NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: I plan to pay for my agenda by … er …
Archive for 2018
July 27, 2018
LYFT WILL BE BEEFING UP BACKGROUND CHECKS AFTER DRIVER ARRESTED FOR RAPE: This is a real land mine area for employers (or anything that looks like an employer). You can be damned if you do or damned if you don’t. If you check into a job applicant’s criminal record, you may end up being held in violation of Title VII. (Somehow we got ourselves into the position of believing that an employer who wouldn’t dream of discriminating on the basis of race is engaged in race discrimination if he or she checks into whether job applicants have criminal records.) If you don’t check, and something bad happens, you may be liable for negligent hiring or for the underlying harm via respondent superior.
If you are interested in just how messed up the law is here, I wrote about it in connection with a report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights a few years ago.
UNION BLUES: New UAW Corruption Scandal Details Implicate Union at Highest Level.
As part of a plea agreement filed this week, ex-labor official Nancy Adams Johnson told investigators that Williams specifically directed union members to use funds from Detroit’s automakers, funneled through training centers, to pay for union travel, meals, entertainment, and more. If true, the accusation not only implicates the UAW of corruption at the highest level but also the potential involvement of staff from both Ford and General Motors — something the FBI is already looking into.
I believe the official industry term for something like this is a “shit show.”
Based on my experience with Teamsters in the steel industry, I wouldn’t be surprised if the official term for something like this is “union business as usual.”
AUSTRALIAN MEDIA CLAIM: Trump May Bomb Iran as Soon as Next Month.
ANDREW KLAVAN: Trump Negotiates, the Press Lies.
Donald Trump is a negotiator, as he has told us from the start. Not everything he says means what it means. Not every final decision he makes is final. And just because he says he loves you, that doesn’t mean he does. He’s in motion toward a goal, and the truth is in the motion. By now, most of us get this.
Except the press. They just hate him too much to take him as he is — to take him as he has always said he is. They don’t accept he’s in a moving negotiation. If he says it’s over and it’s not over, they call him a liar. If he says he loves Putin, they declare he loves Putin. By now, most of us understand that Trump doesn’t operate that way. Not the press.
To be fair, they don’t want to understand — but do read the whole thing.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: IBM Watson recommended ‘unsafe’ cancer treatments, according to internal documents.
According to the internal slide deck, the problem stems from this Watson product being trained on a small number of “synthetic,” hypothetical cancer patients, rather than real-world cases. The accuracy of any AI is dependent on being trained on a large dataset—the larger and more accurate the dataset, the better. Watson’s recommendations were based on expert advice from specialists on each cancer type but not masses of actual cancer treatment cases. The result has been recommendations that are not on part with national treatment guidelines, according to Stat News.
This sounds like a self-correcting problem, as Watson gets more and more real-world data to chew on.
THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: Forcing staff to start work before 10 a.m. is tantamount to torture.
Also at the PJM Live Blog: Coca-Cola set to raise prices due to metal tariffs.
TO DO GOOD IS NOBLE. TO TELL OTHERS TO DO GOOD IS NOBLER, AND BETTER-PAYING: ‘That’s … ridiculous.’ Florida domestic violence chief is paid $761,000 a year.
IN THE MAIL: The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump.
Plus, Today’s Gold Box and Lightning Deals.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Facebook’s Stock Plunge Is a Problem of Mark Zuckerberg’s Own Making. “Too cagey, too clever, and too dismissive of users’ concerns.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE? This Website Lets You Track F-35 Stealth Fighters.
An Israeli F-35 was tracked by flight tracking site flightradar24, according to aviation Web site The Aviationist.
One might wonder why a stealth combat aircraft was operating with its transponder on. One possibility is that it was a deliberate move to let Israel’s enemies — notably Syria and Iran — that Israel’s F-35s are out there. Such actions are not unprecedented.
“Increasingly, RC-135s and other strategic ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] platforms, including Global Hawks, operate over highly sensitive regions, such as Ukraine or the Korean Peninsula, with the ADS-B and Mode-S turned on, so that even commercial off the shelf receivers (or public tracking websites) can monitor them,” notes the Aviationist.
However, Israel has made no secret that its first F-35I Adir squadron went operational last year, and that the aircraft has already made its combat debut with strikes on Syria earlier this year. So what would be gained by briefly making an aircraft visible on flight trackers?
Pilot error is the safe guess.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Sad State Of Higher Education.
The state of the American university remains precarious for several reasons. College costs and student debt have reached a level beyond which they cannot keep rising indefinitely. Colleges keep expanding their use of badly paid adjunct professors hired after only a perfunctory look at their credentials. These adjuncts increased from about 13 percent of the faculty in 1988 to about 51 percent in 2011; in 2011 another 29 percent were instructors not eligible for tenure, and only 21 percent were tenured professors.
Meanwhile, a growing number of courses are available on the Internet, many for free, raising the question of why students should pay as much as $4,000 for a classroom course when they can take a better course for much less or for nothing. At the same time, many American voters, state legislators, and governors who have a low opinion of professors and their ideas are becoming still more reluctant to subsidize higher education through taxes. Between 1987 and 2012, state and local spending on higher education per full-time student fell by 30.6 percent in constant dollars, while tuition at state and local institutions rose by 100.5 percent.
Read the whole thing.
PAPER BALLOTS CAN BE FAKED, BUT THEY CAN’T BE HACKED FROM A BASEMENT IN MINSK — OR BEIJING: Devin Nunes calls for ban on electronic voting systems.
I’ve been calling for a return to paper ballots for over 15 years.
HMM: EPA Reverses Course, Will Now Enforce Obama-Era Regulations On Used Trucks.
Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler decided current regulations limiting the sale of glider kits — refurbished truck engines placed into new bodies — did not warrant a delay in enforcement, according to a source familiar with the matter.
EPA has been working to repeal Obama administration-era glider regulations for months, but hurdles just seem to keep getting in the way. Agency officials have dragged their feet on finalizing the repeal and the White House made EPA do a cost-benefit analysis that slowed the process down.
All the while, emails suggest lobbyists with truck manufacturers opposed to repealing glider regulations colluded with career EPA officials to undermine the Trump administration’s agenda.
Rent-seekers gotta seek rents.