New York sues Trump Foundation, alleging ‘extensive’ lawbreaking – BBC News
hmmm
Category: Money, Class, and Poverty,
New York Dairy Farmers Struggling To Stay In Business
On a lush hillside overlooking the Callicoon Creek Valley is The Diehl Family Dairy Farm, established in 1842.
Adam Diehl is generation number five to run the milking operation with his wife, Alice. Their daughter, Michaela, hopes to be generation six.
…The Diehl farm is one of six in Sullivan County, and 52 statewide, losing their wholesale contract. As of July, there’s no one to buy what they produce.
…Global forces are hitting local farms, everything from increased production in China, to Walmart bottling its own milk in Indiana. Tastes are changing too. The average American drinks 37% less milk today than in 1970.
…Farmers are encouraged that researchers are questioning the alleged link between whole milk and childhood obesity.
The Obama administration banned whole milk in schools. Farmers are working to overturn that. Some want a quota system to prevent mega-farms from producing so much milk it hurts family farms. Many want price supports so they at least break even.
“To create a floor, for the milk price,” said dairy farmer, Cindy Gieger. “So it can’t drop down below cost of production.”
New York Dairy Farmers Struggling To Stay In Business « CBS New York
hmmmm
Gavin Newsom’s Half True claim on reducing San Francisco’s homeless ‘street population’
Whoever becomes California’s next governor will be faced with a growing homeless crisis, one made worse by a lack of affordable housing. Homelessness in the state shot up nearly 14 percent in 2017, as it remained flat nationwide, according to federal data and our recent fact check on the topic.
…Newsom’s statement does not reflect the slight increase in San Francisco’s overall homeless population during his time as mayor. The first available report during his tenure, from January 2005, shows a total of 6,248. By January 2011, Newsom’s final month in office, that number was 6,455.
…Rhorer said [the increase] was also driven by the shuttering of several nonprofit homeless programs, including two drop-in centers, a shelter and a treatment program when private landlords sold buildings housing those services. Even considering the uptick in the last two years of Newsom’s term, the city’s unsheltered total still decreased by 31 percent from 2002 to 2011, he noted.
The executive director added that the city’s overall homeless population held steady from 2009 to 2011, hovering near 6,500.
…The city placed about 7,000 in permanent housing programs, while the remainder left the streets with a bus ticket through Homeward Bound, a program that’s been criticized by some homeless advocacy groups as simply moving the problem to another city.
…His claim that “We got 12,000 people off the street,” is supported by statements from his former homeless czar. It’s important to note, however, that the city used Homeward Bound, a bus ticket program, to move about 5,000 of those people out of San Francisco.
hmmmm
Report: Vacation Rentals Impact on Maui
Hawaiʻi’s housing costs are among the highest in the nation with workers earning the lowest wages in the country after accounting for cost of living.
Data from the report shows that:
– 43% of Hawai‘i residents are renters, the fourth highest percentage in the nation
– Rent is more expensive in Hawai‘i than any other state
– In recent years, rents have been increasing at more than twice the rate of wages
– Hawai‘i has the highest rate of homelessness in the nation
– In 2016, almost 13% of homeless services clients came from homes they were unable to retain
…The report adds that 1 in 7 housing units on Maui is a vacation rental unit. In Lahaina, it is 1 in 3.
Maui Now : Report: Vacation Rentals Impact on Maui
sigh….
Trauma inflicted on border kids proves Americans ‘have lost our minds,’ mental-health expert says
The trauma endured by children separated from their parents at the border — many of whom are fleeing chaotic or violent circumstances back home — will devastate them psychologically for years to come, experts say.
…Inside those facilities, children are devastated: an audio clip published by ProPublica captures the sounds of children sobbing for their parents, begging to be allowed to call a family member.
“It is a form of child abuse,” Dr. Colleen Kraft, head of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told CBS News after she’d spent time in a Texas facility where kids under 12 are being held.
Kraft said she was told staff members there weren’t allowed to hug or hold crying children at the facility to comfort them.
…Every interaction a child has with adults lays the groundwork for their identity and sense of self, so that doesn’t bode well for children in a setting where they’re reportedly not even allowed to be hugged, Kinder said.
“What we say to them, what we do, how we look at them, how we interact with them — all of those interactions add up to a sense of self,” she said. “I can promise you that these interactions are laying neural pathways that are not positive.”
hmmm
Migrants Are Stranded on a U.S. Warship With Nowhere to Go
On Tuesday, the Trenton, a Spearhead-class high-speed transport that is part of ongoing 6th Fleet military operations off the coast of Libya, came upon a migrant boat in distress and disintegrating. People were in the water. Several corpses were floating nearby. The Trenton called for help and, along with the German non-governmental organization Sea Watch whose ship was patrolling nearby, the American crew carried out the rescue of 40 African migrants and observed what appeared to be 12 people in the water who had died. The living are all on the American ship. The anonymous dead were left to the mercy of the elements.
A spokesperson for the U.S. 6th Fleet says that the rescue boats deployed apparently could not find the bodies that had been seen at first, but if they had, the ship would have had enough refrigerated space to store them.
“On June 12, 2018 USNS Trenton, in accordance with its obligations under international law, rendered assistance to mariners in distress that it encountered while conducting routine operations in the Mediterranean Sea,” the Sixth Fleet said in an earlier statement. “Forty people have been recovered and are being provided food, water, and medical care on board Trenton. U.S. authorities are coordinating with our international partners to determine their ultimate disposition.”
…On Wednesday, Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini made it very clear that Italy’s ports would remain closed to all but Italian-flagged ships if they carry rescued migrants.
The political wrangling puts the Trenton in a particularly problematic situation. The German-flagged NGO that helped with the rescue is worried that if it agrees to take the migrants off the Americans’ hands, it could end up in a standoff like the Aquarius.
…On Thursday, the Trenton got tired of waiting for the Italian Coast Guard central command to tell it what to do with the survivors and it left the area. The fate of the 40 survivors on board remains undetermined.
This week Spain is seen as a savior for taking in the people aboard the Aquarius, but only a year ago it was condemned because it used armed force to keep migrants off its shores. And Italy, which has taken in far more African migrants than any other European country, is now seen as the bad guy for saying, “No more.”
But none of that political posturing helps the human beings afloat on the Mediterranean. Some will make it to safety in Europe. Some will be returned to Africa. Many will die, pawns sacrificed in a global game.
Migrants Are Stranded on a U.S. Warship With Nowhere to Go
the (in)humanity….
NASA’s leader wants to privatize the International Space Station. It’s a remarkably terrible idea.
It’s difficult to come up with a business model for the space station that doesn’t either guarantee corporate profit — obviating any notional cost savings — or encourage business managers to cut corners, potentially endangering the safety of astronauts.
hmmm
Amtrak’s decision to degrade service threatens its future
Faced with the financial loss of the mail contracts and competition from the interstate highways, carriers such as the Southern Pacific systematically degraded their remaining passenger trains using tactics which included removing the diner and lounge cars. The hope was this would so upset riders that they would cease to travel by train, and the carrier could get federal permission to end service. A notorious example was the train called the Sunset Limited, which from 1968-1970 offered only vending machine food on a two-day run!
Amtrak quickly restored proper food and beverage offerings, advertising “We’re Making the Trains Worth Riding Again”. Unfortunately, Amtrak recently has begun to copy these 1960s tactics, degrading the on-board experience which it knows will discourage ridership.
Why is this occurring? Amtrak is under pressure from Congress to eliminate food service losses, but this approach is unreasonable and unnecessary. Do the cruise lines or airlines attempt to make money on food? Of course not; these costs are built into their fares. Amtrak has been doing this as well. Railroad diners never made money; they attracted business. If riders are asked to accept only microwaved burgers and pizza on a two-night/three-day EMPIRE BUILDER trip, we know ridership will implode.
…Amtrak knows what happened in the past when the railroads systematically cut back amenities. Ridership collapsed. For fiscal year 2018, Amtrak just received the largest Congressional appropriation for its National Network in history ($1.3 billion). It needs to explain to Congress that not providing quality food service on the Coast Starlight is no more an option than on a cruise ship.
Amtrak’s decision to degrade service threatens its future | Guest Commentary | heraldandnews.com
hmmm
Facebook lowers prices on ads that cause more engagement: Trump’s more “controversial” posts spread even further than Hillary’s ads, for cheaper, because they generated lots of reactions, comments, and shares.
Facebook lowers prices on ads that cause more engagement – meaning that Trump’s more “controversial” posts spread even further than Hillary’s ads, for cheaper, because they generated lots of reactions, comments, and shares.
…Which means that Trump’s ad dollars stretched much further than Hillary’s on Facebook.
…Trump campaign probably paid 100 to 200 times less per ad than Clinton’s campaign did.
This Spicy Drama About Facebook CPMs Has People Like “Wahh?” And “Whoaaa”
hmmmm
Want airline food? Take Amtrak
It’s part of a plan to dismantle the National Network—shutting down most, if not all, long-distance trains, to focus on the Northeast Corridor, Midwest (Chicago) and California short- and medium-distance services, and state-supported trains.
…Why don’t you just come out and say it: “Amtrak is getting rid of dining cars.” No BS. No dancing around the issue. Tell it straight up. It’s what’s happening, right?
Anybody want to eat in a roomette?
…Already gone are the Coast Starlight parlor cars, in-train tour guides on some western trains, most charters, and private railcars bringing up the markers (for a hefty fee, of course). The “cross-country café” is replacing, I’m told, full dining service on Superliner trains: One crew member runs the microwave, another delivers the meal.
Want airline food? Take Amtrak – Railway Age
hmmmm
Report: Rural Poverty In America Is ‘An Emergency’
There are three childhood disruptors that account for why the U.S. ranking is relatively low, says Miles, “One was our infant mortality rate, which is by global standards, pretty high. The second was the teen pregnancy rate, which, although it’s getting better in the United States, it’s still, again, globally quite high,” Miles says.
“And then the third was the number of children that are actually victims of homicide in the United States.”
…According to estimates by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, nearly a quarter of children growing up in rural America were poor in 2016, compared to slightly more than 20 percent in urban areas.
…Perhaps not surprisingly, the report found the highest concentrations of child poverty, overall, in the Mississippi Delta, Appalachia and on Native American reservations.
…Danilo Trisi, one of those authors, says the drop in child poverty was due in large part to the federal safety net programs, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, and the earned income tax credit help low-income families make ends meet.
Report: Rural Poverty In America Is ‘An Emergency’ : NPR
Sigh…
Dem lawmaker: ‘Looks like Zuckerberg lied to Congress’
via Dem lawmaker: ‘Looks like Zuckerberg lied to Congress’ | TheHill
Corporate robber-baron covered his own ass? This is a surprise?!
Grocery bags and takeout containers aren’t enough. It’s time to phase out all single-use plastic
The state and local rules certainly have raised public awareness about the problem. Denying free plastic bags at checkout or providing plastic straws only on request sends consumers an important message that there’s a bigger cost to these everyday items than they may have considered. But the actual flow of trash has been disrupted only modestly.
…Cutting jobs on a disposable plastic product line doesn’t automatically translate into fewer people employed. If the door closes on polystyrene takeout containers, for example, it will open for cardboard and other biodegradable alternatives.
No one expects consumers to give up convenience completely. In fact, the market for bio-plastic alternatives, which are made from corn starch and other biodegradable sources, is already growing thanks to public awareness and the sporadic efforts to curb plastic waste.
Opponents will insist that the answer is just to encourage more recycling. Not only is recycling not the answer (see China’s diminished appetite for imported plastic trash), it has only enabled our addiction to convenient, disposable plastic packaging to deepen for some 60 years.
Grocery bags and takeout containers aren’t enough. It’s time to phase out all single-use plastic
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‘Welfare Makes People Lazy’: A Myth That Needs Busting
“Welfare makes people lazy.” The notion is buried so deep within mainstream political thought that it can often be stated without evidence. It was explicit during the Great Depression, when Franklin D. Roosevelt’s WPA (Works Progress Administration) was nicknamed “We Piddle Around” by his detractors. It was implicit in Bill Clinton’s pledge to “end welfare as we know it.” Even today, it is an intellectual pillar of conservative economic theory, which recommends slashing programs like Medicaid and cash assistance, partly out of a fear that self-reliance atrophies in the face of government assistance.
…the United States, where a core mission of the Republican Party is to reduce government aid to the poor, on the assumption that it makes them lazy. This attitude is supported by many conservative economists, who argue that government benefits implicitly reward poverty and thus encourage families to remain poor—the idea being that some adults might reject certain jobs or longer work hours because doing so would eliminate their eligibility for programs like Medicaid.
But this concern has little basis in reality. One of the latest studies on the subject found that Medicaid has “little if any” impact on employment or work hours. In research based in Canada and the U.S., the economist Ioana Marinescu at the University of Pennsylvania has found that even when basic-income programs do reduce working hours, adults don’t typically stay home to, say, play video games; instead, they often use the extra cash to go back to school or hold out for a more desirable job.
But the standard conservative critique of Medicaid and other welfare programs is wrong on another plane entirely. It fails to account for the conclusion of the Prospera research: Anti-poverty programs can work wonders for their youngest beneficiaries. It’s true north of the border, as well. American adults whose families had access to prenatal coverage under Medicaid have lower rates of obesity, higher rates of high-school graduation, and higher incomes as adults than those from similar households in states without Medicaid, according to a 2015 paper from the economists Sarah Miller and Laura R. Wherry. Another paper found that children covered by Medicaid expansions went on to earn higher wages and require less welfare assistance as adults.
‘Welfare Makes People Lazy’: A Myth That Needs Busting – The Atlantic
hmmmm
Leaked: Cambridge Analytica’s blueprint for Trump victory
[The Trump campaign worked with Cambridge Analytica to] micro-target US voters with carefully tailored messages about the Republican nominee across digital channels.
Intensive survey research, data modelling and performance-optimising algorithms were used to target 10,000 different ads to different audiences in the months leading up to the election. The ads were viewed billions of times, according to the presentation.
…None of the techniques described in the document are illegal. However, the scandal over Cambridge Analytica’s acquisition of data from more than 50 million Facebook users is lifting the lid on an industry that has learned how to closely track the online footprint and daily lives of US voters.
…The Republican nominee, who had just secured sufficient delegates to become the party’s candidate, still had “no speakable data infrastructure” and “no unifying data, digital and tech strategy”, the document states.
…“There was no database of record. There were many disparate data sources that were not connected, matched or hygiened,” she said of the process of ordering, sorting and cleaning enormous data sets. “There was no data science programme, so they weren’t undertaking any modelling. There was no digital marketing team.”
…The document contains very little information about how the campaign used Facebook data. One page, however, suggests Cambridge Analytica was able to constantly monitor the effectiveness of its messaging on different types of voters, giving the company and the campaign constant feedback about levels of engagement on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat.
The feedback loop meant the algorithms could be constantly updated and improved to deliver thousands of different messages to voters depending on their profile.
…Voters in areas where people were likely to be Trump supporters were shown a triumphant-looking image of the nominee, and help finding their nearest polling station.
Those whose geographical information suggested they were not fervent Trump supporters, such as swing voters, were shown photos of his high-profile supporters, including his daughter Ivanka Trump, a celebrity from the reality TV show Duck Dynasty, and Dana White, the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
One of the most effective ads, according to Kaiser, was a piece of native advertising on the political news website Politico, which was also profiled in the presentation. The interactive graphic, which looked like a piece of journalism and purported to list “10 inconvenient truths about the Clinton Foundation”, appeared for several weeks to people from a list of key swing states when they visited the site. It was produced by the in-house Politico team that creates sponsored content.
…Advertisements on Facebook, Twitter, Google and the music-sharing app Pandora were used to help convince 35,000 supporters to install an app used by the most active supporters.
According to the presentation, Cambridge Analytica and the Trump campaign also used a new advertising technique offered by Twitter, launched at the start of the election year, which enabled clients to kickstart viral tweets.
The “conversational ads” feature was used to encourage Trump’s followers to tweet using a set of pre-determined hashtags.
The campaign also took advantage of an ad opportunity provided by Snapchat, enabling users to swipe up and immediately see a preloaded web page. While not useful for securing donors, Cambridge Analytica deemed the tool useful for engaging potential voter “contacts”, according to the presentation.
One of the final slides explains how the company used paid-for Google ads to implement “persuasion search advertising”, to push pro-Trump and anti-Clinton search results through the company’s main search facility.
Leaked: Cambridge Analytica’s blueprint for Trump victory | UK news | The Guardian
hmmmm
Trump Failed the Americans of Puerto Rico
It’s going to be difficult, perhaps impossible, to assess how much of it had to do with the federal government’s indifference and ineffectiveness; how much was the fault of current Puerto Rican government officials; and how much was the effects of long-term Puerto Rican poverty and structural conditions.
Even so, President Donald Trump’s reaction was awful. He picked fights with local government, and during his visit to the island he focused far more on congratulating himself than on doing something worth bragging about.
Worse, he didn’t follow up. Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands simply disappeared from his public statements, and there’s no reporting to indicate that anything was different behind closed doors. There’s no record of FEMA officials or anyone else being summoned to the White House and urged to do more. No evidence of high-level White House coordination of the efforts, such as they were, from the various agencies involved. In fact, the best reporting on the government response, from Politico’s Danny Vinik, shows that it was botched from the get-go, with the government going all out to assist Houston but not Puerto Rico.
Trump Failed the Americans of Puerto Rico
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Facebook Gave 60 Tech Firms Including Apple, Samsung ‘Deep Access’ to User Data-But Denies It Was Wrong
The U.S. social networking website set up data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 phone and tablet makers over the past 10 years. In the exchange, Facebook could expand its reach while the companies could implement features such as “like” buttons and image sharing. It alleged Facebook gave access to user data without consent.
Experts voiced concern that reckless sharing of data could lead to security and privacy risks. Accessed Facebook information, meanwhile, allegedly included political preferences, relationship statuses and upcoming diary dates—even for users who had not given explicit permission for their data to be shared.
The profile information was allegedly obtained via privately-built application programming interfaces (APIs) which are the back-end protocols that are used to develop mobile apps, functions and systems. It has been confirmed that Facebook user data was stored on the technology companies’ servers.
When commodification of your customer base goes wrong and it should have dawned on you that if it wasn’t wrong to treat people, at the very least it was going to come back and bite you on the ass a bit but you never admit any wrong doing or make admissions that might open the corporate entity up to lawsuits so you double-down on delusional and obnoxious positions. Doh!
Seriously, any more of these delusional denials from facebook and I’m going to start rooting for all of the insufferable eggheads who’ve made money of this to be thrown unceremoniously in jail.
A 64-year-old put his life savings in his carry-on. U.S. Customs took it without charging him with a crime.
Aggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Instituionalized theft.
Crime without consequence.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagggggggggggggggh!
Trump wants to impose total ban on luxury German cars
Trump to impose total ban on luxury German cars: report | TheHill
what’s the German word for asshat?
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