brandt Jean, and the judge presiding over the trial(!), after the sentence was announced.
Specifically they both gave hugs to the murderer cop in the spirit of forgiveness.
My take on this is profoundly different from that most of the (white and smugly) media about this, and not because of the “Magic Negro”* aspect of the whole storage. (Both Mr. Jean and the judge are African American)
It’s not that I do not find this criticism unpersuasive, I find it very persuasive, but as someone who can pass as white without trying, I am so completely removed from the black experience to say anything meaningful.
On the other hand I am a Jew, and from a Jewish perspective, or at least MY perspective, (though not just me) I have found the behavior, particularly from the judge, disturbing, and with Yom Kippur coming up, I felt I need to talk about repentance, (teshuva) and forgiveness.
Forgiveness without teshuva is wrong in normative Judaism, and teshuva in Judaism is not the profoundly different from mere regret, or even guilt. Teshuva is about correcting the wrongs that you have done, and correcting yourself so that the wrongs are not repeated, and the harms are remediated as much as possible.
The murderer cop has done none of this, and forgiveness without teshuvah is more than meaningless, it is harmful.
To quote Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5; Yerushalmi Talmud 4:9, Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 37a, “Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.”
The cop didn’t just kill Botham Jean, and hurt his brother, and his mother, and his other loved ones, it is as if she destroyed the whole world.
This sort of throw away forgiveness minimizes the whole concept of repentance and the whole concept of forgiveness.
It makes the world a worse place, and it is completely wrong.
*Specifically, it appears that whenever a white person is finally held to account for brutality against a person of color, there the an expectation that some sort heart-warming expression of forgiveness must be made by the victim, or the victim’s family in order to assuage any potential feelings of guilt from white narcissists.
They have allied themselves with the Koch Brother(s) to go on a jihad against mass transit.
In fact, it is central to their business plans to drive mass transit out:
At first glance, the rideshare corporation Uber couldn’t appear more different than conservative oil-mogul billionaires Charles G. Koch and his brother, the late David H. Koch. Uber has hired numerous former Democratic Party campaign managers and lobbyists, and the company’s CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, has publicly criticized the Trump administration, including over the travel ban on several majority-Muslim countries. The Kochs, meanwhile, have gained a reputation for bankrolling the Republican Party.
Yet Uber — the Silicon Valley start-up gone public — shares at least one goal with the most prominent funders of modern conservatism: the destruction of America’s public transit.
………
A close look at the growing war on public transit reveals the planks of this corporate consensus.
In documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Uber’s executives claim to see a “massive market opportunity” in the estimated 4.4 trillion miles traveled each year by people using public transit across 175 countries. The company continues to heavily subsidize per-ride costs to inflate its value to investors and undercut existing options, despite bleeding billions of dollars. “Uber is effectively a middleman for a money transfer from venture-capital (VC) firms to consumers,” writes James P. Sutton in National Review. Simply put, effectively supplanting the taxi industry wasn’t enough: Uber plans on undercutting public transit to finally turn a profit.
For their part, the Koch brothers have been funneling money to their political action committee (PAC), Americans for Prosperity, to kill proposed public transit projects nationwide. Last year, they led the charge in stopping a popular $5.4 billion transit plan in Nashville, Tennessee, that had even been backed by a coalition of the city’s business community. The Kochs have funded similar anti–public transit efforts in Arkansas, Arizona, Michigan, Utah, and other states.
………
Uber has joined the Koch brothers on this libertarian crusade, using a corporate shell game to avoid paying billions in taxes and lobbying against taxes and fees on rides across the globe.
………
Most important, both the Koch brothers and Uber understand that their freedom depends on taking freedom away from working people. Uber has spent generously on fighting to ensure its drivers maintain their precarious status as independent contractors. The company has also invested heavily in technology that would get rid of drivers altogether, including driverless cars. The Koch brothers’ anti-worker views date back much further, all the way to the counterrevolutionary days at the end of the New Deal era. Fred Koch, Charles and David’s father, owned an oil refinery corporation and was active in the archconservative John Birch Society. Through groups like the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, the Kochs have long led the attack against collective bargaining rights for public employees, including train and bus drivers.
At the end of the day, the Koch brothers and Uber are much like Coke and Pepsi. They may have clashing styles, but their product is largely the same: lower corporate taxes, deregulation, lower wages, and private control over public goods like mass transit.
It’s all about privatizing the public commons.
They want to take what is all of ours, and sell it back to all of us.
A Society Is Only As Free As Its Most Troublesome Political Dissident
The essay is worth a read, but the hed pretty much says it all.
When discussing issues of patent, copyright,a d trademark, it is important to note that, “Intellectual Property Isn’t Property.”
It never has been.
If I steal your car, you no longer have the use of that car.
If I excerpt your essay, you still have that essay.
You cannot take IP in the same way that one could a spoon:
Frank Luntz’s rebranding of the estate tax as the “death tax” was an impressive bit of marketing genius, but perhaps the greatest branding coup in modern American politics was the introduction of the term “intellectual property” into the policymaking lexicon. Intellectual property guarantees the owner exclusive rights to the use of an idea, but the uglier-sounding term “intellectual monopoly” is actually more accurate.
It may be too late to cast intellectual property out of our parlance in favor of intellectual monopoly, but it’s worth addressing the underlying philosophical claim to ideas as property. There is a strong consequentialist case for intellectual property in theory, but IP does not satisfy the Lockean definition of property and therefore shouldn’t grant the holder property rights under a natural-rights framework.
………
To examine where property rights come from, let’s turn to John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. To avoid a lengthy discussion about the merits of Locke’s arguments, let’s take the existence of property rights as he discusses them as a given: If I own myself and I put a part of myself, through my labor, into an unclaimed physical object, I should have exclusive claim to it in the same way I should have exclusive claim to my body and labor.
Why doesn’t this logic work for ideas? Most obviously and importantly, because physical property is scarce and rivalrous. If I take a piece of wood from the wilderness and whittle it into a spoon, anyone who uses that specific spoon is depriving me of my ability to use it.
This is at the nub of the problem Locke is trying to solve. Because physical objects are scarce and rivalrous in use, rights to use and control are necessarily exclusive: If one person gets to use and control the spoon, nobody else does. Locke is wondering how such exclusive rights got going if (as Locke believed) the physical world was given to people in common by their creator. He solves the riddle by asserting the right of self-ownership. Since our bodies and minds start out under our exclusive control, mixing our labor with external objects can bring them out of the common pool and into the realm of private property.
Ideas, on the other hand, are non-rivalrous, meaning their use by one party doesn’t prevent another from using them. If I come up with a new design for a wooden spoon and someone else uses the same idea (whether they learned it from me or developed it independently), my ability to use that design isn’t impeded.
What is impeded is my ability to monetize my design while denying others the ability to do the same. And in cases where the cost of innovation is high but the cost of imitation low, that impediment could end up mattering a great deal for society. Encouraging innovation by helping creators to monetize their creations is at the heart of the consequentialist case for IP. These considerations are, however, outside the scope of a Lockean case for intellectual property.
Furthermore, while you have a right to the products of your mind just as you have a right to the products of your body, there’s an important distinction that must be made between an idea in your head and one that’s known to others. If I come up with an original idea for a widget, song, book, or joke, I could tweet it, tell it to a few close friends, or take it to the grave. This is a natural extension of someone’s right to their own mind.
But once an idea is out in the open, it’s analogous to someone selling or giving away physical property they appropriated from nature. As long as something is transferred voluntarily, the original owner can’t make a claim to this property once it changes hands (or in this case, minds). To maintain otherwise would violate the right to free exchange, a natural extension of the right to property.
Meanwhile, physical property could theoretically remain private forever, while even the staunchest supporters of IP rights believe ideas should enter the public domain at some point. Suppose Alice goes through the traditional process of Lockean appropriation to produce a spoon. That could be hers through the end of her life, but if she gives it to Bob it becomes his. He can then give it to Charlie, and so on. At no point in this chain does the spoon go back into the commons for someone else to appropriate. To believe that intellectual property is, in fact, property, one must also accept the possibility of this infinite chain of private ownership.
The solution to this conundrum is to understand that IP is public interest law, as it states in the Constitution, it exists, “To promote the progress of science and useful arts.”
It is there to serve the public interest, by making the public pay for its benefits.
In other words, it’s socialism.
Specifically, they derive pleasure from the misery of “the other” that they have deemed unworthy:
I understand why it’s hard for normal people to believe that white evangelical Christians are sadists. Normal people have never been, as I was a long time ago, on the inside of that shadowy religious world. But the sooner they understand this, the sooner normal people will see that white evangelical Christian support for Donald Trump isn’t rooted in hypocrisy, contradiction or merely straying from the straight and narrow. The reason they support a fascist president is simple: They’re sadists.
The word “sadist” is off-putting. I get that. But if you’re thinking of sex, you’re thinking in the wrong way. If you’re thinking of “pleasure,” as in sexual pleasure, you’re thinking the wrong way. The pleasure white evangelical Christians derive from the suffering of human beings deemed less human than they are is not about sex. It’s about the pain, humiliation or even violence out-groups deserve by dint of being out-groups. Gay men, for instance, deserve their punishment because they are gay. Punishment for being gay is “divine justice.” From such “justice” comes pleasure—which is sadism.
I didn’t come up with the term. Richard Rorty did. I’m only pushing it as far to the fore as I can, because I don’t think normal people understand what they are facing, and if they don’t understand, they will keep treating sadists as if they have a legitimate place in a liberal democracy. Cruelty is the point, as Adam Serwer powerfully and famously put it in The Atlantic. But normal people must understand the animating force behind that cruelty. Sadists are sadistic not because they are cruel. It’s much simpler than that. They are cruel because being cruel to people deserving cruelty feels good.
I’m still considering the arguments, but the thesis is consistent with the actual observed events, and appears to have a significant predictive properties, which puts it a step above string theory.
the implicit core belief of means-testing services is that we'd rather some people who could use them go without than some people who could pay for them on their own receive them and that's an idea worth challenging tbqh
— taber 🏳️🌈 (@taber) August 19, 2019
Means testing for basic safety net programs is morally and politically bankrupt.
One of the incessant tropes of the draw-by-crayon libertarians is that doing harm to the public is simply bad business.
To quote the Bard of Baltimore, this ,”Is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”
It tuens out that there are many ways in which a business can profit from doing harm, and streets strewn with haphazardly parked scooters is the least of it:
Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers In Their Own Land profiles residents of deeply conservative parts of Louisiana, pondering why they are so opposed to government environmental regulations even as they suffer from environmental catastrophes that stricter regulations could have prevented. I don’t wish here to dive into the many reasons why that is. Instead, I’d like to look at one popular belief that pops up in the book that is very easy to believe but also very wrong. When Hochschild talks to people about the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, she discovers that they are all strongly opposed to Barack Obama’s temporary moratorium on deep sea drilling, even though they were also appalled by the spill. One of the interviewees says the following:
“It’s not in the company’s own interest to have a spill or an accident. They try hard… so if there’s a spill, it’s probably the best the company could do.”
I think it’s easy to see why people believe this. There’s actually a persuasive-sounding logic to it. Many libertarian economists believe it entirely. The argument, expanded a bit, goes: The fact that corporations pursue their own financial self-interest means that regulation is not needed. A company that causes disasters is certainly not helping its own profits. BP didn’t want to spill all that oil in the Gulf, obviously. BP has every incentive to avoid oil spills, because they want to keep the oil! Accidents happen, no company is perfect, but ultimately profits and safety coincide. A corporate executive who bungles like this is not actually pursuing the self-interest of the company, and so when corporations produce environmental catastrophes it is not because they are pathologically self-interested, but rather because they were not pursuing their self-interest well enough. Greed is still good.
………
It’s true that accidents themselves are not in a company’s self-interest, in that no company gains anything from a horrible accident that destroys their equipment (and possibly their employees’ lives, though from a company’s perspective employees are fungible). But “the behavior that produces accidents” can absolutely be in a company’s self-interest, and accidents don’t always sufficiently damage a company’s self-interest to make it worthwhile to avoid them. Eating the cost of a few accidents here and there might end up being more profitable than extreme precaution.
………
A Friedmanite, i.e. sociopathic, company only has incentives not to hurt people to the extent that there are strong external institutions, in the form of government, media, consumer groups, and labor groups, that can create those incentives. If hurting people doesn’t cost money, then it isn’t in the interest of companies to avoid cheap, risky practices. The “expected return” on a dangerously risky move might be high enough that it is “economically rational” (not to be confused with being “actually rational”).
It’s also important to remember that just because a gamble doesn’t pay off, doesn’t mean it was the wrong move. Even if there are strong coercive external institutions that punish toxic cloud emission, and mean that if you emit the toxic cloud your company will be severely hurt, a company might still take the gamble on Method A, because the potential rewards are so high. If there’s a 99/100 chance that by pressing a given button you get a billion dollars, and a 1/100 chance that you’ll be instantly killed, “self interest” doesn’t necessarily dictate that you’ll stay away from the button. It depends on whether you’re feeling lucky. The 2008 financial crisis was like this. People made piles and piles of money of risky investments, until they didn’t. They weren’t necessarily “failing to pursue their own interest” just because they took risks. For many of them, it was probably a smart move that turned out well. Every company takes risks. What if playing dice with people’s lives actually turns out to be good for BP, on the whole? It might go wrong once or twice, but what if overall they make out pretty well from putting quantity of oil over safety, because the oil makes up for the accident costs? Then what?
………
BP certainly wants to convince the ordinary Louisianans that Hochschild talked to that the company is a partner and friend. Why would we want to hurt you? We’re all in this together! We’re bringing you jobs. We’re cleaning up the spill, and we certainly don’t want another. Don’t believe them. Milton Friedman was quite clear: All they want is money, and if they can convince people that “big government” is bad and regulation is unnecessary, then environmental destruction is costless. (The companies tearing down the Amazon rainforests, and displacing native populations, are behaving precisely as Friedman would have wanted.) Doing harm is only bad for business if we make it bad for business.
I am beginning to think that if corporations are legal people, then most of them need to be committed to a hospital for the criminally insane.
In Luzern County, Pennsylvania, where magistrates were found to have taken bribes, the Wyoming Valley West school district has threatened to put children in foster care over unpaid lunch bills.
It now appears that they have doubled down, and the school board has refused to take donations to clear the debt, because, “Capitalism,” or somesuch:
The president of a Pennsylvania school board whose district had warned parents behind on lunch bills that their children could end up in foster care has rejected a CEO’s offer to cover the cost, the businessman said Tuesday.
Todd Carmichael, chief executive and co-founder of Philadelphia-based La Colombe Coffee, said he offered to give Wyoming Valley West School District $22,000 to wipe out bills that generated the recent warning letter to parents.
But school board President Joseph Mazur rejected the offer during a phone conversation Monday, Carmichael spokesman Aren Platt said Tuesday. Mazur argued that money is owed by parents who can afford to pay, Platt said.
“The position of Mr. Carmichael is, irrespective of affluence, irrespective of need, he just wants to wipe away this debt,” Platt said.
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The letters from the school district warned parents that they “can be sent to dependency court for neglecting your child’s right to food,” and that the children could be removed and placed in foster care.
Child welfare authorities have told the district that Luzerne County does not run its foster system that way.
Luzerne County’s manager and child welfare agency director wrote to Superintendent Irvin DeRemer, demanding the district stop making what it called false claims. DeRemer has not returned messages in recent days.
In an editorial Tuesday, the Times-Tribune of Scranton called the threats shameful and an act of hubris. The paper urged lawmakers and the state Department of Education to “outlaw such outlandish conduct by law and regulation covering lunch debt collection.”
Carmichael said he was struggling to understand why district officials would not welcome his help.
I understand Mr. Carmichael’s confusion, but it’s actually pretty simple: Joseph Mazur and the rest of ilk, are sadistic psychopaths who think that they are teaching people a useful lesson.
Some people like to use their power to inflict cruelty on others.
They are deeply evil people without a shred of decency or empathy.
There is an important difference though, Airbus actually spent the money to make sure that was well tested and thoroughly redundant, while Boeing did it on the cheap:
The European Aviation Safety Agency EASA has issued an Air Worthiness Directive (AD) to instruct operators of the Airbus A321neo of a Pitch instability issue.
EASA writes “excessive pitch attitude can occur in certain conditions and during specific manoeuvres. This condition, if not corrected, could result in reduced control of the aeroplane.”
We analyze how this is similar or different to the Boeing 737 MAX pitch instability issues.
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As the AD does not apply to the in-service A320neo, the issue must not be connected to the pitch instability which comes as a natural consequence of mounting the larger neo engines on the A320 series. It can be restricted to how the A321neo version of the ELACs handles the aircraft’s controls in an excessive pitch up condition.
Since publishing the article Airbus has provided us the following information:
The issue is an A321neo landing configuration at extreme aft CG conditions and below 100ft only issue, discovered by Airbus and reported to AESA. Violent maneuvers in for instance a go-around in these conditions can cause a pitch up which the pilots can counteract using their side-sticks. No FBW nose downs or similar is commanded, it’s just the FBW doesn’t neutralize the pitch-up (like FBW using the Airbus style flight laws are supposed to do), the pilots have to do it. Airbus has assisted AESA in issuing the AD which restricts the aft CG used in operational landings until the ELAC software is updated.
Our comment: The Airbus information explains why the issue is limited to the A321neo. The A321 has a different flap configuration than the A320/A319, giving a more nose-down approach angle (a lift curve with a transposed AoA vs. lift range). It seems this difference can set the condition for the pitch-up which the FBW at this point does not compensate for. The Pilots have to do it. The FBW will take away this pitch-up in a FBW software release available 3Q2020.
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Like the 737 MAX, the A319/320/321neos are affected by the mounting of larger engines with their larger nacelles ahead of the center of gravity, Figure 1.
Figure 1. A321 shown on top of A321neo. The larger engine nacelles are marked with a violet color. Source: Airbus and Leeham Co.………
There are several takeaways from the above:
- As we have written in the MAX articles, pitch instabilities in certain parts of an airliner’s wide flight envelope are common.
- It comes down to how these are addressed to produce a safe aircraft. In the case of the MAX and A320, software-based control logic is used, controlling the movements of the horizontal stabilizer and elevator.
- The key is how these controls are designed, tested and implemented.
- The original MAX implementation was inacceptably badly done. It relied on a single sensor, commanded unnecessary repeated nose-down trim commands and didn’t have any global limitation on its authority.
- The Airbus version for the A321neo has a solid implementation based on adequate hardware/software redundancy and relevant limitations on its authority. But it can be improved (see our Airbus update on cause and fix).
Similar problems, and in one case they aren’t killing people, because they aren’t letting finance and marketing drive basic engineering decisions.
12. We laugh about all the right-wing welfare publications, but the whole Democratic party is welfare for Ivy-League mediocrities.— Jacob Bacharach (@jakebackpack) November 13, 2016
It’s not a unique point, not even on Twitter, but it the most evocative expression of this sentiment that I have found:
The Democratic Party is less a political party in pursuit of particular policy goals than a professional association organized to defend and advance the careers of its most valued members.— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) July 13, 2019
