Tag: regulation

Why Google Should be a Utility

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The fact that they don’t care enough to fall prey to these transparent censorship actions indicates that there should be a sh%$ load more regulation of their activities:

A Google search, at one time, could locate a news article on a man accused of attempted child rape, another on someone charged with fraud and still others on Ukrainian politicians facing corruption allegations. Googling certain keywords in March would find an article detailing the movements of two coronavirus-infected British tourists in Vietnam and warning others who visited the same places to take precautions.

Then the stories vanished.

Google stopped listing them in searches after it received formal requests that it scrub links to the pieces, a Wall Street Journal investigation found.

The Journal identified hundreds of instances in which individuals or companies, often using apparently fake identities, caused the Alphabet Inc. unit to remove links to unfavorable articles and blog posts that alleged wrongdoing by convicted criminals, foreign officials and businesspeople in the U.S. and abroad.

Google took them down in response to copyright complaints, many of which appear to be bogus, the Journal found in an analysis of information from the more than four billion links sent to Google for removal since 2011.

Google’s system was set up to comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. The 1998 law gives tech firms immunity from claims in copyright cases as long they quickly take down copyrighted material once alerted.

Takedown requests to Google are often from media companies legitimately requesting that pirated copies of a movie or album be removed from search results. Publishers and news outlets, including the Journal, have also asked Google to scrub allegedly infringing material from Google Search.

Yet some requests, the Journal found, appear to be from people manipulating the system in ways it didn’t intend, resulting in Google’s taking down lawful content.

When a Colorado man, Dak Steiert, faced state-court charges of running a fake law firm in 2018, he sent Google a series of copyright claims against blogs and a law-firm website that discussed his case, claiming they had copied the posts from Mr. Steiert’s own website. That wasn’t true, the Journal determined, but Google erased the pages from its search engine anyway.

Last year, Mr. Steiert, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, pleaded guilty in Colorado state court to one count of false advertising in his business. The Colorado Supreme Court closed his practice. The articles remained invisible in Google searches until the Journal flagged the cases to Google, which then reinstated the links.

………

“If people can manipulate the gatekeepers to make important and lawful information disappear,” said Daphne Keller, a former Google lawyer and now a program director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center, “that’s a big deal.”

………

After the Journal shared its findings with Google, the company conducted a review and restored more than 52,000 links it determined it had improperly removed, she said. Google said its review identified more than 100 new abusive submitters, declining to discuss individual cases.

………

A Google search for reputation managers turns up firms claiming to be able to remove negative content from popular search engines including Google—even though typically Google only removes links for alleged copyright violations or to comply with other relevant laws.

The Journal dug into the world of takedown requests by reviewing electronic records of copyright-removal notices that Google shares with Harvard University researchers. The Journal cross-referenced those requests with separate data Google releases regularly in a “transparency report,” which discloses whether it granted each request.

………

Financial-news site Benzinga fell victim to a common tactic to trick Google: backdating. Someone wanting Google to hide a webpage will find a little-trafficked blog and post a copy of the content from the legitimate webpage. After backdating the plagiarized post, the complainant will file an electronic notice with Google claiming the real article is a copyright violation.

A simple change to the DMCA, requiring fines against those who file false claims, and fines against entities who fail to use diligence with regards to a take-down notice,  (the latter would cover Google) would shut this crap down.

Meaningful regulation, and the right for private recourse would go a long way to shutting down this.

I Want to See Elon Musk Frog-Marched out of His Offices in Handcuffs

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Tesla Factory Parking Lot Today

Alameda county officials have been insisting on maintaining a lock-down, and everyone’s favorite sociopath* Elon Musk has opened the factory anyway, putting thousands of his employees, and tens of thousands or their family members at risk.

What’s more, he dared authorities to arrest him.

Simply put, Elon is throwing mama from the train because he wants his stock options to vest.

To quote some anonymous California pol, “F%$# Elon Musk.”

Arrest everyone in the factory, and put Elon at the back of the line for processing, so that he spends 2-3 days in the slam incommunicado.

2 days of jail food should beat a little bit of humility into him.

It will be a learning experience for him, and a warning for the rest of the law-breakers who claim to be noble “disrupters” when they are criminals:

The fight between Tesla and local officials regarding the reopening of a manufacturing plant escalated Monday after chief executive Elon Musk tweeted his plans and mentioned the potential for arrests.

“Tesla is restarting production today against Alameda County rules,” Musk wrote on Twitter. “I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.”

It is one of the most prominent examples of a powerful business figure defying local health orders amid the response to the novel coronavirus. Tesla on Saturday filed suit against Alameda County, where its Fremont, Calif., factory is located, seeking an injunction against orders to stay closed. The suit alleged violations of the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment.

Neetu Balram, a spokeswoman for Alameda County, said in a statement that the county hoped to work with Tesla to avoid any further escalation of the issue.

F%$# that.  Lock him up, and make sure that when he is arraigned, he is photographed in a prison uniform.

Just because he got lucky (and broke some banking regulations) and became a billionaire is no reason for authorities to allow him to arrogantly and openly flout the law.

*But I’m an engineer, not a psychologist, dammit!†
†I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

Blaming Poor People, Just Because

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Alex Azar, Secretary of Health and Human Services, is blaming impoverished meat packing workers for their dying, saying that they are the ones who are causing the Covid-19 spread through the home and social aspects of their home lives.

Basically, he’s saying, “F%$# the poors, because they are evil. If they weren’t evil, they wouldn’t be poors.”

The country’s top health official downplayed concerns over the public health conditions inside meatpacking plants, suggesting on a call with lawmakers that workers were more likely to catch coronavirus based on their social interactions and group living situations, three participants said.

HHS Secretary Alex Azar told a bipartisan group that he believed infected employees were bringing the virus into processing plants where a rash of cases have killed at least 20 workers and forced nearly two-dozen plants to close, according to three people on the April 28 call.

Those infections, he said, were linked more to the “home and social” aspects of workers’ lives rather than the conditions inside the facilities, alarming some on the call who interpreted his remarks as faulting workers for the outbreaks, the people said.

“He was essentially turning it around, blaming the victim and implying that their lifestyle was the problem,” said Rep. Ann Kuster (D-N.H.), who told POLITICO that Azar’s comments left her deeply concerned about the administration’s priorities in fighting the pandemic. “Their theory of the case is that they are not becoming infected in the meat processing plant, they’re becoming infected because of the way they live in their home.”

………
Azar emphasized the need to keep the plants open, according to the three people on the call. He also theorized that workers were largely not becoming infected at the meatpacking plants, and were instead contracting the coronavirus from their communities.

Azar noted in particular that many meatpacking workers live in congregate housing, allowing that more testing at facilities would help but that the bigger issue was employees’ home environments. One possible solution was to send more law enforcement to those communities to better enforce social distancing rules, he added, according to two of the lawmakers on the call.

Basically, he wants to send the Pinkertons into to break the strikes by breaking heads.

“Law enforcement is not going to solve the problem,” Kuster said. “It was so far off base.”

An HHS spokesperson on Wednesday declined to offer any evidence supporting Azar’s assertions and said the department doesn’t comment on specifics of conversations with members of Congress, but contended that “this is an inaccurate representation of Secretary’s Azar’s comments during the discussion.”

What should be noted here is that this attitude is very much mainstream Republican dogma:  Poor people suffer because they deserve to, and they deserve it even more because of their dark complexions.

This has been the case as far back as when Gerald Ford was President, and called for people to be forced to sell their cars before getting unemployment compensation.

What a Whiny Baby

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In his continuing quest to maximize his convenience at the expense of the health and lives of his workers, Elon Musk has thrown a tantrum over Alameda County’s decision to maintain to its lock-down on the factory. 

He is threatening to move Tesla headquarters (maybe 50 people, big deal) and the factory (a multibillion dollar endeavor that would involve having to retrain an new workforce, and would take years, yeah right) to Texas or Nevada, because he isn’t getting what he wants precisely when he wants.

Why do people think that this wanker is a genius?

Elon Musk and local health officials in California clashed on Saturday over the timing of the reopening of Tesla’s factory in Fremont, with the company’s chief executive pushing for an immediate return and the county’s government seeking a delay of about a week.

In a series of tweets, Mr. Musk said he would move the company’s headquarters out of California to Texas or Nevada.

The tweets came a day after health officials from Alameda County told Tesla that it was not yet allowed to resume production of electric vehicles in Fremont because of fears that the coronavirus could spread among the company’s workers. Manufacturers have been allowed to restart work in other parts of the state that have had less severe outbreaks of the virus.

“Frankly, this is the final straw,” Mr. Musk said on Twitter. “Tesla will now move its HQ and future programs to Texas/Nevada immediately. If we even retain Fremont manufacturing activity at all, it will depend on how Tesla is treated in the future.”

In a separate tweet, Mr. Musk said Tesla would file a lawsuit against Alameda County.

………

Scott Haggerty, the county supervisor for the district in Alameda County where Tesla’s Fremont plant is located, said on Saturday that he had been confident that county health officials and Tesla executives were close to an agreement on reopening the plant on May 18. But, Mr. Haggerty said, that appeared to be unacceptable to Mr. Musk, who wanted to open the plant on May 8.

“We were working on a lot of policies and procedures to help operate that plant and quite frankly, I think Tesla did a pretty good job, and that’s why I had it to the point where on May 18, Tesla would have opened,” Mr. Haggerty said. “I know Elon knew that. But he wanted it this week.”

………

Things began to break down on Thursday, Mr. Haggerty said, when a Tesla executive called him and told him Mr. Musk was thinking about suing him.

………

“He could have spent time enjoying his new baby and given me and my staff a couple more days and his plant would have been open on May 18,” Mr. Haggerty said. “Am I somewhat sympathetic with Tesla? Yes I am. Am I sympathetic to the way Musk is treating people? No.”

………

Over the last few months, Mr. Musk has issued several strident calls to reopen the Fremont plant. After local officials ordered the plant closed, he tried to keep the plant open but was forced by the officials to shut it down in late March. In a conference call this past week to report Tesla’s earnings, he called the order “fascist.”

Seriously, this guy is so far along the path to being a Bond villain, it’s buggers the mind.

The Protests Worked

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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the non-profit organization that oversees the Internet’s domain name system, has rejected a controversial proposal to sell the .org domain to a private equity group for more than $1 billion. It’s a serious—quite possibly fatal—blow to a proposal that had few supporters besides the organizations that proposed it.

Currently, the .org domain registry is run by the Public Interest Registry, a non-profit subsidiary of another non-profit called the Internet Society. PIR was created in 2002 to run the .org domain and has been doing so ever since. But last fall, the Internet Society stunned the non-profit world by announcing it would sell the PIR—and, effectively, ownership of the .org domain—to a new and secretive private equity firm called Ethos Capital for more than $1 billion.

The announcement created a swift and powerful backlash. In its resolution formally rejecting the transaction, ICANN says it received its first letter opposing the deal just two days after it was announced. The group would eventually receive letters from at least 30 groups opposing the deal, as well as numerous negative comments during public hearings. Meanwhile, ICANN says, the deal has received “virtually no counterbalancing support except from the parties involved in the transaction and their advisors.”

Also, the California Attorney General strongly implied that there might be a criminal investigation to follow if they approved this.

This is Truer than Taxes

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Today, there’s a broad consensus that neoliberalism is making work more precarious. Indeed, for four decades and more, successive governments in developed countries have passed various measures to flexibilize the labor market. These measures increasingly allow businesses to use fixed-term contracts with a definite end date. Added to these are other measures that make it easier for employers to lay off staff.

In France, for instance, the creation of interim contracts dates back to 1972. This was meant to make it possible to substitute one member of staff with another in exceptional cases. Yet, over the years, it has become an instrument of flexibility in the hands of employers. When a company sees its levels of activity falling, it can choose not to renew temporary contracts. In so doing, it can get rid of some of its employees without having to enter a long and risky collective redundancy process.

In his famous book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, Guy Standing concludes that it is no longer appropriate just to speak of a division in society between workers and capitalists. What we are instead seeing, Standing argues, is the emergence of a precariat underneath the old proletariat.

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It is clear that their precarious status undermines trade unions. Temporary workers are reticent about unionizing, for they fear that it means their contracts won’t be renewed. Precarity gradually eats into the unions’ own ranks: in some companies, the core of stable workers is gradually replaced by temporary ones. There are not no conflicts involving precarious workers. But they are relatively rare.

For some, like Standing, precarity also has other malign effects — with the rise of far-right populism in Europe and the United States counting among its direct consequences. For want of any real alternative, the destabilization of the popular classes would, it seems, drive them to look for scapegoats among those even more precarious than they are: migrants, the unemployed, LGBT people, and so on.

Yet by no means is this division — the separation of workers into a multitude of different statuses — actually something new. It has existed in various forms throughout the history of capitalism. We could even say that it is functional to capitalism’s very dynamic. Whatever period we look at, we always find that permanent staff coexisted with their temporary counterparts — and that regular employment had to be fought for.
The Permanent and the Temporary

Precarity is, in a sense, inherent to the very nature of employment contracts under capitalism. In principle — at the juridical level — a worker is free to negotiate the price of her own labor power, on an equal footing with her putative employer. According to this liberal conception, the employment relation — whether or not it takes the form of a contract — is thus a commercial transaction between formally equal subjects.

………

In 1966, it was stipulated that employee-elected works councils should be informed of and consulted about any company restructuring plans, and in 1969, redeployment, early retirement, and redundancy compensation were introduced in order to limit the impact of restructuring. These measures sought to orient the employer toward solutions other than “straight” firings.

The idea of a stable, long-term job is, in fact, something relatively new, when we look at the history of capitalism as a whole. These measures were possible only due to the strength of the labor movement and the strong economic growth of the postwar decades. Once these conditions were gone, stable and long-term jobs in capitalism appeared rather more of a short-term “parenthesis.” Today, employment contracts are less and less associated with a protection from market forces. Both governments and employers use the vocabulary of the individual worker’s “mobility” and “liberty” to justify reforms to flexibilize the labor market.

Whenever capitalists talk about the need to increase flexibility to improve the economy, what they really mean is that they want to make work more precarious as a way of driving down wages and benefits.

Never Let a Crisis go Unexploited

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It now appears that the Trump administration is looking to use the Covid-19 pandemic as an excuse to lower agricultural wages.

It is contemptible, but using an emergency as an excuse to shaft the most vulnerable in society is Republican Party 101:

New White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is working with Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to see how to reduce wage rates for foreign guest workers on American farms, in order to help U.S. farmers struggling during the coronavirus, according to U.S. officials and sources familiar with the plans.

………

The measure is the latest effort being pushed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help U.S farmers who say they are struggling amid disruptions in the agricultural supply chain compounded by the outbreak; the industry was already hurting because of President Trump’s tariff war with China.

………

The nation’s roughly 2.5 million agricultural laborers have been officially declared “essential workers” as the administration seeks to ensure that Americans have food to eat and that U.S. grocery stores remain stocked. Workers on the H-2A seasonal guest-worker program are about 10% of all farmworkers.

………

The most recent push to lower wage rates for workers on H-2A visas has drawn pushback from some strange bedfellows: immigrant-rights advocates and immigration hard-liners usually aligned with Trump.

………

It’s unclear how the reforms would be made, including whether they would be taken through executive action or through the federal regulatory process. But Perdue has pushed for adjusting what is known as the adverse effect wage rate, which prevents farmers using the H-2A program from paying all workers — U.S. and guest workers — wages below the prevailing rates in the surrounding area.

Earlier this year, Perdue said the adverse wage rate has set almost a $15 minimum wage for agriculture, noting “no other business in the country has that,” according to the agriculture trade journal DTN.

The “adverse effect wage rates” are based on a USDA survey of what agricultural workers are paid in each state. It’s $11.71 in Florida, $12.67 in North Carolina and $14.77 in California.

Evil is as evil does, I guess.

Never Let an Opportunity for Looting Pass

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In this case, the disposable plastic bag industry is trying to use the Covid-19 pandemic to overturn plastic bag bans, because, if you are going to die anyway, why not make sure that the rest of the world resembles a landfill:

They are “petri dishes for bacteria and carriers of harmful pathogens,” read one warning from a plastics industry group. They are “virus-laden.”

The group’s target? The reusable shopping bags that countless of Americans increasingly use instead of disposable plastic bags.

The plastic bag industry, battered by a wave of bans nationwide, is using the coronavirus crisis to try to block laws prohibiting single-use plastic. “We simply don’t want millions of Americans bringing germ-filled reusable bags into retail establishments putting the public and workers at risk,” an industry campaign that goes by the name Bag the Ban warned on Tuesday, quoting a Boston Herald column outlining some of the group’s talking points.

The Plastics Industry Association is also lobbying to quash plastic bag bans. Last week, it sent a letter to the United States Department of Health and Human Services requesting that the department publicly declare that banning single-use plastics during a pandemic is a health threat.

F%$# them with Cheney’s dick.

Proof that AirBnB is Destroying Cities

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In tourism-heavy cities (I used Nashville, Honolulu, New Orleans, and Savannah) the rental market is exploding, as AirBnB owners are suddenly forced to put their houses on the market.

This surge in supply is going to dramatically cut the rates of monthly rentals. pic.twitter.com/Zyh3AYouyH

— Shane Morris (@IamShaneMorris) March 22, 2020

For years, AirBnB lobbyists and “advocates of the free market” have argued that AirBnB has a negligible impact on the prices of rentals, arguing that they were two totally different commodities.

Now we’re seeing they were totally full of shit.

— Shane Morris (@IamShaneMorris) March 22, 2020

“BuT wHeRe WiLl peOplE sTaY wIThoUt aLL tHeSe sHoRT tErm RenTAlS?”

Hotels. That’s the answer. People will stay in hotels.

The coronavirus has put on full display, these houses and condos were ALWAYS reducing rental supply, and making housing less affordable.

— Shane Morris (@IamShaneMorris) March 22, 2020

Shane Morris did a drill down on Zillow data for furnished rentals, and found that there has been an explosion of long term rentals now that AirBnB has cratered. (Read the whole Twitter thread)

This is the real world experiment which shows that, notwithstanding the

It turns out that the service does take huge amounts of residential rental properties out of the market by moving them to short term rentals (hotels).

To those who argue that hotels take up space too, it should be noted that for a given area, a hotel will house tens, if not hundreds, of times more guests than an AirBnB listing.

People are buying converting residential rentals to hotels, or in an even more destabilizing development, long term renting properties to secretly sublease as AirBnB’s, which means that when there is a downturn, there are suddenly dozens of landlords who are about to discover that their “tenants” are actually speculators who are going to walk away from their leases.  (And I agrew tiht hte poster that, “The sudden collapse of AirBNB has been, legitimately, the funniest f%$#ing thing I’ve watched play out this past month.”

This will not end well, but it is the inevitable result of using regulatory arbitrage to facilitate leverage, speculation, and looting.

As I have noted before, the “sharing economy” has turned out to be little more than sucking the marrow out of society.

Authorities need to stop buying into the whole “internet disruption” bullsh%$.

All it does is enrich a few at the expense of the bulk of society.

Yes, Closing that Barn Door Will Stop that Cow

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The Federal reserve is bailing out the commercial paper market.

Maybe, if they hadn’t allowed these short term debt markets to grow into a largely unregulated sh%$ show of other $1 trillion, they would not have to be bailing them out now:

The Federal Reserve said it would start making loans to American corporations, relaunching a crisis-era tool to help calm short-term debt markets that have faced intensifying strains in recent days.

 The Fed trained its sights Tuesday on dysfunction in the $1.1 trillion market for short-term corporate IOUs called commercial paper. Companies use commercial paper to finance their day-to-day business operations such as payroll expenses.

 While the Fed can’t buy corporate debt or lend directly to households and businesses, it can invoke emergency powers to establish lending facilities that, in turn, extend credit.

………

In launching the Commercial Paper Funding Facility, the Fed is trying to encourage investors to return to that market to ensure that eligible issuers can roll over maturing obligations. The central bank’s facility will purchase three-month debt from firms with high credit ratings. The Fed deployed a version of the tool between 2008 and 2010, during and after the financial crisis.

This sort of “Dark Web” financial bullsh%$ will destroy our economy, and when times are good they should be aggressively regulated so that they do not represent systemic risk.

Of course, this never happened, because when this all went pear-shaped in 2008 and 2009, the powers that be were dedicated to ensuring that there would be no meaningful reforms.

And Now, the Panic

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Despite the fact that there will be a Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) on Tuesday, the Federal Reserve slashed short term interest rates to 0% this afternoon.

Needless to say, this is not the the action of people who are keeping their sh%$ together:

The Federal Reserve announced on Sunday it would drop interest rates to zero and buy at least $700 billion in government and mortgage-related bonds as part of a wide-ranging emergency action to protect the economy from the impact of the coronavirus outbreak.

The moves, the most dramatic by the U.S. central bank since the 2008 financial crisis, are aimed at keeping financial markets stable and making borrowing costs as low as possible as businesses around the country close and the U.S. economy hurtles toward recession.

The Fed, led by Chair Jerome H. Powell, effectively cut its benchmark by a full percentage point to zero. The benchmark U.S. interest rate is now in a range of 0 to 0.25 percent, down from a range of 1 to 1.25 percent.

In addition to rate cuts, the Fed announced it is restarting the crisis-era program of bond purchases known as “quantitative easing,” in which the central bank buys hundreds of billions of dollars in bonds to further push down rates and keep markets flowing freely. The Fed is also giving more-generous loans to banks around the country so they can turn around and offer loans to small businesses and families in need of a lifeline.

I’m not sure why the fact that the Fed is panicking is supposed to reassure markets.

A Noun, a Verb, and a Travel Ban

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The centerpiece Donald Trump’s announced measures to deal with COVID-19 is a travel ban from Europe.
This is the administration’s default response to any situation:  Build a wall.

In this case, the wall is the Maginot Line:

Donald Trump announced that the US would temporarily suspend all travel from the European Union, as the country reckons with the spread of coronavirus and the White House grapples with the severity of the situation.

The restrictions, which would begin on Friday and last for 30 days, would not apply to the UK, he said. He also encouraged older Americans to avoid all travel if possible.

Trump made the announcement in an Oval Office speech on Wednesday evening on the federal response to what the World Health Organization has declared a global pandemic.

During the speech, Trump defended his administration’s response while laying blame on the European Union for not acting quickly enough to address the “foreign virus”, saying US clusters had been “seeded” by European travelers.

Seriously, this is f%$#ed up and sh%$.

When You are Paying $3500 for a Coronavirus Vaccine, Thank Mainstream DEmocrats

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We now see the sordid story of how the Clinton administration, with an assist from Joe Biden killed the possibility of meaningful price controls of drugs:

Before a vaccine to combat the coronavirus pandemic is within view, the Trump administration has already walked back its initial refusal to promise that any remedy would be affordable to the general public. “We can’t control that price because we need the private sector to invest,” Alex Azar, Health and Human Services secretary and a former drug industry executive, told Congress.

After extraordinary blowback, the administration insisted that in the end, any treatment would indeed be affordable. President Donald Trump on Monday morning tweeted that he would be meeting with “the major pharmaceutical companies today at the White House about progress on a vaccine and cure. Progress being made!” The federal government, though, under the Clinton administration, traded away one of the key tools it could use to make good on the promise of affordability.

………

That’s how much of the pharmaceutical industry’s research and development is funded. The public puts in the money, and private companies keep whatever profits they can command. But it wasn’t always that way. Before 1995, drug companies were required to sell drugs funded with public money at a reasonable price. Under the Clinton administration, that changed.

In the 1994 midterms, the Republican Revolution, built largely around a reaction to Bill Clinton’s attempt to reform the health care system, swept Democrats out of Congress. On its heels, in April 1995, the Clinton administration capitulated to pharmaceutical industry pressure and rescinded the longstanding “reasonable pricing” rule.

………

The move was controversial, and a House member from Vermont, independent Bernie Sanders, offered an amendment to reinstate the rule. It failed on a largely party-line vote, 242-180.

Then in 2000, Sanders authored and passed a bipartisan amendment in the House to reimpose the “reasonable pricing” rule. In the Senate, a similar measure was pushed by the late Paul Wellstone of Minnesota.

………

Then-Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware voted to table Wellstone’s amendment, and it was defeated 56-39.

This shot of sh%$ is why the the status quo, and Status Quo Joe, are not a viable alternative for the future.

In order for progressive policies to work, the Neoliberal embrace of looting must be abandoned.

What Is an Emergency without Looting?

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Given that he is a former pharmaceutical executive, this is not a surprise:

Members of Congress and advocacy groups are voicing outrage after Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar—a former pharmaceutical executive—repeatedly refused during House testimony Wednesday to guarantee that any coronavirus vaccine or treatment developed with taxpayer money will be affordable for all in the U.S., not just the rich.

………

During testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee Wednesday, Azar was pressed multiple times to vow that vaccines and treatments for the coronavirus will be priced fairly and made affordable for all U.S. households.

“We would want to ensure that we’d work to make it affordable,” Azar told Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), “but we can’t control that price because we need the private sector to invest.”

You don’t need the private sector to invest.

The research will be government funded, and you have tools, such as a threat to invoke Biden-Dole march in rights on most of their patent portfolio, to coerce basic human decency out of these firms.

Grind Them into the Dirt, and Then Salt the Earth

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I am, of course, referring to Pacific Gas & Electric, which is now facing $2.1 billion fine for its negligence causing multiple wildfires:

California regulators increased penalties against PG&E Corp. to $2.1 billion for violations tied to the catastrophic wildfires ignited by the company’s power lines in 2017 and 2018.

The penalty would be the largest ever imposed by the California Public Utilities Commission, the agency said in a statement Thursday.

The decision, which becomes final if PG&E agrees to the terms within 20 days, increases a prior penalty settlement by about $462 million. It also would require that any tax savings associated with the payments be applied to the benefit of PG&E customers. Those savings may exceed $500 million.

………

The state’s revised penalty would bar PG&E from recovering about $1.8 billion in wildfire-related costs from ratepayers, require the company to spend $114 million on system enhancements and corrective actions and pay a $200 million fine to the state’s general fund. 

PG&E needs to be shut down, and its assets seized by the government.

To quote Corporal Hicks, “Nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”

This is a Feature, Not a Bug

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As a result of a new privacy law in California, many businesses have reduced the amount of data that they collect:

Last year, a major U.S. airline went looking for all the things it knew about its passengers. Among the details it had gathered, the company found, were consumers’ food preferences—information that seems innocuous but that could also reveal a passenger’s religious beliefs if they select a kosher or halal meal. So the airline decided to stop saving the food-preference information, according to Integris, the data privacy startup that helped the airline review its data practices. (Integris declined to name its client.)

Instead, the airline will ask passengers what they’d like to eat before every flight.

Recently, treasure hunts like this one have been taking place across industries and all around the country. Companies are mapping the data that they own, and some, like the airline, are proactively scrubbing sensitive information to avoid trouble.

When companies cut back on hoarding sensitive data, consumers win. Less of their private information is susceptible to data breaches and leaks, viewable by unscrupulous company insiders, or available to be sold to data brokers or advertisers.

This is a surprising turn: Data about consumers can be wildly lucrative—it fuels a $100 billion-plus digital-advertising industry, among other things—and companies generally like to gather as much of it as they can. But something changed this year. A new state law, the California Consumer Privacy Act, or CCPA, has turned data from an unadulterated asset into a potential liability.

………

The CCPA, in effect since Jan. 1, grants several new digital rights to Californians. They can now ask companies for a copy of the information the firms know about them, limit how that data is shared or sold, and demand that it’s deleted altogether.

Businesses also have to disclose new details about the personal information they gather and who they share it with.

Many companies have been setting up new tools to allow Californians to exercise these new rights, and some, such as Microsoft, have extended them to all their customers. But the law has had a second-order effect, too, that has an impact on almost every consumer: It has pushed some firms to slim down their troves of personal consumer data.

That’s because the CCPA’s new transparency requirements make it less attractive to hoover up everything there is to know about consumers. By gathering less, a company can avoid having to make damning disclosures about what kinds of data it keeps, and potentially turn privacy into a selling point.

Plus, companies can now get in legal trouble if they’re found to have not taken “reasonable” measures to safeguard particularly sensitive data such as Social Security numbers—a good reason to just get rid of that information if they don’t need it.

“That’s a huge incentive for companies not to collect those categories of information unless they absolutely need to,” says Ross, who co-authored the California ballot initiative that led to the CCPA. 

This is an unalloyed good, because privacy is an unalloyed good.

And the Supreme Court Will Probably Buy this Bullsh%$

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The right wingers at the Supreme Court have for years used the first amendment to shut down common sense regulation of predatory businesses.

My prediction is that they will do this again, and say that the first amendment protects ISP’s rights to resell your browser history:

The US state of Maine is violating internet broadband providers’ free speech by forcing them to ask for their customers’ permission to sell their browser history, according to a new lawsuit.

………

ACA Connects, CTIA, NCTA and USTelecom are collectively suing [PDF] Maine’s attorney general Aaron Frey, and the chair and commissioners of Maine’s Public Utilities Commission claiming that the statute, passed in June 2019, “imposes unprecedented and unduly burdensome restrictions on ISPs’, and only ISPs’, protected speech.”

How so? Because it includes “restrictions on how ISPs communicate with their own customers that are not remotely tailored to protecting consumer privacy.” The lawsuit even explains that there is a “proper way to protect consumer privacy” – and that’s the way the FCC does it, through “technology-neutral, uniform regulation.” Although that regulation is actually the lack of regulation.

If you’re still having a hard time understanding how requiring companies to get their customers’ permission before they sell their personal data infringes the First Amendment, the lawsuit has more details.

It “(1) requires ISPs to secure ‘opt-in’ consent from their customers before using information that is not sensitive in nature or even personally identifying; (2) imposes an opt-out consent obligation on using data that are by definition not customer personal information; (3) limits ISPs from advertising or marketing non-communications-related services to their customers; and (4) prohibits ISPs from offering price discounts, rewards in loyalty programs, or other cost saving benefits in exchange for a customer’s consent to use their personal information.”

All of this results in an “excessive burden” on ISPs, they claim, especially because not everyone else had to do the same. The new statute includes “no restrictions at all on the use, disclosure, or sale of customer personal information, whether sensitive or not, by the many other entities in the Internet ecosystem or traditional brick-and-mortar retailers,” the lawsuit complains.

Listen, I think that we should get some stakes, honey, and a few anthills of REALLY pissed off ants, and have a heart to heart with the senior executives of ACA Connects, CTIA, NCTA and USTelecom.

Perhaps we should bring in their lawyers for a consult as well.

In Other Unsurprising News

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This has been known for over 80 years.  It’s why New York introduced the medallion system in 1937:

Five years ago, Travis Kalanick was so confident that Uber Technologies Inc.’s rides would prompt people to leave their cars at home that he told a tech conference: “If every car in San Francisco was Ubered there would be no traffic.”

Today, a mounting collection of studies shows the opposite: Far from easing traffic, Uber and its main rival Lyft Inc. are adding to congestion in numerous U.S. downtowns.

Officials in San Francisco, Chicago and New York have cited congestion as the main rationale for new fees they recently enacted on Lyft and Uber rides in each of the cities. Other regulators around the country are considering similar fees. Uber and Lyft no longer pledge ride-hailing will reduce traffic, acknowledging that they add to congestion, though they say some studies overstate their role in the problem.

The app makers initially thought their technology would create seamless trips, with four strangers forsaking their own cars for a shared ride. Cutting-edge algorithms, they believed, would steer behavior through pricing and route-matching, letting drivers spend little time between trips. Riders leaving their cars at home would then increasingly hop on buses, bikes or walk in a gridlock-easing ripple effect.

Seriously, the ability of charlatans to take a pile of crap and give it a shine by calling it disruption.

Same Old Same Old

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Following a SEC inquiry of Tesla being closed, the SEC opens up another inquiry, because stock fraud is kind of Tesla’s thing:

Tesla Inc. isn’t yet in the clear with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

On Dec. 4, the same day the agency closed its second investigation into the electric-car maker in as many years, the SEC sent a subpoena seeking information on a fresh set of matters, Tesla disclosed in a regulatory filing Thursday. The regulator is looking into “certain financial data and contracts including Tesla’s regular financing arrangements,” according to the company.

The investigation the SEC closed in December related to projections and public statements regarding Model 3 production rates. Earlier in 2019, the agency went to court with Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk over tweets he sent about how many cars the company would build for the year. A judge forced the two sides to shore up a settlement reached in 2018 over claims Musk made during his short-lived efforts to take Tesla private.

If we actually enforces securities law in the United States, half of the Silicon Valley masters of the universe would have gone to jail.