SERGEY IS WATCHING YOU: Google Street Views AI Can Now Predict Race and Political Party.
Archive for 2017
December 7, 2017
BLUE STATE BLUES: A $40 Toll to Drive 10 Miles? It Happened on Virginia’s I-66.
If you took a bus from New York to Washington tomorrow, a 230-mile drive, and then turned around and came back, you still might not spend as much as some Virginians paid on Tuesday to drive there from 10 miles away.
Just after 8 a.m., the price to take the new express lanes on Interstate 66 from the Beltway to downtown Washington reached $40. By the time the morning rush ended at 9:30, the toll was $15.75 — a comparative pittance, but still almost enough for a one-way ticket from New York.
The peak price — which barreled past the $34.50 recorded on Monday, the lanes’ first day of operation — was one of the highest for a toll road anywhere in the United States. But transit officials said the congestion pricing system was working as designed: keeping traffic moving by encouraging people to car-pool or take alternate routes.
If you’re in a hurry to get to DC, I guess it helps to be a well-paid bureaucrat or lobbyist.
GO FOR A NICE HEALTHY WALK — OR NOT: Smoggy streets may negate health benefits of a daily walk.
REVANCHISM? Turkey’s Erdogan calls for border treaty review in Greece visit.
Mr Erdogan said the 1923 treaty that settled Turkey’s borders after World War One was not being applied fairly.
But Greek President Prokopis Pavlopoulos rejected any change to the Treaty of Lausanne.
Relations between the two Nato members have been uneasy for decades.
The 1923 treaty and the resulting population transfers between the two nations was supposed to settle the Greco-Turkish border once and for all, but it never quite worked out that way.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: A Most Remarkable Year.
After a period of sheer disbelief these liberal revolutionaries are now going head to head with the Deplorable rebels. The game’s afoot and nobody can easily call it off.
Which will win has yet to be determined by history. All one can do is compare their present strengths and strategies. In the matter of strength there should be no contest. A survey of federal government employees has the liberals over the Deplorables by almost 19 to 1. Over 99% of Department of Education employees backed Hillary. Trump’s best showing was in the Department of Defense — and even there Hillary had 84% of contributions. Add to this the liberal dominance in the media (93%) and academe (92%) and in Big Silicon, and it should be a case of progressive Goliath walking over conservative David.
Yet for a variety of reasons, the contest is much closer than the liberals could have imagined. Even the term “Resistance” implicitly accepts the status of equality if not actual inferiority. One possible explanation for the surprising competitiveness is the existence of some weakness which prevents liberals from generating their nominal power potential. In fact, the inability of the Resistance to generate net thrust is indirect confirmation that the toxic lying, wasteful spending, institutional incompetence, and ideological madness of which they have been accused are at least partially true.
Though they won’t admit it, they’ve realized this. This quiet acceptance has driven their strategy. The Resistance’s need to rid itself of weakness explains the choice of rectification, also known as purge, as a major activity. Purges have traditionally been used by “progressive” movements to rid themselves of “undesirables.” In 2017 the purge took two forms. The first was directed against the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, and the second became a vigorous, almost hysterical campaign against sexual predators in liberal ranks. The need to clear the decks was so great that even liberal politicians like Al Franken and John Conyers find themselves reclassified as expendable.
Read the whole thing.
HOW EXERCISE CAN MAKE FOR HEALTHY FAT. “According to a timely new study, a single session of exercise may change the molecular workings of fat tissue in ways that, over time, should improve metabolic health. This finding has particular relevance during the holidays, when, despite our best intentions, so many of us add to our fat stores. Exercise might make these annual bacchanals less metabolically damaging than otherwise.”
For me, at least, exercise also serves as an incentive not to bury all that hard work under a layer of fat.
AND ANOTHER ONE DOWN: Former Congressman Harold Ford Jr. Fired For Misconduct By Morgan Stanley.
In two interviews with HuffPost, the woman alleged that Ford engaged in harassment, intimidation, and forcibly grabbed her one evening in Manhattan, leading her to seek aid from a building security guard. The incident took place several years ago when Ford and the woman were supposed to be meeting for professional reasons. Ford continued to contact her after the encounter until she wrote an email asking him to cease contact.
The email, which was reviewed by HuffPost, shows that the woman emailed Ford after he repeatedly asked her to drinks. She asked him not to contact her anymore, citing his inappropriate conduct the evening where he forcibly grabbed and harassed her. Ford replied to the email by apologizing and agreeing not to contact her.
HuffPost is not identifying the woman at her request but has reviewed emails that confirm her interactions with Ford and spoke to two people whom the woman confided in about the incident. One woman heard from Ford’s accuser the night of the incident and described her as “distraught, shocked, and frightened,” and said that she was concerned about any career ramifications should she report the incident.
Ford comes from a prominent political family in Tennessee. His father, Harold Ford Sr., held a congressional seat for 12 terms before retiring, leaving his son to run for the seat, a race which he won handily.
As the wise man said, “There is no distinctly native American criminal class save Congress.”
ONLY THE PARANOID SURVIVE: What’s Driving Walmart’s Digital Focus? Paranoia, Top Exec Says.
For quite some time, Walmart, No. 1 on Fortune’s Global 500 list of the world’s largest companies with $486 billion in sales last year, has been working to adjust its strategy to reckon with the threat posed by Amazon.com.
The so-called Everything Store had more than 50% of all online retail sales in the U.S. last year and continues to expand at a blistering pace. With its acquisition earlier this year of Whole Foods, Amazon served notice that it is bringing the fight for consumers to Walmart on its own turf—physical stores. Amazon’s market value has risen above $550 billion, significantly above Walmart’s stock market value of around $290 billion despite strong returns for Walmart’s shares this year.
In China, Walmart now has another potent competitor getting into the stores business: Chinese online retail titan Alibaba.
Alibaba announced in November that it was investing $2.9 billion to acquire a 36% stake in Chinese hypermarket operator Sun Art, which has some 400 stores in China similar in scale to Walmart’s superstores. As with Amazon and Whole Foods, Alibaba plans to create a connected retail experience for shoppers between their smartphones and their neighborhood stores.
It’s the same strategy Walmart is pursuing, but in reverse: Amazon and Alibaba want to bring their huge customer bases into stores; Walmart wants to persuade the shoppers who frequent its nearly 12,000 stores globally to do more of their digital shopping with Walmart as well.
Walmart’s online experience is much improved, but Amazon still enjoys amazing customer lock-in with its combination of Prime membership and one-click ordering.
IF THE OBAMACARE MANDATE REPEAL WILL KILL PEOPLE, HOW COME DEATH RATES WENT UP UNDER OBAMACARE?
The increased mortality associated with the Affordable Care Act’s poorly conceived penalty for readmissions is unsurprising to those of us who care for patients. Despite their intent to target avoidable readmissions, the penalties don’t involve a detailed assessment of which readmissions were truly avoidable. In addition to the reasons listed by the Journal, another cause of mortality is prolonged hospital stay as doctors keep patients “just one more day” to be sure they are less likely to “bounce back” to the hospital.
Unfortunately, staying in the hospital longer than needed puts the patient at risk for catching drug-resistant germs, and as doctors seek to justify watching the patient one more day, they subject the patient to additional procedures that are of marginal usefulness but which carry incremental risk of harm. Too often government policy is enacted when bureaucrats ask “what could go wrong?” as a rhetorical question rather than as a serious question.
Ouch.
BUT I HAS THE FEELZ: Law Professor Requires Students to ‘Cluck Like a Chicken’ if They Say ‘I Feel.’
76 YEARS AGO TODAY: 32 historical photos of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Several of these are new to me, including a rare color photo of the effort to save a crewman from the burning USS West Virginia.
MSNBC TURNS TO A FORMER PLO SPOX WHO SAID PALESTINIAN ROCKETS DON’T CARRY EXPLOSIVES.
Huh – who knew Estes Model Rockets had such a big market in the Middle East?
OH: North Korea says nuclear war on Korean Peninsula inevitable.
A nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula is inevitable because of threatening military drills by South Korea and the United States, North Korea’s foreign ministry said in comments carried by the official Korean Central News Agency late Wednesday.
The foreign ministry said the military exercises involving hundreds of South Korean and U.S warplanes made the outbreak of war an “established fact.” It also blamed high-ranking U.S. officials, including CIA Director Mike Pompeo, for “bellicose remarks.”
Pompeo said Saturday that U.S. intelligence agencies believe North Korean leader Kim Jong Un doesn’t have a good idea about how tenuous his situation is domestically and internationally as he pushes ahead with North Kore[a]’s nuclear weapons program.
Indeed. Violent, unpredictable, and now armed with nukes, the Kim Regime is no longer the kind of neighbor China can tolerate having right across the Yalu River.
A NICE CHRISTMAS GIFT FOR THE RIGHT KID: Galoop-a-Doodle: A story about a little girl who really really REALLY wanted a real horse.
TECH WARS: Inside Oracle’s cloak-and-dagger political war with Google.
The story that appeared in Quartz this November seemed shocking enough on its own: Google had quietly tracked the location of its Android users, even those who had turned off such monitoring on their smartphones.
But missing from the news site’s report was another eyebrow-raising detail: Some of its evidence, while accurate, appears to have been furnished by one of Google’s fiercest foes: Oracle.
For the past year, the software and cloud computing giant has mounted a cloak-and-dagger, take-no-prisoners lobbying campaign against Google, perhaps hoping to cause the company intense political and financial pain at a time when the two tech giants are also warring in federal court over allegations of stolen computer code.
Since 2010, Oracle has accused Google of copying Java and using key portions of it in the making of Android. Google, for its part, has fought those claims vigorously. More recently, though, their standoff has intensified. And as a sign of the worsening rift between them, this summer Oracle tried to sell reporters on a story about the privacy pitfalls of Android, two sources confirmed to Recode.
To be sure, the substance of Quartz’s story — Google’s errant location tracking — checks out. Google itself acknowledged the mishap and said it ceased the practice. Nor does Oracle stand alone in raising red flags about Google at a time when many in the nation’s capital are questioning the power and reach of large web platforms.
Still, Oracle’s campaign is undeniable.
A fascinating tale of corporate skullduggery — read the whole thing.
AL FRANKEN ON SENATE FLOOR: Denies allegations; attacks Trump, Moore; resignation in “weeks.”
IN THE MAIL: Walking on the Sea of Clouds.
BRUCE BAWER: The Courage of Larry David.
DA TECH GUY: Waking up to a layoff phone call at Christmastime.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Peter Ingemi (DaTechGuy) is good people. Help him out if you can.
21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Amazon will cause rogue delivery drones to have a controlled self destruct.
The use of UAVs is accompanied by the need for new solutions to various problems, such as service disruptions due to unsuitable weather conditions, equipment malfunctions, and other problems.
In that context, various embodiments related to the fragmentation of UAVs are described. In one case, a UAV includes various parts or components, such one or more motors, batteries, sensors, a housing, casing or shell, and a shipping container or other payload for delivery. Additionally, the UAV includes a flight controller and a fragmentation controller. The flight controller determines a flight path and controls a flight operation of the UAV for delivery of the payload.
While the UAV is in-flight, the fragmentation controller develops and updates a fragmentation sequence. Among other information, the fragmentation sequence includes a release timing and a release location to fragment away (e.g., release, drop, jettison, eject, etc. away) one or more UAV components in case the flight operation of the UAV is disrupted. The fragmentation sequence can be evaluated and updated over time based on the flight path of the UAV, the ongoing flight conditions for the UAV, and the terrain topology over which the UAV is flying, among other factors. Terrain topology information or data can identify certain preferred locations for dropping one or more of the components of the UAV. For example, the terrain topology information can identify bodies of water, forested areas, open fields, and other locations more suitable for dropping components of the UAV if or when flight operation errors, malfunctions, or unexpected conditions occur.
What the article doesn’t describe is what happens to the package.
DEEP STATE UPDATE: #Resistance and the Crisis of Authority in American Politics.
When Leandra English, former chief of staff to the former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, asked a federal judge to block President Trump’s appointment of Mick Mulvaney to replace her departing boss Richard Cordray, and to install her as the CFPB’s rightful leader, Judge Timothy J. Kelly of the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., denied her request. Yet English’s legal team, rejecting the idea that President Trump held the directorship in his hands pursuant to the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1988 and Article II of the Constitution, has since vowed to continue its resistance to the President’s action.
Regardless of what happens next in the CFPB matter, this episode illuminated a crisis of authority pervasive in American politics today. The dysfunction it laid bare tells us that we have forgotten what authority means and are thus no longer capable of identifying where it resides in our political system. The result is a post-political order that delegitimizes conflict and undermines the institutions on which we depend to resolve disagreement and forge compromise in a pluralistic society.
Administrative employees are nominally subject to the control of those appointed by politicians who have won elections, but Democrats embedded in the federal bureaucracy have proclaimed themselves part of the “resistance” to President Trump, and are using their positions to undermine his administration. Bureaucrats thus frustrate the will of the voters. President Trump has been in office for nearly a year, and has yet to take control over the federal bureaucracy that nominally reports to him.
I agree with Professor Barnett that this is a constitutional crisis. The most powerful branch of today’s government is the Fourth: the permanent federal bureaucracy that is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution. The Trump administration can best be viewed, perhaps, as a struggle to the death between American voters and the federal employees who are paid to serve them.
This is a much more dangerous situation that most people appreciate, I think.
America needs more babies.
That’s what policymakers seem to have decided, from the White House to Capitol Hill. Congress spent November considering the Child Tax Credit, a measure that reduces the federal income taxes owed by families with kids. The Senate and the House both voted to raise the credit in their recent tax bills, which will soon be reconciled. Meanwhile, two Democratic senators, Michael Bennet and Sherrod Brown, proposed their own version of an increase. And led by Ivanka Trump, the Trump administration has been softly pushing a child-care tax deduction and federal paid-maternity-leave program.
These programs have been sold as ways to support struggling middle-class families, but they also address another issue: declining birth rates. Government data suggests the U.S. has experienced drops in fertility across multiple measures in recent years. Even Hispanic Americans, who have had high fertility rates compared to other ethnic groups in recent decades, are starting to have fewer babies. Lyman Stone, an economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture who blogs about fertility in his spare time, called this year’s downward fertility trend “the great baby bust of 2017.”
These are the seeds of a nascent pro-natalist movement, a revived push to organize American public policy around childbearing. While putatively pro-family or pro-child policymaking has a long history in the U.S., the latest push has a new face. It’s more Gen X than Baby Boom. It’s pro-working mom. And it upends typical left-right political valences: Measures like the Child Tax Credit find surprising bipartisan support in Congress. Over the last year or so, the window of possibility for pro-natalist policies has widened.
Read the whole thing. I’m beginning to think it was a mistake to listen to Paul Ehrlich.