Meanwhile, at the Criminal Enterprise Formerly Known as Facebook™

It appears that Mark Zuckerberg and his Evil Minions™ have been obstructing inquiries into harms to children by his social media sites.

Gee, you mean that Facebook has been less than forthcoming?  Color me shocked. (Not) 

Senators are accusing Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg of stonewalling hundreds of their questions after the mogul testified at a blockbuster hearing earlier this year about concerns that major tech companies are failing to adequately protect children online.

Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee hammered Zuckerberg and the CEOs of TikTok, Snap, Discord and X over those allegations during the nearly four hour-long session in January.

But it was Zuckerberg who appeared to get the brunt of the criticism, at one point being pressured to apologize to families in the hearing room whose children experienced harm on social media.

Now lawmakers say Zuckerberg and Meta are failing to take their follow-up questions seriously as they continue to investigate how digital platforms may exacerbate the spread of child-abuse material online.

The panel on Monday released hundreds of pages of written responses from the companies to additional lawmaker inquiries — a common post-hearing practice on Capitol Hill. But lawmakers took exception to the 35-page reply from Meta, which they said had not been fully forthright.

Josh Sorbe, a Senate Judiciary spokesman, said that while the committee gave Zuckerberg “multiple extensions” to respond after the session, the chief executive “answered only a small fraction of members’ questions” six weeks after receiving them — less than 10 percent.

“His lack of urgency in responding to members’ questions proves yet again that neither he nor his company is committed to protecting children online,” Sorbe said. “It is more important than ever for the Senate to pass our kids’ online safety bills and finally hold Big Tech accountable.”

Harming children is profitable.  Don't expect Meta to cooperate in the removal of a major profit center for them.

A Feature, Not a Bug

In a study that will almost certainly be ignored by the inside the beltway crowd, it was found that Medicare Advantage is charging the US government 22% more for services than its government run counterpart.

One should remember that this is even though Medicare Advantage routinely screws its customers when they get seriously ill:

'A difference that translates into a projected $83 billion in 2024,' one report found

If Joe Biden or Donald Trump or anyone else wants to know how to "cut" tens of billions from the Medicare budget without taking a single nickel from seniors, an obscure government body just revealed how.

But nobody seemed to notice.

The body in question is called the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, or MedPac. It is an independent, authoritative body that advises Congress on Medicare. It was set up by the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, back when people in Washington were actually doing their jobs.

It just published its latest report to Congress, entitled "Medicare Payment Policy." And the key thing everyone needs to read is on page "XXV," which is how they used to say "25" in Rome.

It reads: "We estimate that Medicare spends approximately 22 percent more for MA enrollees than it would spend if those beneficiaries were enrolled in FFS Medicare, a difference that translates into a projected $83 billion in 2024."

"MA" means Medicare Advantage. ""FFS Medicare" means traditional "Fee-For-Service" Medicare.

In other words: The private insurers who now run more than half of all Medicare plans are overcharging the taxpayers by a staggering $83 billion a year. They are charging us taxpayers 22% more than it would cost us to provide the same health insurance to seniors directly, if we just cut out the private insurance companies as middlemen.

………

 To put it in context, that is nearly 10% of the entire Medicare budget.

It's more than twice as much as it would cost simply to provide free dental, hearing and vision care to all traditional Medicare beneficiaries, not just those in private "Medicare Advantage" plans.

………

Medicare Advantage was set up in the early 1980s to introduce some competition into Medicare. The theory was that private insurers might be more efficient than Uncle Sam at providing health insurance to seniors.

It was a nice idea in theory. The only problem? It has never worked. Never. 

It should be noted that the source for this story, Morningstar, is not some left wing advocate for single payer, they are a research and investment management firm.

The application of the private profit motive to healthcare has been a disaster since the beginning of modern medicine.

Today in the Exploits of Former Governor Rat-F%$#

It turns out that former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan pushed for Baltimore Harbor to serve larger ships and ignored safety issues while in office.

Unfortunately, the story is from Lever News, and not the Baltimore Sun or Washington Post,  so I do not know how much traction this will get.

It's important to note here that Larry Hogan never gave a crap about the safety of Baltimore, because his entire political strategy was to demonize black people, like his political idol Ronald Reagan did, and a crucial part of his tactic was to demonize Baltimore City and starve it for resources.  (Hence no improvements to the protections for the Key Bridge)

Days after a massive cargo ship collided with the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Larry Hogan called for the federal government to foot the bill for the bridge’s reconstruction. Hogan’s demand follows his efforts as Maryland’s governor to attract such outsized cargo vessels to Baltimore’s port in the first place — despite safety warnings from an insurance giant and transportation experts.

Regardless of those concerns, Hogan’s gubernatorial administration pledged that bringing ever-larger cargo ships to Baltimore would strengthen the economy — and even improve safety.

His administration’s major public-private partnership to attract such mega-ships promised that it “reduces the occurrences of crashes, fatalities, and injuries among transportation users.”

Hogan appointed the head of dredging contractors’ lobbying group to run the port amid the much-celebrated expansion that doled out lucrative dredging and construction contracts.

As the insurance conglomerate Allianz was spotlighting the dangers of large cargo ships, Hogan positioned himself as his state’s highest-profile supporter of the mega-ship industry — at one point declaring that thanks to his administration’s investments, “every year we are seeing larger and larger container ships choosing the Port of Baltimore.”

During the Republican governor’s tenure, mega-ship traffic in Baltimore exploded, transporting record amounts of cargo through the port worth billions of dollars. But as the port expanded with Hogan’s support, experts say the Key Bridge, as it was commonly known, may not have been fortified for the possibility of a collision with such large ships — even though a cargo vessel had already crashed into the bridge a few decades earlier, when ships were smaller.

Hogan, who is now running for one of Maryland’s U.S. Senate seats, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Of course Hogan did not respond to requests for comment.

He wants to keep his role in the disaster on the down low.

Maybe Now We Will See a Push for Privacy Legislation?

Normally, I am not one to take the side of data brokers, who make their business your business, but I am profoundly amused that a data broker has outed visitors to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s private island.

Of course, I'm sure that they had good business causes to be down there.  They were probably funding his movie, Close Encounters with the Third Grade.

Nearly 200 mobile devices of people who visited Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious “pedophile island” in the years prior to his death left an invisible trail of data pointing back to their own homes and offices. Maps of these visitations generated by a troubled international data broker with defense industry ties, discovered last week by WIRED, document the numerous trips of wealthy and influential individuals seemingly undeterred by Epstein’s status as a convicted sex offender.

The data amassed by Near Intelligence, a location data broker roiled by allegations of mismanagement and fraud, reveals with high precision the residences of many guests of Little Saint James, a United States Virgin Islands property where Epstein is accused of having groomed, assaulted, and trafficked countless women and girls.

Some girls, prosecutors say, were as young as 14. The former attorney general of the US Virgin Islands alleged that girls as young as 12 were trafficked to Epstein by those within his elite social circle.

………

Little is known publicly about Epstein’s activities in the decade prior to his 2019 arrest. The majority of women who came forward that year to accuse the convicted pedophile in court say they were assaulted in the ’90s and early 2000s.

Now, however, 11,279 coordinates obtained by WIRED show not only a flood of traffic to Epstein’s island property—nearly a decade after his conviction as a sex offender—but also point to as many as 166 locations throughout the US where Near Intelligence infers that visitors to Little St. James likely lived and worked. The cache also points to cities in Ukraine, the Cayman Islands, and Australia, among others.

Near Intelligence, for example, tracked devices visiting Little St. James from locations in 80 cities crisscrossing 26 US states and territories, with Florida, Massachusetts, Texas, Michigan, and New York topping the list. The coordinates point to mansions in gated communities in Michigan and Florida; homes in Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket in Massachusetts; a nightclub in Miami; and the sidewalk across the street from Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York City.

The coordinates also point to various Epstein properties beyond Little St. James, including his 8,000-acre New Mexico ranch and a waterfront mansion on El Brillo Way in Palm Beach, where prosecutors said in an indictment that Epstein trafficked numerous “minor girls” for the purposes of molesting and abusing them. Near’s data is notably missing any locations in Europe, where citizens are safeguarded by comprehensive privacy laws.

What is our society coming to when an elite group of co-conspirators cannot hang out without their locations being revealed anyway?

Hint:  The answer is that even though in this case a greater societal purpose may be served, the behaviors of the data brokers, and the surveillance advertisers, and the social media stalkers are still reprehensible, and still need to be shut down.

It Only Took 8 Years

Crystal Mason, a felon who mistakenly thought, and was so informed by the local voting authorities in Texas, that she could vote, and then was tried and sentenced to 5 years in jail, has been exonerated.

A Texas appeals court reversed the conviction of a Black woman who had been sentenced to five years in prison on a charge of illegally voting in the 2016 presidential election, acquitting her in a nationally watched case that civil rights attorneys cast as part of a broader fight for voting rights.

Crystal Mason voted with a provisional ballot in 2016 but, she has said, did not know she was ineligible to do so at the time. The ballot was not counted, but she was convicted of illegal voting in 2018.

Texas Second Court of Appeals Judge Wade Birdwell ruled Thursday that there was not enough evidence to show Mason had known she was ineligible to vote.

The case had been seen as an example of a GOP-led crackdown on alleged voter fraud in Texas, and Mason’s attorneys had framed it as an attempt at intimidating other voters, particularly people of color and those returning from prison, by making an example of Mason.

While I am happy for Ms. Mason, the anti-American conservatives who want to discourage Black and Brown people from voting largely achieved their goal, to instill fear in minority voting.

 

Channeling Theodore Seuss Geisel

Rod Blagojevich is upset that, because he was impeached for corruption, he can not stand for any elected position in Illinois, so he filed suit.

The court was unamused, and quoted Dr. Seuss in the ruling dismissing the suit:

As a general rule, it’s never good when a federal judge feels compelled to address your case with a quote from Dr. Seuss.

But that’s exactly what happened Thursday to disgraced former Gov. Rod Blagojevich, whose lawsuit challenging the state resolution prohibiting him from running for any state or local office in Illinois was excoriated by a judge as a publicity stunt and an “Issue-Spotting Wonderland.”

In dismissing Blagojevich’s 2021 suit, U.S. District Judge Steven Seeger accused the former governor of using the federal courthouse as a megaphone in an ill-advised attempt to get back in the political game following the commutation of his 14-year prison sentence by then-President Donald Trump.

He quoted from Dr. Seuss’ 1972 book “Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!” which reads: “The time has come. The time is now. Just Go. Go. GO! I don’t care how. You can go by foot. You can go by cow. Marvin K. Mooney, will you please go now!””

I'm wondering what children's book should be quoted in the plethora of cases against Donald Trump.

This Might Piss off Customers

General Motors has been remotely collecting driver data and reselling it to brokers who in turn resell the data to insurance companies, who in turn use this data to f%$# their customers like drunk sorority girls.

This revelation has incensed many GM car buyers, and as a result, the automaker will be ending the practice:

After public outcry, General Motors has decided to stop sharing driving data from its connected cars with data brokers. Last week, news broke that customers enrolled in GM's OnStar Smart Driver app have had their data shared with LexisNexis and Verisk.

Those data brokers in turn shared the information with insurance companies, resulting in some drivers finding it much harder or more expensive to obtain insurance. To make matters much worse, customers allege they never signed up for OnStar Smart Driver in the first place, claiming the choice was made for them by salespeople during the car-buying process.

Now, in what feels like an all-too-rare win for privacy in the 21st century, that data-sharing deal is no more.

The US really needs comprehensive privacy legislation to stop this.

It goes without saying, that whatever strictures would be placed on auto manufacturers should also be applied to internet advertisers and social media companies as well.

A Feature, Not a Bug

I am completely not shocked that a massive carbon offset program in Australia is a fraud.

This is not a surprise.

As my posts on the Nature Conservancy show this is the default behavior.

Either they are taking credit for vegetation not under threat, or they are misrepresenting the savings involved:

Australia's carbon credit scheme was undermined by damning new research Wednesday, which found a world-leading reforestation project had been an underperforming "catastrophe".

Vast swathes of land across Australia's desert Outback have been earmarked for native forest regeneration, which is meant to offset emissions as new trees suck up carbon.

But researchers have found that across almost 80 percent of these plantations forest growth was either stagnant – or that woodlands were shrinking.………

Australia has set aside almost 42 million hectares (104 million acres) under the scheme, an area larger than the landmass of Japan.

Researchers said it was "one of the world's largest" natural carbon offset projects.

Officials claim that since 2013, the native forest spreading across this land has sucked up more than 27 million tonnes of carbon.

But the peer-reviewed research, which used satellite imagery to chart forest growth, has cast serious doubt on this figure.

………

The peer-reviewed research was published in the Nature Communications journal, Earth & Environment.

Australia has committed to cutting carbon emissions by 43 percent by 2030 from 2005 levels, on a path to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.

Australia's carbon dioxide emissions per person are among the highest in the world at 15.3 tonnes, surpassing US levels, World Bank figures show.

Carbon offsets are a criminogenic activity.

Its structure not only favors fraud, it practically demands fraud.

The First Rule of Dungeons and Dragons

Is....

Don't ever think

That you can outsmart

The DM ………

Ever!

Not Long Enough

This is a very good description of the culture of impunity behind this.
The original tweet chain is here.Crypto-Fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the orgy of fraud he conducted as head of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange.

I need to be clear here.  I do not think that his crimes were worse, or even as bad as a school shooter, and probably less bad than something like soon to be ex-Senator Bob Menendez' corruption, but a message needs to be sent about perceived class impunity.

At the core of the attitudes of SBF's parents (why are they not charged, they were knowing beneficiaries of the fraud) is the idea that, "People like them," should not be subject to the same scrutiny nor be subject to the same consequences, because they are just so f%$#ing special.

A federal judge sentenced Sam Bankman-Fried to 25 years in prison on Thursday. The already jailed founder of FTX just turned 32; if he serves 85 percent of his sentence, he’ll be free after 21 years, when he’s 53. Bankman-Fried is preparing to appeal his conviction last fall on seven fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering charges, but most everyone agrees that this effort is a long shot. His sentencing ends his time in the spotlight as America’s newsiest financial crook. (At least among convicted ones.)

Before imposing the sentence, Judge Lewis Kaplan dismissed the most potent arguments by Bankman-Fried’s defense team and made clear his anger at Bankman-Fried’s behavior leading up to and during his trial. Bankman-Fried’s lawyer spoke, and then Bankman-Fried did, too, focusing largely on the harm he’d caused to FTX’s employees who had staked their careers on him. He awkwardly alluded to an argument he has made since FTX collapsed, that customers could’ve gotten their money back if he’d been given more time to fix the situation instead of ceding control to a bankruptcy team. Prosecutors argued he still hadn’t accepted responsibility, and it looked like he hadn’t. Kaplan noted Bankman-Fried’s lack of remorse and habit of lies and evasions at his trial. Then the judge sent him away. It’s a stiff sentence, though Bankman-Fried may have thought it would be even longer given what the judge said about him before handing it down.


Bankman-Fried’s sentencing presented an odd situation. Ordinarily, an influential component of federal sentencing is a presentence report from the probation officers, who submit a recommendation to the judge alongside the requests of prosecutors and the defense. The presentence report for Bankman-Fried called for 100 years out of a maximum 110, a term his lawyers called “barbaric” and that even the prosecutors for the Southern District of New York found too aggressive. Bankman-Fried’s team asked the judge to sentence him to six and a half years or less. Prosecutors countered at between 40 and 50 years.

………

The whole argument about calculating loss might have been window dressing. The most obvious problem Bankman-Fried faced throughout his trial was the mountain of evidence and cooperative testimony against him. But next most obvious was his obnoxious behavior as a defendant, which prosecutors made sure to remind the judge of as they urged the stiffer sentence. (Not that Kaplan needed a reminder.) Kaplan sent Bankman-Fried to jail before the trial, revoking his bail, because Bankman-Fried had tampered with witnesses, prosecutors argued, and violated an agreement not to use a VPN. And indeed, Kaplan found that Bankman-Fried had attempted to tamper with witnesses.

That is yet another example of perceived impunity by SBF.

Basically, he thought that he was smarter and better than the mud people that he fleeced, and the mud people that were the prosecutor and the judge.

I do not know about smarter, but he certainly was not any better.

Looks Like Change in New Jersey

In New Jersey, there was, emphasis on was a highly competitive Democratic Party primary race to replace corrupt Senator Bob Menendez between the wife of the Governor, Tammy Murphy, and Congressman Andy Kim.

Then Murphy abruptly dropped out of the race, pressured by county party chairs, who were concerned that Representative Kim's lawsuit challenging the state "County Line" primary ballot, in which the county party, and frequently the county party boss, can place whomever they choose prominently at the beginning of the ballot while consigning challengers to completely different, and less prominent, places on the ballot.

Kim has shown no sign of withdrawing the lawsuit, and minor primary candidates have argued that the case should be kept open:

There were some early rumblings a week ago. Steven Fulop’s resume may just say mayor, but he’s been in that position for a decade, Jersey City is the second-biggest city in the state, and Fulop is running for governor next year. He’s always cultivated a kind of outsider persona, but he endorsed Phil Murphy for governor in 2017, and endorsed Murphy’s wife Tammy for Senate in 2024, joining virtually every ambitious politician and county boss in the state.

I’m sure Fulop didn’t see much of a choice. If you wanted to get ahead in New Jersey politics, you had to endorse Tammy Murphy. That was the expectation in a state that hasn’t really had contestable elections for a while, because the establishment of the party could by a wave of their hand choose winners and losers. And they had a long enough memory that being on the wrong side of the winners was nowhere to be for anyone with thoughts of higher office.

So when Fulop came out one week ago and said, “At this point, I don’t think it’s in the state’s best interest for Tammy to continue her campaign,” while switching his endorsement to Andy Kim, it was a signal that the old rules just didn’t work anymore. The extreme gap in quality of candidate between Kim and Murphy just blew up the corrupt bargain that had held in New Jersey for decades, and may turn that state into something approaching a democracy.

Yesterday, Murphy did indeed drop out, a stunning turnaround for someone who seemed destined to waltz into a Senate seat. Kim won this race on the ground, in a series of grassroots performances at the handful of county conventions that weren’t rigged from the get-go. He won just about every single convention with a secret ballot (except for Bergen County, where party boss Paul Juliano seemed to still control the process), and demonstrated that voters would tilt in the same direction.

That didn’t necessarily mean Murphy had no chance. She still had the endorsement in nine out of 21 counties, most of which were awarded by the fiat of the county chair. Several of those counties were among the biggest in the state; more primary voters were expected to come from counties with a Murphy endorsement. And 19 of the 21 counties in New Jersey use the controversial “county line” system, giving endorsed candidates prime space on the ballot while unendorsed challengers are sent to hard-to-find corners known as “ballot Siberia,” with a proven effect on election outcomes.

Notwithstanding Phil Murphy's popularity, the whole nepotism thing stuck in voters' craw, and contributed mightily to Tammy Murphy's decision to quit the race, but even more so was the fact that the Democratic Party bosses were desperate to preserve the county line system, because it is crucial to their power.

………

There was probably an element of “lose the battle, win the war” here. Lurking in the background of this race was a lawsuit to end the county line, which gives party bosses their power. Kim, while trying to win the Senate race despite the built-in disadvantages, had launched the lawsuit and sought an injunction against the county line, arguing that the ballot system is “fundamentally unjust and undemocratic.” The party bosses might have figured that, if Murphy were to drop out and they all endorsed Kim (which is what appears to have happened), Kim would drop the lawsuit, and they would retain the ballot weapon for future use.

They were wrong. Kim’s adviser Anthony DeAngelo immediately told the New Jersey Globe that the congressman still supported abolishing the county line; his case received a hearing from federal district court judge Zahid Quraishi last week. “The status of our injunction remains in the hands of the judge and we remain ready to strongly advocate for the changes the Congressman and so many others have called for,” DeAngelo said.

FWIW, the judge has just issued an injunction against the county line ballot: 

New Jersey’s unique way of displaying county-endorsed candidates on the ballot has been struck down by a federal judge, after a lawsuit by Rep. Andy Kim (D-N.J.), who is running for Senate, and two other Democrats running for Congress, who called the design unfair and unconstitutional.

New Jersey’s ballot design process is unlike any other in the nation, and it allows parties to place their endorsed candidates in a specific portion of the ballot known as “the line.” Candidates running without their party’s endorsement appear in a different section of the ballot, farther down from where voters can see their names.

In his lawsuit, Kim claimed that design “cynically” manipulates voters and are “anathema to fair elections.”

U.S. District Judge Zahid N. Quraishi sided with Kim and the other plaintiffs and said the system of “bracketing” county-endorsed candidates gave them an unfair advantage over their challengers. The ruling will force New Jersey to redesign its ballots ahead of the June primary.

I really do not see this being overturned by the appeals court.

I Can Haz Prosecushuns?

It turns out that prison phone companies have been cutting kickback deals with jails in exchange for them banning in person visitors.

Just when you thought that the for-profit part of the carceral system could not POSSIBLE become more evil, they outdo themselves.

Perhaps these sheriffs and phone company executives need to spend some time as inmates to better understand the dynamics here:

Two lawsuits filed by a civil rights group allege that county jails in Michigan banned in-person visits in order to maximize revenue from voice and video calls as part of a "quid pro quo kickback scheme" with prison phone companies.

Civil Rights Corps filed the lawsuits on March 15 against the county governments, two county sheriffs, and two prison phone companies. The suits filed in county courts seek class-action status on behalf of people unable to visit family members detained in the local jails, including children who have been unable to visit their parents.

Defendants in one lawsuit include St. Clair County Sheriff Mat King, prison phone company Securus Technologies, and Securus owner Platinum Equity. In the other lawsuit, defendants include Genesee County Sheriff Christopher Swanson and prison phone company ViaPath Technologies. ViaPath was formerly called Global Tel*Link Corporation (GTL), and the lawsuit primarily refers to the company as GTL.

Each year, thousands of people spend months in the county jails, the lawsuit said. Many of the detainees have not been convicted of any crime and are awaiting trial; if they are convicted and receive long sentences, they are transferred to the Michigan Department of Corrections.

If someone is awaiting trial, they are innocent, and sheriffs and these phone companies are colluding to extort money from innocent. 

………

St. Clair County implemented its family visitation ban in September 2017, "prohibiting people from visiting their family members detained inside the county jail," Civil Rights Corps alleged. This "decision was part of a quid pro quo kickback scheme with Securus Technologies, a for-profit company that contracts with jails to charge the families of incarcerated persons exorbitant rates to communicate with one another through 'services' such as low-quality phone and video calls," the lawsuit said.

Under the contract, "Securus pays the County 50 percent of the $12.99 price tag for every 20-minute video call and 78 percent of the $0.21 per minute cost of every phone call," the lawsuit said. The contract has "a guarantee that Securus would pay the County at least $190,000 each year," the St. Clair County lawsuit said.

The contract incentivizes the jail to increase video calls, in part by reducing payments from Securus "if the County fails to reach a minimum number of monthly paid video calls," the lawsuit said. The contract also lets Securus bill the county directly if call volume isn't high enough or renegotiate or terminate the deal if there is a "material reduction in inmate population or capacity," the lawsuit said.

"Both the County Defendants and Securus understood and intended that, to fulfill their end of the bargain, County Defendants would ban all in-person visits. Securus even installed the new video kiosks in the same areas of the jail formerly used for in-person visitation," the lawsuit said.

Change the law, and criminally charge everyone involved with this scheme.  Then use asset forfeiture to leave them destitute.

These people, and these companies, need to be effaced with not even a hint of their existence remaining.

Boeing CEO Out

All you really need to know about Dave Calhoun's exit is his earlier career and education.

He has a degree in accounting, not anything remotely technical, and the first 27 years of his career was at General electric, working under Jack Welch, and ended up on the GE board.

Jack Welch is significant because in retrospect his success at GE was accounting fraud.

In any case, Dave Calhoun has fallen on his sword for only ……… Checks notes ……… about $50 million.

What a humanitarian.  (I mean this in the same way that you would call someone a vegetarian)

Boeing abruptly said on Monday that it was overhauling its leadership amid its most significant safety crisis in years, announcing sweeping changes that included the departure of its chief executive, Dave Calhoun, at the end of the year.

………

In addition to Mr. Calhoun’s departure, Boeing announced that Stan Deal, the head of the division that makes planes for airlines and other commercial customers, would retire immediately. He will be replaced by Stephanie Pope, Boeing’s chief operating officer, the company said in a statement.

Stephanie Pope, BS in Accounting, Missouri State University, MBA, Lindenwood University.

I'm pretty sure that she is a part of the problem.

Boeing also said that its chairman, Larry Kellner, would not stand for re-election. This weekend, the board elected Steve Mollenkopf, an electrical engineer by training and the former chief executive of Qualcomm, as its new chairman. In that role, he will lead the process of choosing Boeing’s next chief executive.

Qualcomm?  Jeebus.  About the only company out there with less savory business practices than Qualcomm is Comcast Cable, who are so awful that they had to rebrand as Xfinity.

………

A recent F.A.A. audit of Boeing’s Max production found dozens of lapses. The agency gave Boeing 90 days, or until about late May, to address its issues. The Justice Department has also reached out to passengers of the Alaska Airlines flight, [the one where the fuselage plug came out in flight] informing them that they may be a “possible victim of a crime,” according to a copy of one such notification. 

Yeah, I think that the continued presence of MBA types is far worse for Boeing than a potential criminal investigation.

If course, if said criminal investigation results in senior executives and board members being frog-marched out of their offices, that would be a win for everyone, except, of course for the aforementioned executives.

Headline of the Day

Sperm Whales Drop Giant Poop Bombs to Save Themselves from Orca Attack

—Live Science

What can I say but, nature is the sh%$?

There is a Cost to Long Range EVs

When one purchases an extremely long range, as in more than about 400 km range EV, they carry a lot of batteries, and those batteries are very heavy, and as a result, these cars have severely limited tire life.

I would have thought that this was a no-brainer, but people are surprised by this:

In case you missed it, there's been a lot of discourse surrounding electric vehicles and tires lately. Not only do EVs wear through their rubber and roads quicker because of their relatively extreme heft, but the instant power they put down also accelerates the process. Owners are shocked to learn this firsthand because, as J.D. Power reports, their daily drivers chew through tires like they're going out of style. And not only that, but many were supposedly never told this would happen.

That bit about instant power is kind of silly.  Everyone knows that each time you do a burnout, you are reducing tire life something on the order of 1500 km.

On the other hand, the fact that something like a Cybertruck weighs about 3½ tons results in much shorter tire life is less obvious to the non-engineering types out there:

………

Now, big-name OEMs like Michelin and Goodyear sell rubber specifically for battery-powered cars. Marketing is one reason, of course, but so are the legitimately different requirements of EV tires. They must strike a different balance of strength, weight, and resiliency without hampering vehicle range or causing excessive noise. That's a tall task when you're dealing with 6,000-pound sedans and "midsize" trucks that weigh as much as a dually pickup.

Automotive dealer software company CDK Global published a lengthy study about EV service in late 2023. In it, one respondent said that “when it comes to EVs, tires are the new oil change." We published a story last August about Rivian R1Ts needing new rubber after as few as 6,000 miles. Not all EV owners deal with such egregious wear, but considering most service shops recommend oil changes every 5,000 miles on gasoline-powered cars, the comparison checks out in that case.

One solution for this is to get a less expensive car with shorter range.  Shorter range means less batteries, which means less battery weight, which means less tire wear.

If if you are charging from a 120VAC plug at your home, if you are commuting 50 miles a day each way, you should not suffer from range anxiety from a 200 mile range EV.

Or you could buy a plug in hybrid, which typically have a range on the order of 40-50 miles, but can continue after that using an internal combustion engine that gets around 50 MPG.

Good News Everyone!

Oregon's Gover has signed a right-to-repair law with a fabulous twist, it is the first in the nation that outlaws parts pairing.

Parts pairing is the use of digital signatures to prevent the re-use of parts and the use of compatible 3rd party parts.

Printer ink and HP are a classic example of using this tactic to maximize their profits at the expense of their users:

Oregon Governor Tina Kotek today signed the state's Right to Repair Act, which will push manufacturers to provide more repair options for their products than any other state so far.

The law, like those passed in New York, California, and Minnesota, will require many manufacturers to provide the same parts, tools, and documentation to individuals and repair shops that they provide to their own repair teams.

But Oregon's bill goes further, preventing companies from implementing schemes that require parts to be verified through encrypted software checks before they will function. Known as parts pairing or serialization, Oregon's bill, SB 1596, is the first in the nation to target that practice. Oregon State Senator Janeen Sollman (D) and Representative Courtney Neron (D) sponsored and pushed the bill in the state senate and legislature. 

………

Oregon's bill isn't stronger in every regard. For one, there is no set number of years for a manufacturer to support a device with repair support. Parts pairing is prohibited only on devices sold in 2025 and later. And there are carve-outs for certain kinds of electronics and devices, including video game consoles, medical devices, HVAC systems, motor vehicles, and—as with other states—"electric toothbrushes."

This is a major step forward.

Unfortunately, the DMCA and WIPO make further progress more difficult.

One Fewer Shanda Fur die Goyim ⃰

Joe Lieberman (יִמַּח שְׁמו)† has died at the age of 82.

He rose to prominence by defeating the last decent Republican in the Senate™, Lowell Weiker in 1988 with enormous help from movement nutjob right wing Republicans like William F. Buckley.

Once he entered the Senate, he spent most of the time stabbing his Democratic colleagues in the back, culminating in his behavior in the 2000 election, when, as Al Gore's running mate, he blithely supported the theft of the election in Florida in the hope that he could be the nominee in 2004.

Along the way, he made the PATRIOT act worse, neutered environmental regulation, worked to prevent a public option in healthcare, opposed lowering the Medicare eligibility age, supported the Iraq war until the bitter end, and routinely accused people who disagreed with him of being traitors.

He abandoned all pretense of being a Democrat after his failed bid for the Democratic nomination in 2004, and lost the Senate primary in 2006, but refiled as an independent and ran as an independent and won the general election.

He was a smarmy sanctimonious, holier than thou hypocrite, but by exiting this world he has finally done something to make this world a better place.

^*Yiddish, meaning, "An embarrassment to the Jews before the rest of the nations of the world."
^†Hebrew, meaning, "May his name be obliterated."

Shorter Version, the French Are Bastards

Emmanuel Macron's recent statements regarding the deployment of regular French military forces to the Ukraine have a context, and this context is a neocolonialist plan for to continue looting their former colonies in Africa.

Specifically, the CFA Franc currency allowed the existing colonial economics to continue, where this allowed France to extract raw materials and import them at below market cost, and allowed them to sell finished goods at above market prices.

This was compounded by the installation of puppet governments post colonial independence, sabotage and destruction of infrastructure of uncooperative governments, and configuring corporate deals which would mean that all the profits (beyond what bribes went to corrupt leaders) ended up in France.

This looting has been central, arguably essential, to France's post colonial economic success, and the economic failures of these former colonies.

As a result of this, the coups in in the former French possessions in the Sahel have been aggressively anti-French, and have eagerly accepted Russian offers of security assistance.

Needless to say, the French, particularly Emmanuel Macron, who has waxed rhapsodic over Frances one-sided economic hegemony in Africa, consider this to be a severe threat to France and the French economy.

This conflict is what is driven Macron's bellicose pronouncements.

The video below is rather long, 48 minutes, but explains this context in exquisite detail, and is well worth the watch.

Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So, once again, initial unemployment claims fell, beating forecasts, falling by 2,000 to 210,000 while continuing claims rose by 24,000 to 1.8 million.

The number of Americans signing up for unemployment benefits fell slightly last week, another sign that the labor market remains strong and most workers enjoy extraordinary job security.

Jobless claims dipped by 2,000 to 210,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday. The four-week average of claims, which smooths out week-to-week ups and downs, fell by 750 to 211,000.

Overall, 1.8 million Americans were collecting unemployment benefits the week that ended March 16, up 24,000 from the week before.

Applications for unemployment benefits are viewed as a proxy for layoffs and a sign of where the job market is headed. Despite job cuts at Stellantis Electronic Arts, Unilever and elsewhere, overall layoffs remain below pre-pandemic levels. The unemployment rate, 3.9% in February, has come in under 4% for 25 straight months, longest such streak since the 1960s.

Meanwhile, GDP was revised up by .2% for the 4th quarter of 2023. 

With all of this, I'm thinking that the Fed will put off rate cuts for another meeting.  (Somehow skyrocketing profits are not subject to the same level of concern as mildly improving wages)

As Atrios Would Say, "That F%$#ing Paper."

It's been clear for some time that someone in senior management at the New York Times hates trans people.

They have been churning out poorly reported anti-trans propaganda for at least the last two years, and Media Matters has the numbers:

A new report from Media Matters and GLAAD finds that The New York Times excluded the perspectives of trans people from two-thirds of its stories about anti-trans legislation in the year following public criticism for its handling of the topic.

Media Matters previously reported that the Times helped fuel a right-wing anti-trans panic in 2022 by platforming anti-trans extremists, painting rising transgender identification as a social contagion, and fearmongering about the costs of transgender acceptance.

In February 2023, the paper received two separate open letters: one from a coalition of 150+ organizations and leaders, including GLAAD, and a separate letter signed by hundreds of Times contributors that criticized the outlet's contributions to a deadly anti-LGBTQ culture war. The newspaper attempted to conflate both efforts, dismissing all criticisms of its coverage as merely “protests organized by advocacy groups.”

Between February 15, 2023, when those letters were separately delivered to the Times, and February 15, 2024, the Times published at least 65 articles that mentioned U.S. anti-trans legislation in either their headline or lead paragraphs. We counted how often the paper quoted openly trans or gender-nonconforming sources, cited anti-trans misinformation or talking points without context or adequate fact-checking, and accurately represented the records of anti-trans figures mentioned in its stories. Our findings:

• 66% of the articles did not quote even one trans or gender-nonconforming person.
• 18% of the articles quoted misinformation from anti-trans activists without adequate fact-checking or additional context.
• 6 articles obscured the anti-trans background of sources, erasing histories of extremist rhetoric or actions.

There is a timeline at the link.

I do not know who is responsible for this, but it is someone senior.

If you put a gun to my head, I would say that it was probably the publisher, AG "Dash" Sulzberger, but I have nothing at all to back this up.

Because It Was the Output of a Bunch of Click Bait Lying Sacks of Sh%$

Over at The Economist, they are wondering, "Why “Freakonomics” failed to transform economics."

This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.

It's pretty simple:  There was no concern for the truth nor accuracy.  It was an exercise in mindless and dishonest contrarianism in the interest in selling books/clicks.

I noted this in 2009, when the folks at Freakonomics tried to argue that solar power would result in more heating than coal because they are black, and absorb heat.

To do this they had to:

• Assume that coal power was far more thermally efficient than it actually is.  (You cannot burn coal in a turbine and use the exhaust to boil water for a steam turbine, which is the most efficient form of fossile fuel power.  It only works for liquid and gaseous fuels)
• Assume that solar panels do not reflect or re-emit any heat (Black body radiation), and that their efficiencies are lower than were achievable then.
• That the Earth is a perfectly reflective sphere.  (It's not it's albedo is 0.39, as any Vangelis fan could tell you)
• Ignore that home solar panels are most often put on roofs, which are also black.
• Ignores the greenhouse effect in its entirety, which dwarfs thermal emissions of all power generation on the planet earth.

Freakonomics did not transform economics because it was a humbug promulgated by snollygosters.

Bye Felicia!

Former clerk for Clarence Thomas John Eastman has been recommended for disbarment by the judge reviewing his actions with regard to the 2020 election.

Judge Yvette Roland also suspended his right to practice law three days from now, and a final decision on a permanent ban on his ability to practice law will be dealt with by the California Supreme Court.

There is a line from the movie The Firm, where Gene Hackman's character asks, " Do you think l'm talking about breaking the law?" and Cruise responds, "No, I'm just trying to figure out how far you want it bent," that appears to apply here.

Lawyers are supposed to be zealous advocates for their clients, but they are not supposed to descend into blatant illegality to do so.

Eastman has been on the side of unethical and illegal behavior for years in support of his batsh%$ insane ideology.

The only travesty here is that it took so long for the legal profession to recognize and sanction this:

A California judge recommended that conservative attorney John Eastman be disbarred in the state over his role in developing a legal strategy to help President Donald Trump stay in power after his 2020 election loss.

State Bar Court of California Judge Yvette Roland issued the recommendation in a 128-page ruling on Wednesday, ordering that Eastman’s law license be put on “involuntary inactive” status effective three days after her ruling. The California Supreme Court will issue a final ruling on the matter, which Eastman can appeal. Along with the recommendation for disbarment, Roland recommended that Eastman be ordered to pay $10,000 in monetary sanctions to the State Bar of California Client Security Fund.

“The court rejects Eastman’s contention that this disciplinary proceeding and Eastman’s resultant discipline is motivated by his political views or his representation of President Trump or President Trump’s Campaign,” Roland’s ruling said. “Rather, Eastman’s wrongdoing constitutes exceptionally serious ethical violations warranting severe professional discipline.”

………

Along with the effort to be disbarred in California, Eastman, a former law school dean, has been embroiled in other legal cases related to election interference.

Eastman faces criminal charges in a Georgia case accusing Trump and his allies of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results in the state. He’s also one of the unnamed co-conspirators described in an election interference case brought by the Justice Department, although he doesn’t face charges.

Eastman's behavior has been an affront to the legal ethics and to the reputation of the legal profession since almost his first day passing the bar, which is an awfully high bar to clear.

It's not just that he has defended the indefensible, it has been that his lying about the law has been central to his entire career.

It's nice that the wheels of justice have finally turned on him.

Not a Face-Eating Leopard

'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.

— Adrian Bott (@Cavalorn) October 16, 2015

In a district that Trump carried in Alabama, albeit one where it was close, Democratic candidate Marilyn Lands defeated her Republican opponent Teddy Powell with 63% of the vote.

She accomplished this miracle by focusing on Republicans eating their constituents faces, specifically on how Republican abortion criminalization legislation led to the shutdown of both abortion and IVF services in the state.

A special election in Alabama on Tuesday proved one thing for Democrats: Abortion is a winning issue.

Democratic candidate Marilyn Lands defeated her Republican opponent, Madison City Council member Teddy Powell, for a state House seat in a deep-red district after she made abortion and in vitro fertilization access a cornerstone of her campaign.

………

Lands secured a whopping 63 percent of the vote—a 26-point lead—by aggressively going against the grain, telling voters she supports a repeal of Alabama’s abortion bans while sharing her own experience with abortion two decades ago, when she received a devastating diagnosis: a genetic defect called trisomy.

“Twenty years ago I was able to get the care I needed. My three doctors told me this is the procedure I needed, that my life was at risk. I was able to go to my own hospital with my own doctor there, I didn’t have to leave my community,” Lands told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent. “And to think we’ve gone 20 years backwards. I can’t believe that. I’ve seen, in my lifetime, women make great strides in many areas. And, I’m just, I’m outraged that 20 years later women do not have the same freedoms and protections that I had.”

It's really very simple.  Republicans want to kill women like Marilyn Lands and like my wife.

Suddenly, the staunch anti-abortion activists realize that the Handmaiden's Tale will apply to good Christian white people like them, and suddenly they are looking for another proxy for racism.*

^*The history is abundantly clear here, the origins of the abortion crimilization movement grew from racial bigotry, not abortion. They were upset that their segregation academies lost their tax exempt status.

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

A North Texas school teacher and U.S. Army veteran has legally changed his name to Literally Anybody Else and announced he is running for U.S. president. https://t.co/D5f2DCKd2X

— NBC DFW (@NBCDFW) March 26, 2024

Yes, he has a website.

According to the story, he is a middle school teacher, which makes him qualified to deal with Congressional Republicans, at least the more mature ones, but my guess is that he does standup comedy on the weekends, and this is his attempt to get on Colbert. (I'm cynical that way)

What Angus Said

Specifically, Angus Deaton, recipient of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel* who has unloaded on members of his profession, whom he excoriated for ignoring the power issues in economics and inequality:

Angus Deaton is the economic doyen from central casting. The bow-tie-wearing econometrician was born in Scotland, did a PhD at Cambridge and has been at Princeton for the last 40 years. He’s currently the Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs Emeritus. He won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2015. And he’s just dropped an almighty bucket of sh%$ on his entire profession.

(%$ mine)

Where Deaton published it is almost as interesting as the contents: at the International Monetary Fund, that institution once seen as the standard-bearer of neoliberal orthodoxy, but which has in recent years developed a curiosity about the real-world impacts of the hardline policies it once imposed upon or prescribed to countries.

Deaton lobs a series of truth bombs at his own profession, the result, he says, of “changing my mind, a discomfiting process for someone who has been a practising economist for more than half a century”. These include: “We have largely stopped thinking about ethics and about what constitutes human well-being”.

• If “economists should focus on efficiency and leave equity to others, to politicians or administrators… the others regularly fail to materialise, so that when efficiency comes with upward redistribution — frequently though not inevitably — our recommendations become little more than a license for plunder”.
• “Historians, who understand about contingency and about multiple and multidirectional causality, often do a better job than economists of identifying important mechanisms…”
• Far from being “a nuisance that interfered with economic (and often personal) efficiency”, unions “once raised wages for members and nonmembers, they were an important part of social capital in many places, and they brought political power to working people in the workplace and in local, state, and federal governments. Their decline is contributing to the falling wage share, to the widening gap between executives and workers, to community destruction, and to rising populism.”
• “I am much more sceptical of the benefits of free trade to American workers and am even sceptical of the claim, which I and others have made in the past, that globalisation was responsible for the vast reduction in global poverty over the past 30 years”.
• Immigration contributes to inequality.

But Deaton’s main point is a recognition of how power distorts policy: “Our emphasis on the virtues of free, competitive markets and exogenous technical change can distract us from the importance of power in setting prices and wages, in choosing the direction of technical change, and in influencing politics to change the rules of the game.”

One does wonder what took him so long to reach this decision.

It's been obvious since (at least) John Maynard Keynes.

^*It's not really a Nobel Prize, even if this were called the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Ken Paxton Cops a Plea

He claims that it is not a plea deal, but Texas attorney general Ken Paxton is paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to make federal securities fraud go away.

It's a plea deal:

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), a conservative firebrand acquitted last year in a historic impeachment trial, has reached an agreement with prosecutors to avoid trial on long-standing state felony securities fraud charges.

Paxton was charged nearly a decade ago, accused of defrauding investors at a Dallas-area tech company by not disclosing that he was paid by the company to recruit them. The case has been delayed for years by pretrial disputes over the trial’s location and special prosecutors’ fees.

Under the agreement reached in Harris County District Court on Tuesday, prosecutors will dismiss felony charges against Paxton if he successfully completes 100 hours of community service and 15 hours of legal ethics classes and pays restitution of $271,000 by September. Paxton, who was a state legislator when some of the alleged actions occurred, had previously pleaded not guilty.

Restitution, community service, and ethics classes?  It's a f%$#ing plea deal.

It's All About the Benjamins

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has selected Nicole Shanahan his running mate.

She bankrolled his Suberb Owl ad, and has something on the order of about a billion dollars in the bank as a result of her divorce from Google founder Sergei Brin.

Needless to say, this juxtaposition of incompetent candidates and large quantities of money will have political consultants salivating, particularly those chasing signatures for ballot access.

Part of My Youth Gone

Babar author Laurent de Brunhoff, has died at the age of 98.

I have fond memories of my mom reading me the Babar stories, both by Laurent and his father Jean.

It's been years since I've thought of the eponymous elephant, but notice of his death reminds me a simpler time in my life.

Bye Felicia

And by, "Felicia," I mean Ronna Romney McDaniel, who was hired a few days ago by NBC as a pundit was fired by NBC following massive internal protests.

Also, her agent, CAA, has dumped her.

Needless to say, Republicans are claiming that she was fired because she was a Republican, but they are completely full of crap on this.

She was alibiing for insurrection and blatantly and egregiously lying to reporters in her role as RNC chair.

This is different from, for example, Donna Brazile who spent a career spinning reporters, but in a way that has been done by partisan actors for decades.

The former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel is on her way out of NBC less than a week after joining the network, NBC announced in a memo from NBCUniversal News Group chair Cesar Conde.

Conde said he had listened to “the legitimate concerns” of many network employees. “No organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned,” he wrote. “Over the last few days, it has become clear that this appointment undermines that goal.”

………

But she also claimed it was “fair to say there were problems [in elections in battleground states] in 2020” and said that while she did “not think violence should be in our political discourse”, she supported Donald Trump’s election fraud lie, which ultimately stoked the deadly January 6 attack on Congress, as a way of “taking one for the whole team” .

That interview prompted an angry on-air response from Chuck Todd, a former host.

When complete tool Chuck Todd unloads a can of whup ass on a Republican, someone has screwed up.

………

A procession of senior NBC and MSNBC hosts followed Todd in protesting the McDaniel hire on air, from the popular husband-and-wife morning show team of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski to Jen Psaki, Nicolle Wallace, Joy-Ann Reid, Lawrence O’Donnell and Rachel Maddow.

One hopes that senior management will be flipping burgers in the near future.

Update on the Key Bridge

The power goes out about 10 seconds in


Not good

We now have some information on the container ship that took down the Francis Scott Key Bridge at the mouth of Baltimore harbor. 

The ship, the MV Dali was, if you cannot tell by the prefix, a diesel powered container ship, 300m long, and about 116,000 tons, so it was almost as long as a Ford Class carrier, and had about 15% more mass.

From this video, it appears that there was some sort of power failure, and a loss of steering, with the lights going off at least 3 times.

It is known that the ship sent out a Mayday before hitting the bridge.

That, and the voluminous smoke from the stack before impact, which implies that they tried to reverse to slow down, seems to reinforce this.

BTW, there is a lot of kinetic energy in play here, it looks like it was doing about 7 knots (3.6m/s) and at maximum weight, you are looking about 682 mJ of energy.  Given that TNT has a an energy contendt of 4.184 MJ/kg, this means that the impact was likely equivalent to somewhere around 100-160 kg of TNT applied directly to the bridge support.

That bridge was going down after that.

The bridge is toast, and at least 6 construction workers are missing and presumed dead:

A massive container ship adrift at 9 mph issued a “mayday” early Tuesday as it headed toward the iconic Francis Scott Key Bridge, losing power before colliding with one of the vital support columns. As the 984-foot vessel struck the bridge in the middle of an otherwise calm night, it caused a din that woke people ashore and immediately toppled an essential mid-Atlantic thoroughfare into the frigid waters.

The effects were immediate and catastrophic: Authorities began searching for six construction workers who had been repairing potholes on the Interstate 695 bridge at the time of the collapse. By Tuesday evening, their employer said they were presumed dead, and the Coast Guard said it was ending rescue efforts.

The ship, a Singapore-flagged vessel named Dali with thousands of containers on it, departed the Port of Baltimore around 1 a.m., then quickly ran into trouble. It’s unknown what, precisely, caused the collision at 1:27 a.m., but the ship reported losing power just before it struck the bridge. The National Transportation and Safety Board is investigating the accident — which authorities said does not appear to be intentional nor an act of terrorism — but had not boarded the vessel to collect evidence, such as recorders, as of Tuesday afternoon.

It did not want to disturb the more pressing matter: search efforts led by the U.S. Coast Guard. But Tuesday night, Rear Adm. Shannon Gilreath said the rescue efforts would be suspended.

“Based on the length of time that has gone on in the search, the extensive search efforts that we’ve put into it, the water temperature, at this point we do not believe we are going to find any of these individuals still alive,” Gilreath said.

The water temperature in the bay at this time of year is around 47°F/8°C, so the it's hihgly unlikely that anyone would have survived in that water for more than an hour.

Two people — one who was briefly hospitalized and another who declined a trip to a hospital — were rescued, authorities said.

Who the f%$# decides, after falling 180 feet into Baltimore Harbor, not to go to the hospital?

Oh, yeah, the ambulance probably wasn't covered by their health insurance.  (F%$# private healthcare)

………

As for the bridge itself, which opened in 1977 after five years of construction, Federal Highway Administration records indicate the bridge had been considered in “good” or “fair” condition going back at least three decades. A 2023 Maryland Transportation Authority inspection found the bridge to be in “overall satisfactory condition.”

[Maryland Governor Wes] Moore said the bridge was “fully up to code” and Benjamin W. Schafer, a Johns Hopkins professor of structural and civil engineering who reviewed video of the incident, said he didn’t see anything that immediately stood out as a “red flag” in regard to the bridge’s structural integrity. He called the collapse “more of an acute event.”

The bridge had two supports holding it up; if you take one away, “it’s not a bridge anymore,” he told The Sun.

I would be remiss if I did not note that the ship's owner, Maersk, was recently subject to penalties for retaliating against a whistle-blower.

The company that chartered the cargo ship that destroyed the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore was recently sanctioned by regulators for blocking its employees from directly reporting safety concerns to the U.S. Coast Guard — in violation of a seaman whistleblower protection law, according to regulatory filings reviewed by The Lever.

Eight months before a Maersk Line Limited-chartered cargo ship crashed into the Baltimore bridge, likely killing six people and injuring others, the Labor Department sanctioned the shipping conglomerate for retaliating against an employee who reported unsafe working conditions aboard a Maersk-operated boat. In its order, the department found that Maersk had “a policy that requires employees to first report their concerns to [Maersk]... prior to reporting it to the [Coast Guard] or other authorities.”

Federal regulators at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which operates under the Labor Department, called the policy “repugnant” and a “reprehensible and an egregious violation of the rights of employees,” which “chills them from contacting the [Coast Guard] or other authorities without contacting the company first.”

Maersk’s reporting policy was approved by company executives, federal regulators found in their investigation into the incident.

There is at this time, there are no indications that this contributed to whatever failures led to the accident, but I would not be at all surprised to find that Maersk's official (!) policy of retaliation contributed to whatever went wrong.

Breaking

I'm getting up, and my wife says something to the effect of, "Holy Sh%$!".

A container ship hit the Francis Scott Key bridge and knocked out a span.

Some cars ended up in the harbor.

"Holy Sh%$ !" indeed.

More news to follow.

Posted via mobile.

There Ain't No Justice

Donald Trump just got his bond following his loss in the fraud civil trial in New York cut by more than half, and he got 10 additional days to post it.

He lost the case, and the rules in New York are very specific as to the timing and amount of the bond that must be posted, but for reasons that are unclear from the ruling (PDF) the judges have appeared to have bailed him out:

An appeals court panel in New York said Monday that former president Donald Trump would be allowed to post a $175 million bond to stave off enforcement of a nearly half-billion-dollar civil judgment against him and his business.

The order was a significant win for Trump, who was otherwise facing a massive cash crunch and the prospect of New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) moving to seize some of his assets as soon as this week.

However, while the five state judges on the panel eased the financial strain on Trump, they did not erase it entirely. They gave Trump 10 days to come up with the reduced bond of $175 million, saying they would only delay enforcement of the full amount if he put up that lower figure within this window — and it is not immediately clear how he will come up with the money.

………

Trump’s attorneys have said he could not finance an appeal bond of more than $450 million. They said his team had contacted 30 companies, none of which would take real estate — which accounts for most of Trump’s wealth — as collateral. Instead they required he put up cash or investment accounts. Securing such a large bond in cash is a “practical impossibility,” Trump’s lawyers argued.


The appeals court panel on Monday did not reduce the initial judgment, only the amount Trump needs to put up for a bond while appealing. His deadline for securing the bond is next Thursday, April 4. The extra 10 days may not be enough of an extension for Trump to turn his real estate into cash, as it typically takes weeks or months to sell properties such as golf courses or hotels.

………

Although the appeals court gave no reasoning for its decision, Adam Pollock, an attorney who formerly served as assistant attorney general in New York, said the decision could indicate that it might consider permanently reducing the judgment against Trump on appeal.

“It’s extraordinary because the law is clear that you have to post a bond in the full amount, and it additionally suggests that there may be concern that the underlying judgment is itself excessive,” said Pollock.

The appellate court did indicate that it wants to keep the case moving based on the schedule it laid out, legal experts said. The order requires Trump to appeal in time for the court’s September term. That requires that his appeal be prepared by July 8, according to Pollock. “Here what they’re saying is, ‘You’re not going to get to drag this out,’” Pollock said.


In addition to reducing the amount Trump must put up for his appeal bond, the panel also said it would stay other parts of Engoron’s decision.

Among other things, the panel said it would block Engoron’s decree that Trump and his company be prohibited from getting loans from any New York financial institution for three years. The panel also said it would block Engoron’s orders barring Trump from serving in a top position at a New York corporation for three years or his sons — Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump — for two years. An appeals court judge had granted temporary stays on those measures last month, though it remained unclear whether the full panel would maintain or change that.

The panel said some of Engoron’s other moves, including his directive installing an independent director of compliance for the Trump Organization, should stand.

It's going to get interesting when that independent monitor issues a report saying, "Same sh%$, different day," because without corrupt business practices, the Trump Org would have no business at all.

Oh, well.

Flaco Update

A necropsy has been performed on Flaco, the Eurasian Eagle Owl that had escaped from the Central Park Zoo, and it appears that he had high levels of rat poison in his system, as well as a severe infection contracted from pigeons.

Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl whose escape from the Central Park Zoo and life on the loose captivated New York, had enough rat poison and pigeon virus in his system to kill him even if he had not died after apparently striking an Upper West Side building last month.

The finding, from a necropsy conducted by Bronx Zoo pathologists after Flaco’s death on Feb. 23, validated widespread concerns about the hazards he faced living as a free bird in Manhattan for just over a year. He would have turned 14 this month.

“Flaco’s severe illness and death are ultimately attributed to a combination of factors — infectious disease, toxin exposures and traumatic injuries — that underscore the hazards faced by wild birds, especially in an urban setting,” the Wildlife Conservation Society, which operates the Central Park and Bronx Zoos, said in a statement on Monday.

Initial necropsy findings released the day after what onlookers described as a deadly building strike suggested Flaco had sustained an acute traumatic injury to his body, with signs of substantial hemorrhage under his sternum and in his back near his liver.

………

In confirming the role of traumatic injuries, those tests found he had a severe pigeon herpesvirus, which the conservation society attributed to his eating feral pigeons.

 I'm still bummed about his death.

Meanwhile, Down the Hall in Another Courtroom

Judge Juan Merchan has refused to further delay the criminal charges against Donald Trump in the Stormy Daniels hush money case, so the trial will begin on April 15:

Donald J. Trump is all but certain to become the first former American president to stand trial on criminal charges after a judge on Monday denied his effort to delay the proceeding and confirmed it would begin next month.

The trial, in which Mr. Trump will be accused of orchestrating the cover-up of a simmering sex scandal surrounding his 2016 presidential campaign, had originally been scheduled to start this week. But the judge, Juan M. Merchan, had pushed the start date to April 15 to allow Mr. Trump’s lawyers to review newly disclosed documents from a related federal investigation.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers had pushed for an even longer delay of 90 days and sought to have the case thrown out altogether. But in an hourlong hearing Monday, Justice Merchan slammed their arguments, rejecting them all.

In a particularly low moment for the defense team, the judge questioned the claims — and eventually, the résumé — of one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers as the former president looked on.


After a midmorning break, the judge returned to the courtroom, said that the former president had suffered no harm from the late disclosure of the documents and made the April 15 trial date final.

“Defendant has been given a reasonable amount of time,” the judge said crisply.

Personally, I do not think that Trump's trial will actually start on the 15th, but I would be delighted if I were wrong about this.

Biden's Best Appointment

Rather unsurprisingly, it is Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, who just just forced GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, and Boehringer Ingelheim to lower prices on asthma inhalers.

You may be wondering how the FTC gets involved in such things, as its purview does not generally extend to patents and other forms of exclusivity offered to pharmaceutical manufacturers.

It turns out that its what is squarely in its purview is criminal actions in furtherance of anticompetitive goals, like lying to the FDA about the patent protections on certain medications.

The FTC went after all three, and the costs of their inhalers have been lowered, and they are now open to generic competition:

………

But I want to start with something different. This week, GlaxoSmithKline announced it will cap out-of-pocket expenses to $35 for a device for its entire line of asthma inhalers, likely due to significant policy action by the Federal Trade Commission. This move will help millions of people, and it speaks to the kind of opportunities lying around for assertive policymakers.

GlaxoSmithKline’s line of inhalers is the most prescribed in the United States, and this corporation’s cut to patient costs follows two other giant corporations - AstraZeneca and Boehringer Ingelheim - who recently did the same thing.

Despite being a very old type of product that is sold inexpensively abroad, inhalers are a big business in America, generating $178 billion in revenue between 2000 and 2021. Three firms - AstraZeneca, GSK, and Teva - had revenue of $25 billion in the past five years from this line of business. The high revenue is a result of high cost, with the list price of inhalers as somewhere between $200 to $600. A cut, therefore, is a big deal, especially for people with high deductible health care plans.

Why are inhalers so profitable? And why have three giant firms decided to forego this money? The short story is that pharmaceutical companies have been committing an extremely boring form of fraud that enabled them to maintain illegal monopoly protection for their products, and no one in government bothered to stop it. Last year, Chair Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission stepped up with some clever lawyering and removed their monopoly protection. And so these firms are preemptively choosing to cut what patients have to pay.

Here’s the slightly longer version. While you’d think that a drug patent expiring would be simple and allow new entrants to come in and make an off-patent drug cheaply, in practice pharma companies often have many patents for a single drug, and frequently file for new second generation patents for an old drug. So bringing a generic competitor to market, with all the approvals and manufacturing costs, is risky unless you know it’s legal to sell it. In 1984, Congress passed a law called Hatch-Waxman, which was designed to lower drug prices by setting up a process to let generic drug companies enter markets. It essentially created a litigation period before any production started, where the brand and generic producers would fight, and a judge would decide whether the drug’s patents had expired. Once that judge ruled for the generic producer, it would then put the expensive into factories, distribution, and so forth.

The law worked, and as a result, today, most drugs we take are cheap generics, while most of the money we spend on drugs are for the small number of newer branded drugs that still have patent protections. (The situation though has slowly gotten worse, and a lot of the same problems have re-emerged in new forms, which is why everyone hates big pharma. But most drugs are generic and quite cheap.)

Hatch-Waxman included a litigation-heavy process for challenging a drug patent, involving something called the Orange Book, which is a list of FDA approved medicine that have been deemed safe and effective, as well as their patents. That’s the guide the FDA and generic companies use to tell if an expensive drug can be challenged. According to Hatch-Waxman, when a drug company lists a patent in the Orange Book, the FDA is prohibited by statute from letting any generic into the market for 30 months to let the process of challenging a branded patent play out.

And here’s where the fraud comes in. Pharmaceutical companies have been, well, lying. They list patents in the Orange Book that aren’t valid for the medicine associated with them. That’s illegal. It’s actually a crime, a form of fraud. You’re not allowed to list patents on medical devices, but they do that. And no one has cracked down on illegal Orange Book patent listing in decades. The FDA, HHS, and the FTC all thought it was someone else’s job, until Orange Book fraud became a routine way that everyone just thought, well that’s how business works.

Lina Khan is NOT a, "Someone else's job," kind or regulator, and so the FTC drafted a statement making it clear that this was a crime, and sent out letters to a number of pharmaceutical companies saying that they were breaking the law.

………

So basically, what’s happening is that the inhaler and epipen markets are about to get a lot more competitive, and prices are going to come way down, perhaps even lower than the $35 out of pocket some of these firms are promising. It won’t even require government action for much longer, because generic pharmaceutical firms are going to take up the enforcement on their own. That’s how you create markets. And when there’s generic competition with a bunch of sellers, it means we won’t have to depend on brand companies to choose to lower out-of-pocket costs. And that’s the ultimate solution.

No.  The ultimate solution is to jail executives who preside over such schemes.

This is not just a civil infraction, and it is a crime, and even if they have to lower their prices now, they have generated billions in profits over the past few decades, so they still win.

Still, Lina Khan cannot criminally prosecute criminal pharma execs, and she is doing what she can.