Author: Seth Anderson

Just another Gen-Xer still posting on a blog

Pope’s Death Penalty Stance Won’t Stop Execution, Nebraska’s Death Penalty Governor Ricketts Says

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Fading One By One
Fading One By One

Via the NYT:

“No one’s happy a man’s life is going to be taken,” said Michael Fischer, 35, a Republican and a financial planner in Omaha who, like many along the streets here, said he supported capital punishment. “But if you take the death penalty off the books, the fear is there won’t be strong discouragement for people to commit crimes.”

(click here to continue reading Pope’s Death Penalty Stance Won’t Stop Execution, Nebraska’s Catholic Governor Says – The New York Times.)

Uhh, it obviously didn’t work so well for the guy on Death Row, did it? How many people are murdered every day in states with death penalties on the books? Dozens? More? Specious reasoning. No, the reason for the death penalty is to take revenge for the cruelty of the universe by killing someone. Revenge killings are bad enough for individuals, but revenge killings by the state is not solving anything.

Should Have Been You
Should Have Been You

On a related point, if one is a Cubs fan, one is also supporting the Death Penalty Governor, Peter Ricketts, in his mission to kill as many humans as he can. 

When Nebraska lawmakers defied Gov. Pete Ricketts in 2015 by repealing the death penalty over his strong objections, the governor wouldn’t let the matter go. Mr. Ricketts, a Republican who is Roman Catholic, tapped his family fortune to help bankroll a referendum to reinstate capital punishment, a measure the state’s Catholic leadership vehemently opposed.

After a contentious and emotional battle across this deep-red state, voters restored the death penalty the following year. Later this month, Nebraska is scheduled to execute Carey Dean Moore, who was convicted of murder, in what would be the state’s first execution in 21 years.

The prospect has renewed a tense debate in a state that has wrestled with the moral and financial implications of the death penalty for years, even before the 2015 attempt to abolish it. Protesters have been holding daily vigils outside the governor’s mansion to oppose Mr. Moore’s execution.

Complicating matters, Pope Francis this week declared that executions are unacceptable in all cases, a shift from earlier church doctrine that had accepted the death penalty if it was “the only practicable way” to defend lives. Coming only days before the scheduled Aug. 14 execution here, the pope’s stance seemed to create an awkward position for Mr. Ricketts, who is favored to win a bid for re-election this fall.

…

Mr. Ricketts, scion of the TD Ameritrade family fortune and an owner of the Chicago Cubs, has made the death penalty a signature issue as he seeks a second term as governor. In the past, he has repeatedly said that capital punishment deters violent crime. He contributed $300,000 to help with a petition drive that led to the restoration of the death penalty by voters.

Mr. Ricketts declined requests to be interviewed for this story, but in an interview in The Omaha World-Herald in 2015, the governor said that his position in favor of executions was in keeping with the tenets of his faith.

…

“As I’ve thought about this and meditated on it and prayed on it and researched it, I’ve determined it’s an important tool.”

Executions are in keeping with the tenets of his faith. Hmmm. Wonder what religion that is exactly? Sounds barbaric. 

Death to The Bullshit Web

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Weaving Your Spells
Weaving Your Spells…

Nick Heer writes about a topic near and dear to our brains, albeit from the web developer side: why do websites load so slowly? And why is our personal data being sold without our informed consent?

The average internet connection in the United States is about six times as fast as it was just ten years ago, but instead of making it faster to browse the same types of websites, we’re simply occupying that extra bandwidth with more stuff. Some of this stuff is amazing: in 2006, Apple added movies to the iTunes Store that were 640 × 480 pixels, but you can now stream movies in HD resolution and (pretend) 4K. These much higher speeds also allow us to see more detailed photos, and that’s very nice.

But a lot of the stuff we’re seeing is a pile-up of garbage on seemingly every major website that does nothing to make visitors happier — if anything, much of this stuff is deeply irritating and morally indefensible.

Take that CNN article, for example. Here’s what it contained when I loaded it:

Eleven web fonts, totalling 414 KB

Four stylesheets, totalling 315 KB

Twenty frames

Twenty-nine XML HTTP requests, totalling about 500 KB

Approximately one hundred scripts, totalling several megabytes — though it’s hard to pin down the number and actual size because some of the scripts are “beacons” that load after the page is technically finished downloading.

The vast majority of these resources are not directly related to the information on the page, and I’m including advertising. Many of the scripts that were loaded are purely for surveillance purposes: self-hosted analytics, of which there are several examples; various third-party analytics firms like Salesforce, Chartbeat, and Optimizely; and social network sharing widgets. They churn through CPU cycles and cause my six-year-old computer to cry out in pain and fury. I’m not asking much of it; I have opened a text-based document on the web.

…

An actual solution recognizes that this bullshit is inexcusable. It is making the web a cumulatively awful place to be. Behind closed doors, those in the advertising and marketing industry can be pretty lucid about how much they also hate surveillance scripts and how awful they find these methods, while simultaneously encouraging their use. Meanwhile, users are increasingly taking matters into their own hands — the use of ad blockers is rising across the board, many of which also block tracking scripts and other disrespectful behaviours. Users are making that choice.

They shouldn’t have to. Better choices should be made by web developers to not ship this bullshit in the first place. We wouldn’t tolerate such intrusive behaviour more generally; why are we expected to find it acceptable on the web?

An honest web is one in which the overwhelming majority of the code and assets downloaded to a user’s computer are used in a page’s visual presentation, with nearly all the remainder used to define the semantic structure and associated metadata on the page. Bullshit — in the form of CPU-sucking surveillance, unnecessarily-interruptive elements, and behaviours that nobody responsible for a website would themselves find appealing as a visitor — is unwelcome and intolerable.

Death to the bullshit web.

(click here to continue reading The Bullshit Web — Pixel Envy.)

All that “surveillance” stuff and related files are an abomination, and pleases no-one. I’ve heard anecdotal reports that even marketing savvy companies don’t frequently use all the data that is collected on their behalf. So who wants it? Unclear to me. I guess the third party data collection industry is happy to vacuum up this data because they can subsequently re-sell our information to the highest bidder, but that’s not a good enough reason to continue making web pages cumbersome.

And as I’ve blabbed about repeatedly, I swear by the script-blocking capabilities of Ghostery, but that is a half-measure, and doesn’t apply to the web-surfing of the vast majority of the populace.

You should read Mr. Heer’s entire post, it is worthy of your time…

 

Un Deletable Cookies Safari
Un-Deletable Cookies – Safari

High Sierra

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Apple Logos
Apple Logos

For reasons, I did not upgrade my Mac to the current OS, High Sierra until this weekend. The new file system1 and its growing pains were the cause of my initial hesitation, but then inertia and procrastination took over. Oh, and that my laptop died after upgrading from the public beta of High Sierra to the Golden Master. Possibly a coincidence, maybe not.

Anyway, over the weekend, I cloned my entire boot disk2 using the essential Mac tool, SuperDuper!, and upgraded. If I wasn’t a digital horder, the clone would have been faster, but I am, so it was not. 

Once I had a complete, bootable copy of my main disk, I installed High Sierra. 

Quoting my request for help at a few Mac sites:

Afterwords, I could not load my Sound Preference panel nor get any sound to display.

Activity Monitor reported:
com.apple.preference.sound.remoteservice (Not Responding)

FWIW, I have a speaker connected to the optical digital port, plus I have an Apple LED Cinema display connected. Both worked fine before this morning.

Where do I begin to troubleshoot this?

I tried a Safe Boot, but same behavior, also logged in as another Admin user, same result. I also deleted com.apple.systempreferences.plist

By process of elimination, and by carefully examining Console logs, I found clues with audio .kext files3. I dug into both ~/Library and Library, removed all .kext and other related files for third party audio apps, including Rogue Amoeba’s Instant On.

Later, I found that Rogue Amoeba had blogged:

 

A small number of our users on High Sierra have experienced a loss of audio on their Macs, with no audio being heard from the computer. This problem can be caused by a conflict between High Sierra and an outdated version of our Instant On audio component (specifically, Instant On version 8.4.3). When Instant On 8.4.3 is installed on High Sierra, MacOS’s audio backend (CoreAudio) can crash, resulting in lost audio.

 

The conflict described only occurs when the outdated Instant On 8.4.3 runs on High Sierra. Well before High Sierra was released, we updated Instant On to fix the incompatibility. Instant On 8.4.4 (and up) has no conflicts on High Sierra, and users who are up-to-date will experience no problems on the new OS. While very few people will be affected by this issue, any number greater than zero is undesirable.

 

 

(click here to continue reading Rogue Amoeba – Under the Microscope » Blog Archive » Fixing an Important High Sierra Incompatibility.)

I then updated Audio Hijack to the latest version, and this fixed everything. Everything!

Yayyyyyy…

Just Passing Time
Just Passing Time

Footnotes:
  1. APFS [↩]
  2. not a bad thing to do anyway on International Check Your Backup Day [↩]
  3. kernel extensions, known also as drivers [↩]

Russia Hawk Axed From National Security Council Right Before Trump-Putin Summit

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Everything Must Be Done Occasionally
Everything Must Be Done Occasionally

Kate Brannen & Spencer Ackerman report:

Russia Hawk Axed From National Security Council Right Before Trump-Putin Summit

Retired Col. Richard Hooker is pro-NATO, skeptical of Russia, and out at the White House.

 Shortly before Donald Trump detonated a NATO summit, shanked the beleaguered British prime minister and prepped for a face-to-face love session with Vladimir Putin, his White House quietly divested itself of a senior official hawkish on Russia and bullish on the transatlantic military alliance.

The circumstances of retired Army Colonel Richard Hooker’s departure from the National Security Council on June 29 are in dispute. It’s not clear whether Hooker was forced out or if his detail on the NSC came to its natural end. But what’s not in doubt is that for the past 15 months, Hooker was senior director for Russia, Europe and NATO.

And just as his new boss, National Security Adviser John Bolton, was preparing to travel to Moscow to meet with Putin on June 27 to lay the groundwork for Trump’s visit, Hooker was packing up his desk. Now, he’s headed back to the National Defense University, the crown jewel of the Pentagon’s cross-service military-education system, which had loaned him to the NSC. Hooker is the latest NSC staffer to leave as Bolton reconfigures the influential policymaking body in his image. Like Hooker, Bolton has long viewed Russia a strategic threat to the United States, and accused Putin of lying to Trump about interfering in the 2016 election.

Hooker, who is highly respected in military circles, would not comment for this story, and an NSC spokesperson declined to comment on the record as well. But many sources familiar with him portrayed him as the sort of consensus defense official common in both Republican and Democratic administrations in the pre-Trump era.

(click here to continue reading Russia Hawk Axed From National Security Council Right Before Trump-Putin Summit.)

If this was just one incident, nobody would blink an eye. But instead, this is another incident where Trump’s sycophancy to Putin is policy. Or what passes for Trumpianism policy. 

You’d think Putin is Trump’s boss or something…

EPA blocks warnings on cancer-causing chemical – formaldehyde

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V O T E
V O T E

Politico reports on why elections matter, part the 567,543,566th:

The Trump administration is suppressing an Environmental Protection Agency report that warns that most Americans inhale enough formaldehyde vapor in the course of daily life to put them at risk of developing leukemia and other ailments, a current and a former agency official told POLITICO.

The warnings are contained in a draft health assessment EPA scientists completed just before Donald Trump became president, according to the officials. They said top advisers to departing Administrator Scott Pruitt are delaying its release as part of a campaign to undermine the agency’s independent research into the health risks of toxic chemicals.

Andrew Wheeler, the No. 2 official at EPA who will be the agency’s new acting chief as of Monday, also has a history with the chemical. He was staff director for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in 2004, when his boss, then-Chairman Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), sought to delay an earlier iteration of the formaldehyde assessment.

Formaldehyde is one of the most commonly used chemicals in the country. Americans are exposed to it through wood composites in cabinets and furniture, as well as air pollution from major refineries. The new assessment would give greater weight to warnings about the chemical’s risks and could lead to stricter regulations from the EPA or class-action lawsuits targeting its manufacturers, as frequently occurs after these types of studies are released.

“They’re stonewalling every step of the way,” the current official said, accusing political appointees of interfering with the formaldehyde assessment and other reports on toxic chemicals produced by EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System. Industry has long faulted the IRIS program, the agency’s only independent scientific division evaluating the health risks of toxic chemicals, whose assessments often form the basis for federal and state regulations.

…

Interfering with the formaldehyde study is one of several steps Trump’s EPA has taken to side with the businesses the agency is supposed to regulate and undermine the agency’s approach to science, critics say. Public health advocates also expressed alarm after Pruitt replaced academic scientists with industry advocates on the agency’s influential science advisory boards and sought to limitthe types of human health research the EPA can rely on in rulemakings.

The officials said Trump appointees have required that career officials receive their permission before beginning the required internal review of the formaldehyde study and have canceled key briefings that would have advanced it. That interference came after EPA career scientists revised the study once already last year to insulate it from political controversy, they said.

(click here to continue reading Sources: EPA blocks warnings on cancer-causing chemical – POLITICO.)

So, scientists at the EPA are leaking to Politico because they don’t want to be hauled in to defend themselves in a class action law suit in a few years…

Tomorrow We Vote
Tomorrow We Vote

Just out of morbid curiosity, I googled formaldehyde manufacturers, and one of the first to come up is Georgia Pacific. You may recall their owner: Koch Industries. The EPA stonewalling makes a lot more sense now, doesn’t it?

And this isn’t a new story, as it was discussed back in 2010, for instance

Kevin Grandia reported:

Our research has uncovered very strong ties between Georgia-Pacific, a company co-owned by David Koch through Koch Industries, and a political lobby group called the Formaldehyde Council that is involved in efforts to downplay the dangers posed by formaldehyde to human health.

Formaldehyde is classified as a “Group 1 Carcinogen” which is defined as an agent that “is definitely carcinogenic to humans” by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), and “a complete carcinogen” in the words of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The National Toxicology Program also recently revised its characterization of formaldehyde to that of “known human carcinogen.”

But this determination by top scientists and researchers has not stopped Formaldehyde Council Inc. from trying to convince lawmakers on Capitol Hill that the links between Formaldehyde and cancer are highly overstated.

…

According to IRS filings [pdf], the Formaldehyde Council was formed in 1995 with the mission to,

“encourage accurate scientific evaluation of Formaldehyde and Formaldehyde-based materials and to communicate sound scientific information relating to the uses, benefits and sustainability of these products.”
The Council’s operating budget in 2008 was $2.7 million and it reported $2 million in “membership dues and assessments.”

David Koch’s company, Georgia-Pacific, one of the largest manufacturers of Formaldehyde in the United States, is listed on the Formaldehyde Council’s website as a “member” since at least 2004.

(click here to continue reading Koch Industries Funds Attack on Science Linking Formaldehyde and Cancer | HuffPost.)

We need to have leaders in the EPA who actually care about protecting the environment, and our health, and not the profits of polluters like the Koch family.

Trump’s trade war is hurting the dairy industry

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CE Zuercher Co Wholesale Cheese
CE Zuercher & Co Wholesale Cheese

As part of our continuing mocking of Trump-voting industries being screwed by Trump, Slate reports:

As the Wall Street Journal reports Thursday, Mexico and China have decided to target up to $986 million worth of American dairy exports with tariffs as retaliation for the Trump administration’s protectionist moves. Mexico is increasing its duty on cheese, while China is hitting cheese and whey. With their growing middle-class populations, both countries have become important markets in recent years for the U.S. dairy industry, which has found itself struggling with overproduction in the face of declining domestic milk consumption. Milk futures for July are down since Mexico announced its tariffs earlier this year—the last time the country imposed similar tariffs on U.S. cheese, shipments fell by 26 percent—and companies are already fretting. The president of Wisconsin’s BelGioioso Cheese called the situation “a nightmare.”

This is part of a larger pattern for the Trump administration, which the New York Times documents at length. So far, the administration’s efforts on trade and regulation have ended up hurting the very industries they claim to be helping. The 10 percent tariff Trump placed on aluminum, for instance, has made raw materials more expensive for most of the companies that actually produce aluminum products in the U.S., since they’re generally in the business of importing those raw materials and shaping them into more valuable upstream products. Steel tariffs have made pumping crude more expensive for oil companies by adding to the cost of building rigs and buying equipment. Soybean prices are crashing in response to Chinese tariff threats. Detroit’s car-makers are worried about potential tariffs on foreign autos, with executives warning about possible retaliation. The law of unintended consequences is playing out, or about to play out, in sector after sector of the economy.

(click here to continue reading Trump’s trade war is hurting the dairy industry..)

I would guess many dairy company owners and employees in Wisconsin are starting to regret voting for the Trump trauma train… 

Global Cheese
Global Cheese, Kensington Market, Toronto

WSJ:

 Cheese makers that rely on foreign sales are suffering as China and Mexico raise tariffs on U.S. mozzarella and provolone.

 BelGioioso Cheese Inc., a second-generation family company in Wisconsin, has seen sales to Mexico drop since officials there implemented tariffs of up to 15% in early June on most U.S. cheese. The levies were a response to tariffs the U.S. placed on Mexican steel and aluminum.

 On Thursday, Mexico was slated to raise its levy on most U.S. cheese to as much as 25%, while China on Friday is implementing tariffs on $34 billion of U.S. goods, including cheese and whey, a dairy byproduct often fed to livestock.

 “It’s a nightmare,” said BelGioioso President Errico Auricchio.

…

The Trump administration’s trade agenda is threatening that growth, dairies say. The Mexican tariffs affect as much as $578 million in U.S. dairy goods, while China’s duties could hit $408 million of cheese, whey and other products, according to U.S. Chamber of Commerce data.

July milk futures have dropped 12% since Mexico announced May 31 that it would strike back with tariffs. The price for a barrel, or 500 pounds, of white cheddar last week hit its lowest level since 2009. More cheese is in cold storage in the U.S. than any time since the U.S. Department of Agriculture began keeping track in 1917.

…

U.S. dairy exports last year totaled $5.5 billion, including $1.3 billion to Mexico, the top market, according to the Export Council. China, meanwhile, bought more than $577 million in U.S. dairy products last year, nearly half of it whey. (The recent tariffs don’t affect all dairy exports to Mexico and China.) Almost half of U.S. whey sales went to China last year, the Export Council said. The threat of the Chinese tariffs that take effect Friday has already hurt those sales. 

 

(click here to continue reading Take Our Cheese, Please: American Cheese Makers Suffer Under New Tariffs – WSJ.)

How Trump’s Policy Decisions Undermine the Industries He Pledged to Help

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Trump As Joker
Trump As Joker (source unknown)

As part of a continuing series about Trump supporters who have gotten screwed by Trump’s erratic trade policy pronouncements, the NYT reports:

In late March, the Trump administration began imposing a 25 percent tariff on steel and a 10 percent tariff on aluminum from countries including Russia, China, Turkey and Brazil. On June 1, it expanded the levies to include Canada, Mexico and the European Union.

While the steel industry supports the tariffs, the aluminum industry is mostly opposed. The tariffs raise prices for aluminum, which helps smelters, the companies that make raw aluminum here. However, only a handful of smelters still operate in the United States.

The Aluminum Association, which represents the bulk of the American industry, says that 97 percent of American jobs in aluminum are at what are called “downstream” businesses that shape the metal into things like auto parts or other goods. Those companies are hurt by Mr. Trump’s tariffs, because they must now pay higher prices for their raw materials.

(click here to continue reading How Trump’s Policy Decisions Undermine the Industries He Pledged to Help – The New York Times.)

It turns out electing a president who gets all his policy ideas from Fox News maybe isn’t such a good thing for the nation. Who woulda guessed?

Storing Wheat Agfa Scala 200
Storing Wheat / Soy – Agfa Scala 200

And yet, despite all the evidence of Trump’s incompetence, and indifference, some Trumpsters remain on the Trump train:

“I would like to tell the president, ‘Man, you are messing up our market,’” said Kevin Scott, a soybean farmer in South Dakota and the secretary of the American Soybean Association. The idea of changing Nafta, he said, “gives us a lot of heartburn in farm country.”

 At the same time, Mr. Scott said, China’s threat to impose tariffs this weekon United States soybeans — in direct response to Mr. Trump’s tariffs on other Chinese-made products — is already having a negative effect on the prices farmers see. In recent days, Canada imposed its own retaliatory tariffs against the United States. And on Friday, General Motors warned that Mr. Trump’s threat of tariffs on imported cars could backfire, killing American jobs and leading to “a smaller G.M.”

Mr. Scott voted for Mr. Trump, and he approves of administration efforts to roll back environmental regulations, “But if we lose those Chinese and Mexican markets, it will be hard to get them back,” he said. China and Mexico are the two biggest markets for American soybean exports.

Richard Newell, president of Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington, described the administration’s overall approach as “whac-a-mole policy” that suggests a lack of appreciation of the complexity of global commerce. “The law of unintended consequences abounds,” Mr. Newell added.

Trump repeatedly suggested invading Venezuela

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Trump Eventually We Will Get Something Done
Trump: Eventually We Will Get Something Done

The Guardian UK reports on an AP story filed earlier today:

Donald Trump repeatedly raised the possibility of invading Venezuela in talks with his top aides at the White House, according to a new report.

Trump brought up the subject of an invasion in public in August last year, saying: “We have many options for Venezuela, including a possible military option, if necessary.” But the president’s musings about the possibility of a US invasion were more extensive and persistent than that public declaration, according to the Associated Press.

The previous day Trump reportedly took his top officials by surprise in an Oval Office meeting, asking why the US could not intervene to remove the government of Nicolas Maduro on the grounds that Venezuela’s political and economic unraveling represented a threat to the region.

Quoting an unnamed senior administration official, the AP report said the suggestion stunned those present at the meeting, which included the then national security advisor, HR McMaster, and secretary of state, Rex Tillerson. Both have since left the administration.

The administration officials are said to have taken turns in trying to talk him out of the idea, pointing out that any such military action would alienate Latin American allies who had supported the US policy of punitive sanctions on the Maduro regime.

Their arguments do not seem to have dissuaded the president.

A grim-faced Tillerson stood alongside Trump the next day at his New Jersey golf course at Bedminster as the president warmed to his theme.

“We have many options for Venezuela, this is our neighbour,” Trump said.

“We’re all over the world and we have troops all over the world in places that are very very far away, Venezuela is not very far away and the people are suffering and dying. We have many options for Venezuela including a possible military option if necessary.”

(click here to continue reading Trump repeatedly suggested invading Venezuela, stunning top aides – report | US news | The Guardian.)

Honestly, this scares me quite a bit. Trump is a creature of the corporate media (Fox, obviously, but CNN and the major newspapers too – Trump cares if they cover him), and has been trained by years of corporate media’s jingoistic support of any military action the United States happens to be involved in. Trump saw what happened to Bush’s ratings during the Iraq War1, how the invasion of Grenada played out, Noriega’s overthrow, yadda yadda. Trump is looking for any excuse to send our troops into battle, not for any geopolitical reasons, but to juice his approval ratings.

Footnotes:
  1. both of them, actually, Bush the Smarter, and W’s adventures in the Middle East [↩]

The Shrinking Ambitions of Donald Trump’s Infrastructure Plan

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Stop Standing So Still 

The Nation reports:

Other than shouting about building a wall on the US-Mexico border, one of Donald Trump’s most frequently proclaimed promises on the 2016 campaign trail was the launching of a half-trillion-dollar plan to repair America’s crumbling infrastructure (employing large numbers of workers in the process). Eighteen months into his administration, no credible proposal for anything near that scale has been made. To the extent that the Trump administration has a plan at all for public investment, it involves pumping up Pentagon spending, not investing in roads, bridges, transportation, better Internet access, or other pressing needs of the civilian economy.

Not that President Trump hasn’t talked about investing in infrastructure. Last February, he even proposed a scheme that, he claimed, would boost the country’s infrastructure with $1.5 trillion in spending over the next decade. With a typical dose of hyperbole, he described it as “the biggest and boldest infrastructure investment in American history.”

Analysts from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania—Trump’s alma mater—beg to differ. They note that the plan actually involves only $200 billion in direct federal investment, less than one-seventh of the total promised. According to Wharton’s experts, much of the extra spending, supposedly leveraged from the private sector as well as state and local governments, will never materialize. In addition, were such a plan launched, it would, they suggest, fall short of its goal by a cool trillion dollars. In the end, the spending levels Trump is proposing would have “little to no impact” on the nation’s gross domestic product. To add insult to injury, the president has exerted next to no effort to get even this anemic proposal through Congress, where it’s now dead in the water.

(click here to continue reading The Shrinking Ambitions of Donald Trump’s ‘Infrastructure’ Plan | The Nation.)

Is anyone surprised? Really? Has Trump acted upon any of his campaign promises, other than his anti-immigrant histrionics? Even that is more flailing about than pouring concrete to build his Mexico wall. Creating actionable political plans is not something Trump’s team has ever been competent at, why should infrastructure be any different? 

A Poem Interrupted By Jealousy
A Poem Interrupted By Jealousy

Chicago Avenue Bridge is For Sale

Seth Anderson0 comment

Chicago Avenue Bridge For Sale
Chicago Avenue Bridge For Sale

The funny thing is that this isn’t a joke! 

Loop North News reports:

 According to a public notice on the city’s website, the Chicago Avenue Bridge over the north branch of the Chicago River is available to anyone who will remove it at their expense, maintain it, and assume all financial responsibility.

 Otherwise, the bridge is expected to be demolished so that a non-movable concrete and steel bridge can be built.

The city is asking interested parties to send a letter by July 13 detailing means of funding, how the bridge will be moved, how quickly it will be moved, and where it will be moved to.

The current bridge at Chicago Avenue, a pony truss bascule bridge, opened to traffic in 1912, replacing a swing bridge that had been there since 1849. It was one of the first of the Chicago River bridges to have an operator house made of concrete and not wood. According to a 1911 report by Chicago Department of Public Works, the city intended to eventually build a subway under Chicago Avenue, and so the Chicago Avenue Bridge was specially designed to accommodate future construction of a double subway tunnel.

Today, with its rusted surfaces, broken lights, and loose wire, the bridge has suffered from lack of regular maintenance, according to Ward Miller, executive director of Preservation Chicago.

 

 

(click here to continue reading City offers Chicago Avenue Bridge free to good home – Loop North News.)

A shame that something engineered so well it lasted over 100 years is going to be discarded because the City has other priorities. 

Oxidized Infrastructure
Oxidized Infrastructure

Chicago Avenue Bridge
Chicago Avenue Bridge

The Days Fell On Their Knees
The Days Fell On Their Knees

Easier To Think
Easier To Think

Carter H Harrison Mayor marker Chicago Avenue Bridge
Carter H Harrison Mayor marker – Chicago Avenue Bridge (I think. Maybe Grand Ave?)

Facebook conducting mass surveillance through its apps

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Surveillance Society Halsted and Division Edition
Surveillance Society – Halsted and Division Edition

The Guardian reports:

Facebook used its apps to gather information about users and their friends, including some who had not signed up to the social network, reading their text messages, tracking their locations and accessing photos on their phones, a court case in California alleges.

The claims of what would amount to mass surveillance are part of a lawsuit brought against the company by the former startup Six4Three, listed in legal documents filed at the superior court in San Mateo as part of a court case that has been ongoing for more than two years.

A Facebook spokesperson said that Six4Three’s “claims have no merit, and we will continue to defend ourselves vigorously”.

…

The allegations about surveillance appear in a January filing, the fifth amended complaint made by Six4Three. It alleges that Facebook used a range of methods, some adapted to the different phones that users carried, to collect information it could use for commercial purposes.

“Facebook continued to explore and implement ways to track users’ location, to track and read their texts, to access and record their microphones on their phones, to track and monitor their usage of competitive apps on their phones, and to track and monitor their calls,” one court document says.

(click here to continue reading Facebook accused of conducting mass surveillance through its apps | Technology | The Guardian.)

This is Facebook’s business model though, so what exactly are they going to argue? No, we don’t collect data on our users and then use this information to sell advertising to corporations? 

The one detail that is the most disturbing1 is that Facebook did this for people who weren’t Facebook users. How did these people consent? How do they request their data? How do they update their privacy settings?

Footnotes:
  1. and we’ve noted it previously [↩]

Letter of Recommendation: Drinking at Lunch Is A Good Thing

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Bringing In the New Cheer
Bringing In the New Cheer

Adam Sternbergh of The New York Times reports on a topic dear to my heart:

I may be wrong, but my hunch is that, when you go out for lunch with colleagues or even just office friends, you don’t order a martini, let alone three. I’ll wager you don’t order a beer, a glass of wine or a brandy-soaked cherries jubilee. That’s because, a few decades after the heyday of the notorious “three-martini lunch,” the act of ordering even one measly martini with your lunch on a workday is viewed as roughly equivalent to pulling out your heroin works and splaying them on the table between courses.

Would it surprise you to learn that the three-martini lunch was once such a staple of the American workday that it was celebrated by the former President Gerald Ford in 1978? Addressing the National Restaurant Association, Ford called the practice “the epitome of American efficiency. Where else can you get an earful, a bellyful and a snootful at the same time?” The three-martini lunch may be remembered as an anachronistic ritual during which backslapping company men escaped a swallowing sense of existential pointlessness. But Ford’s joke about efficiency ironically suggests exactly why the martini-at-lunch disappeared: not because of some renewed sense of temperance but because of our ascendant obsession with cramming every minute of our day with work.

When the Italian brewer Birra Moretti commissioned a poll in 2011 on daytime drinking habits among American workers, it found that, whereas nearly half of Italians reported they were “inclined” to have a drink with lunch, only 20 percent of Americans reported the same inclination.

…

This might explain how we’ve arrived at this improbable moment when microdosing LSD in order to increase workplace productivity is, in some precincts, more professionally acceptable than having a glass of wine. But it’s not LSD that has replaced our midday cocktails; it’s that other modern intoxicant: productivity.

(click here to continue reading Letter of Recommendation: Drinking at Lunch – The New York Times.)

Classic Martini Hendrick s
Classic Martini – Hendrick’s

As someone who has been self-employed for a while, I don’t have a compunction about day drinking, when appropriate. If I’m meeting a prospective new client, and they are open to having a glass of wine with lunch, I’ll join them, but I won’t be the first to order it. However, if I’m the one being wooed by a prospective new business associate, wine with lunch is absolutely encouraged, or beer if sushi is on the menu. If I’m lunching with associates I already know, or eating to brainstorm, or similar kinds of “working lunches”, again, having a glass or two1 of something is absolutely encouraged. Some meals, I prefer the dose of caffeine of a good green tea, but often will also order an alcoholic beverage for after. 

21st C.E. Americans are weird though. This nation was founded on strong ale, cider, and eventually rye whiskey2 – we should not be adverse to having a tipple in the middle of the day.

Vieux Carré with Armagnac and Few Rye
Vieux Carré with Armagnac and Few Rye

Drinking like Don Draper is not required, you should still be able to go back to work after your meal and not end up on a three day bender.

Martini Hour
Martini Hour

Footnotes:
  1. never more [↩]
  2. look up your early American history, if you’ve forgotten [↩]

Trump donor vows to cut off funding to Republicans who don’t back DACA immigration fix

Seth Anderson0 comment

Screaming In the Night
Screaming In the Night

The Chicago Tribune reports:

Frustrated by congressional gridlock, WeatherTech founder David MacNeil, a megadonor to Donald Trump’s inauguration, said Friday he is cutting off funding to any Republican candidate who doesn’t support pending legislation protecting young immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children.

“I’m not supporting politicians that aren’t working hard to get this done, from the dogcatcher on up,” MacNeil said by phone from Italy, where he was traveling.

MacNeil, an entrepreneur who built a car floor mat manufacturing empire in south suburban Bolingbrook, donated $1 million to Trump’s January 2017 inauguration. He shares the “made in America” mantra that dominated Trump’s campaign, as well as the call for tighter border security.

But Trump’s September decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program has hit home for MacNeil, who has at least two people covered by the program among the 1,600 employees at WeatherTech.

(click here to continue reading WeatherTech founder, a Trump donor, vows to cut off funding to Republicans who don’t back DACA immigration fix – Chicago Tribune.)

I’d be more sympathetic to this dude if he put his money where his mouth is, and supported the party that actually does support a DACA immigration fix: the Democratic Party. But for Mr. MacNeil, the other parts of the Republican agenda are just fine: shredding the social safety net, reversing Roe vs. Wade, tax cuts for the 1% and corporations, destroying the EPA, etc. etc. But not immigration reform.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  

So, uh, yeah, I’m not throwing a party for David MacNeil. 

Vermont passes first law to crack down on data brokers

Seth Anderson0 comment

Data Dump
Data Dump

TechCrunch reports:

While Facebook and Cambridge Analytica are hogging the spotlight, data brokers that collect your information from hundreds of sources and sell it wholesale are laughing all the way to the bank. But they’re not laughing in Vermont, where a first-of-its-kind law hems in these dangerous data mongers and gives the state’s citizens much-needed protections.

Data brokers in Vermont will now have to register as such with the state; they must take standard security measures and notify authorities of security breaches (no, they weren’t before); and using their data for criminal purposes like fraud is now its own actionable offense.

If you’re not familiar with data brokers, well, that’s the idea. These companies don’t really have a consumer-facing side, instead opting to collect information on people from as many sources as possible, buying and selling it amongst themselves like the commodity it has become.

This data exists in a regulatory near-vacuum. As long as they step carefully, data brokers can maintain what amounts to a shadow profile on consumers. I talked with director of the World Privacy Forum, Pam Dixon, about this practice.

“If you use an actual credit score, it’s regulated under the Fair Credit Reporting Act,” she told me. “But if you take a thousand points like shopping habits, zip code, housing status, you can create a new credit score; you can use that and it’s not discrimination.”

And while medical data like blood tests are protected from snooping, it’s not against the law for a company to make an educated guess your condition from the medicine you pay for at the local pharmacy. Now you’re on a secret list of “inferred” diabetics, and that data gets sold to, for example, Facebook, which combines it with its own metrics and allows advertisers to target it.

(click here to continue reading Vermont passes first law to crack down on data brokers | TechCrunch.)

Exactly why I wish the US would implement its own version of the GDPR that we’ve discussed. Corporations that mine our digital data, and sell it, and resell it, without oversight, or without giving “a taste” to the consumer are corporations that need to be regulated and watched by a consumer protection agency of some kind. Not every consumer is savvy enough to obfuscate their tracks, and honestly, even somewhat savvy consumers are no doubt caught up in these nameless corporations’ databases. Corporations like Equifax, Quotient and Catalina Marketing and a few thousand others don’t really need to use browser cookies anymore, they also use the unique ID of your devices, they track your IP numbers down to your block group, and can track you at home, at office, via phone, via credit card, via geolocation and via other means. I find it Orwellian and creepy.

My sincere wish is that Vermont continues on this path of regulation of the wild, wild web of data brokers, and that other states and the entire country follows suit.