An algorithm gave treatment to white patients over sicker black ones – Business Insider
Grrrrrrrrrrrr
Category: Money, Class, and Poverty,
California wildfires: Trump threatens to cut funding to fight fires
“Every year, as the fire’s rage & California burns, it is the same thing-and then he comes to the Federal Government for $$$ help,” Trump said. “No more. Get your act together Governor. You don’t see close to the level of burn in other states.”
Newsom responded on Twitter that, since Trump does not believe in climate change, he is “excused from this conversation.”
California wildfires: Trump threatens to cut funding to fight fires
hmmmm
School district bars students with lunch debts from field trips, prom
School district bars students with lunch debts from field trips, prom | WKRN News 2
So no overt shaming of kids in the lunchline but still punishing them for at best their parents irresponsibility and at worst their family’s financial insecurity. Not much of an improvement….
New California law allocates $10 million for police use-of-force training
A month after signing one of the most sweeping use-of-force laws in the country, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a companion measure on Thursday …Senate Bill 230.
New California law allocates $10 million for police use-of-force training
hmmm
Former CIA director: secure US elections with open-source voting machines
In the case of voting, open-source software systems would be overseen by public-private partnerships between counties and vendors.
Open-source systems are tried and tested. A majority of supercomputers use them. The Defense Department, NASA and the United States Air Force all use open-source systems, because they know this provides far more security. Every step in our voting process should use software that follows these examples.
Former CIA director: secure US elections with open-source voting machines / Boing Boing
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The public deserves action regarding our insecure election systems
The software that is used to tabulate the ballots and generate the initial vote counts is one of the weakest links in our entire election process.
Currently, this software is supplied (and controlled) by private corporations. This creates a plethora of problems. For one, the software is proprietary, so it can’t be audited by the large numbers of software security experts, from university professors to hi-tech security firms. For another, the corporations are motivated by profits, which is actually at odds with providing the most robust solution possible.
The public deserves action regarding our insecure election systems – The San Francisco Examiner
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Keystone pipeline leaks oil in northeastern North Dakota
State regulators were on the scene Wednesday afternoon, and they estimated that the area of the spill was 1,500 feet long by 15 feet wide. Glatt said some wetlands were affected.
…The company was still working to contain the spill Wednesday afternoon.
…It has experienced problems with spills in the past, including one in 2011 of more than 14,000 gallons of oil in southeastern North Dakota, near the South Dakota border.
In 2017, the pipeline leaked an estimated 210,000 gallons of oil onto agricultural land in northeastern South Dakota, in a rural area near the North Dakota border.
Keystone pipeline leaks oil in northeastern North Dakota – StarTribune.com
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HUD officials knowingly failed ‘to comply with the law,’ to stall Puerto Rico hurricane relief funds
Two top officials with the Department of Housing and Urban Development admitted at a congressional hearing this week that the agency knowingly missed a legally required deadline that would have made desperately needed hurricane relief funding available to Puerto Rico.
…The housing agency was supposed to issue funding notices to 18 states affected by disasters on Sept. 4. They published all the notices except Puerto Rico’s. The publication of the notice would have allowed Puerto Rico to start drafting a plan that would create the structures needed to manage the much-needed funds.
…Woll admitted that HUD had “no statutory authority” to miss such a deadline.
…“As the HUD Inspector General’s letter clearly states, HUD officials misled congressional staff about the conclusions of the IG’s review of Vivienda’s capacity to administer disaster recovery funds in an attempt to justify their violation of the law,” Rep. Norma Torres, D-Calif., who brought up the letter during the hearing, told NBC News.
…So far, Puerto Rico has received only the first $1.5 billion of a total of $20 billion granted through the agency’s Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery Program, or CDBG-DR, for infrastructure repairs and rebuilding homes.
Experts have anticipated that the flow of housing funds will be paralyzed until HUD appoints a financial monitor for Puerto Rico.
HUD officials knowingly failed ‘to comply with the law,’ stalled Puerto Rico hurricane relief funds
sigh…
How California’s data privacy law will change your online experience — no matter where you live
The California law goes further than any other U.S. law when it comes to who has access to a consumer’s personal data online. Beyond opting out, individuals can ask the company for what reason the data is being collected and sold, learn about the types of third-party companies buying the data and find out the financial incentives for the business selling user data. The law also applies not just to an individual, but personal data for a household or connected devices.
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Leo Lech not entitled to money after police blew up his Colorado home, court rules
Robert Jonathan Seacat, had stolen a shirt and a couple of belts from a Walmart in neighboring Aurora. …A police officer pursued him in a high-speed chase until Seacat parked his car. …He climbed the fence on the other side — and then, shortly thereafter, came upon the Lech residence.
A 9-year-old boy, John Lech’s girlfriend’s son, was home alone at the time. …“He said, ‘I don’t want to hurt anybody. I just want to get away,’ ” Lech said. Minutes later, the boy walked out of the house unharmed.
…Police had pulled into the driveway. Seacat fired a shot at them through the garage.
…Thus began the 19-hour standoff.
“They proceed to destroy the house — room by room, by room, by room,” Lech said. “This is one guy with a handgun. This guy was sleeping. This guy was eating. This guy was just hanging out in this house. I mean, they proceeded to blow up the entire house.”
…[the victim’s] expenses to rebuild the house and replace all its contents cost him nearly $400,000, he said. While insurance did cover structural damage initially, his son did not have renter’s insurance and so insurance did not cover replacement of the home’s contents, and he says he is still in debt today from loans he took out.
“This has ruined our lives,” he said.
…On Tuesday, a three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit unanimously ruled that the city is not required to compensate the Lech family for their lost home because it was destroyed by police while they were trying to enforce the law, rather than taken by eminent domain.
…The court said that Greenwood Village was acting within its “police power” when it damaged the house, which the court said doesn’t qualify as a “taking” under the Fifth Amendment. The court acknowledged that this may seem “unfair,” but when police have to protect the public, they can’t be “burdened with the condition” that they compensate whomever is damaged by their actions along the way.
…Police must be forced to draw the line at some point, [the victim] said — preferably before a house is gutted — and be held accountable if innocent bystanders lose everything as a result of the actions of law enforcement.
…“This can’t go on in this country,” he said. “There has to be a limit. There has to be accountability.”
Over a shirt and some belts from WalMart???! That’s beyond unnecessary escalation all the way to egregiously irresponsible to start with and then the city refuses to pay more than $5000? Criminal.
Robots aren’t taking warehouse employees’ jobs, they’re making their work harder
The report shows how technologies are modifying the day-to-day work of people who organize, store, and package physical goods in warehouses. It found that technology and automation can help workers by reducing the “monotonous and physically strenuous activities” of, say, lifting heavy packages. But it also could affect workers’ health, safety, and morale, and accelerate the rate at which employees are replaced. That’s because tools like self-driving shelving carts, body sensors, and AI-powered management systems are putting pressure on workers to work harder, faster, and under more scrutiny. This is helping boost productivity but could be bad for workers, the report argues.
…“Technology has led to workers being pushed harder and also their privacy getting violated.”
…Even though some new technologies “promise to alleviate the most arduous activities” for workers, they can also contribute to an overall greater workload and more intense supervision.
…The report says technology can intensify warehouse work in two main ways. The first is by limiting the amount of human interaction, including in cases where employees can help each other. The second is by allowing the “micromanagement of work tasks at an unprecedented scale.”
That’s because many of these new machines are dissecting workers’ every move — like sensors that measure the time it takes a worker to reach a location where they can pick up an item, scan a label, select a product, and place it in a bin.
…“The assumption that streamlining processes leads in a linear fashion to greater efficiencies, and thus cost reductions, may be fundamentally flawed,” the report states. “Gains could be counteracted by new health and safety hazards as well as increased employee turnover due to overwork and burnout.”
There are also questions about data privacy and whether workers have a right to know how the data being collected on them on the job is being used — including if it’s being used to feed the AI behind new autonomous warehouse machines. If that’s happening, it would mean that workers may unwittingly train their own replacements.
Robots aren’t taking warehouse employees’ jobs, they’re making their work harder – Vox
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PG&E Paid Out Stock Dividends Instead of Trimming Trees
At a probation hearing related to the utility’s deadly 2010 gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno, Judge William Alsup said the embattled utility hasn’t done enough to prevent wildfires through tree trimming and other maintenance work — even while its shareholders made millions.
“PG&E pumped out $4.5 billion in dividends and let the tree budget wither,” Alsup said.
But the judge declined to impose more sweeping changes that he’d earlier floated, including requiring PG&E to inspect its entire electrical grid.
…State fire investigators also blamed PG&E for 18 of the more than 170 wildfires that swept Northern California in October 2017. And the utility has acknowledged that its equipment likely started the 2018 Camp Fire in Butte County, which destroyed nearly 14,000 homes in the town of Paradise and killed 85 people.
…On Tuesday, the judge also directed a federal monitor to conduct random inspections of the tree-trimming program.
Judge: PG&E Paid Out Stock Dividends Instead of Trimming Trees | The California Report | KQED News
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Pfizer CEO gets 61% pay raise—to $27.9 million—as drug prices continue to climb
As drug giant Pfizer Inc. hiked the price of dozens of drugs in 2017, it also jacked up the compensation of CEO Ian Read by 61 percent, putting his total compensation at $27.9 million.
…The 61 percent raise comes after a string of separate reports noting drug price increases by Pfizer. In January, FiercePharma reported an analysis finding that Pfizer implemented 116 price hikes just between …December 15 [2017] and January 3 [2018.]
…Additionally, Pfizer had increased the prices of 91 drugs by an average of 20 percent in just the first half of 2017.
…In June of 2016, Pfizer raised the list prices of its medicines by an average of 8.8 percent. That followed an average 10.4 percent raise in list prices in January of that year.
Pfizer CEO gets 61% pay raise—to $27.9 million—as drug prices continue to climb | Ars Technica
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ICE withdraws big fines for immigrants taking sanctuary in churches
“We knew that these exorbitant fines were illegal and were nothing more than a tool to scare our clients and retaliate against them for fighting back and standing up to this administration,” attorney Lizbeth Mateo, who represents a Mexican woman living at an Ohio church.”
…Immigrants who are free on bond but ordered to leave the country are typically given a date to report to immigration authorities for removal. Others are ordered to check in with authorities, which, under former President Barack Obama-era policies, generally didn’t result in deportation unless the person was convicted of a serious crime in the United States.
Trump lifted those restrictions almost immediately, causing people to get deported when they reported to ICE offices as instructed and discouraging others from coming.
ICE withdraws big fines for immigrants taking sanctuary in churches
hmmm
Study Finds a Medical Algorithm Favors White Patients Over Sicker Black Patients
The use of algorithms as a technological diagnostic tool was meant to help lower the nation’s healthcare costs by helping medical providers keep people well.
However, as the Post notes, if a system is already historically biased, it’s easy for a new technological tool to inherit those biases.
“I am struck by how many people still think that racism always has to be intentional and fueled by malice,” Ruha Benjamin, an associate professor of African American studies at Princeton University, told the Post. “They don’t want to admit the racist effects of technology unless they can pinpoint the bigoted boogeyman behind the screen.”
Study Finds a Medical Algorithm Favors White Patients Over Sicker Black Patients
Attention well-meaning Presidential candidates… [hack, cough, ahem, cough, Cory Booker] Technology is not necessarily going to improve things or make it more efficient. The human component is necessary to implement fairness and justice.
Betsy DeVos found in contempt of court for violating order on student loans
Betsy DeVos found in contempt of court for violating order on student loans – CBS News
There is no argument to be made that these people do not think they are too good to have to follow the laws of this country.
What if America Took Amtrak Seriously?
By the 1960s the decline had reached crisis levels and railways began closing down. …In 1971, under Richard Nixon’s administration, the National Railroad Passenger Corp. was born. It was a for-profit company, but it received public funds to assume operation of the 20-odd private railroads that still ran intercity passenger trains. Only half the routes survived the consolidation.
By all appearances this was an effort to rescue passenger rail. In fact it was a ploy to let it die more quietly and, perhaps, on someone else’s watch. Amtrak, as the National Railroad Passenger Corp. came to be called, was not expected to last long. …Many attempts have been made over the decades to defund or dismantle Amtrak. The strategy is familiar: starve a public service, then use its underperformance to justify eliminating it altogether. Textbook neoliberalism, except they can’t quite close the deal. Congress always appropriates just enough funding to keep Amtrak limping along. No powerful interest has a stake in truly making the system work, but it’s too popular to kill.
…There’s a reason why the trains are perpetually running late. Amtrak owns almost none of its own track. Instead it pays private freight lines like the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) for the use of their tracks. By federal law, freight rail operators are supposed to give priority to passenger trains, but in practice, this law apparently is violated with impunity. Time and again the train slows to a stop, waiting helplessly for freight cars to make way.
…The number of crude oil trains traveling on the BNSF tracks has risen in step. Our cleanest form of intercity transportation is, quite literally, being held up by fossil fuels.
What if America Took Amtrak Seriously? – Streetsblog USA
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