American entrepreneurialism: The slander industry

Investigative reporter trolls self

This is just too good to not mention. The New York Times writes:

My colleague Kashmir Hill and I [New York Times reporter Aaron Krolik] were trying to learn who is responsible for — and profiting from — the growing ecosystem of websites whose primary purpose is destroying reputations.

So I wrote a nasty post. About myself.

Then we watched as a constellation of sites duplicated my creation.

Egad!! IT'S ALIIIIVE!!!!!

To get slander removed, many people hire a “reputation management” company. In my case, it was going to cost roughly $20,000.

We soon discovered a secret, hidden behind a smokescreen of fake companies and false identities. The people facilitating slander and the self-proclaimed good guys who help remove it are often one and the same.

Part 1:The stain

At first glance, the websites appear amateurish.

They have names like BadGirlReports.date, BustedCheaters.com and WorstHomeWrecker.com. Photos are badly cropped. Grammar and spelling are afterthoughts. They are clunky and text-heavy, as if they’re intended to be read by machines, not humans.

But do not underestimate their power. When someone attacks you on these so-called gripe sites, the results can be devastating. Earlier this year, we wrote about a woman in Toronto who poisoned the reputations of dozens of her perceived enemies by posting lies about them.

One woman in Ohio was the subject of so many negative posts that Bing declared in bold at the top of her search results that she “is a liar and a cheater” — the same way it states that Barack Obama was the 44th president of the United States. For roughly 500 of the 6,000 people we searched for, Google suggested adding the phrase “cheater” to a search of their names.

The unverified claims are on obscure, ridiculous-looking sites, but search engines give them a veneer of credibility. Posts from Cheaterboard.com appear in Google results alongside Facebook pages and LinkedIn profiles — or, in my case, articles in The New York Times.

The NYT interviewed one brave smear site owner, whose credentials include a criminal with a couple of stints in jail, e.g., for making death threats on one occasion and trying to pepper spray police in the face with Sriracha Dorito dust in another. He calmly explained why he does not feel bad about slandering people online. “Teach children not to talk to strangers, then teach them not to believe what they read on the internet.” Apparently, he sees himself as a life coach just trying to help the children of America.

The article is long and heavy with details, but mind-blowing. The astonishing high level of sleaze in this fine American industry arguably rivals that of the ex-president's personal life, business operations and his administration. Once again, the moral values of unregulated markets shine through for all to see. 

COVID in India

Cremating COVID victims in East Delhi 

The New York Times writes about the unfolding pandemic catastrophe in India. There are some similarities with the US, e.g., politicians downplay the death toll, but also some differences, e.g., a new double mutant strain of the virus. The NYT writes:

Fatalities have been overlooked or downplayed, understating the human toll of the country’s outbreak, which accounts for nearly half of all new cases in a global surge.

India’s coronavirus second wave is rapidly sliding into a devastating crisis, with hospitals unbearably full, oxygen supplies running low, desperate people dying in line waiting to see doctors — and mounting evidence that the actual death toll is far higher than officially reported.

Each day, the government reports more than 300,000 new infections, a world record, .... But experts say those numbers, however staggering, represent just a fraction of the real reach of the virus’s spread, which has thrown this country into emergency mode.

The sudden surge in recent weeks, with an insidious newer variant possibly playing a role, is casting increasing doubt on India’s official Covid-19 death toll of nearly 200,000, with more than 2,000 people dying every day.

Interviews from cremation grounds across the country, where the fires never stop, portray an extensive pattern of deaths far exceeding the official figures. Nervous politicians and hospital administrators may be undercounting or overlooking large numbers of dead, analysts say. And grieving families may be hiding Covid connections as well, out of shame, adding to the confusion in this enormous nation of 1.4 billion.

“It’s a complete massacre of data,” said Bhramar Mukherjee, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan who has been following India closely. “From all the modeling we’ve done, we believe the true number of deaths is two to five times what is being reported.”

At one of the large cremation grounds in Ahmedabad, a city in the western Indian state of Gujarat, bright orange fires light up the night sky, burning 24 hours a day, like an industrial plant that never shuts down. Suresh Bhai, a worker there, said he had never seen such a never-ending assembly line of death.

But he has not been writing down the cause of death as Covid-19 on the thin paper slips that he hands over to the mournful families, even though the number of dead is surging along with the virus.

“Sickness, sickness, sickness,” Mr. Suresh said. “That’s what we write.”

When asked why, he said it was what he had been instructed to do by his bosses, who did not respond to requests for comment.

Doctors worry that the runaway surge is being at least partly driven by the emergence of a virus variant known as the “double mutant,” B.1.617, because it contains genetic mutations found in two other difficult-to-control versions of the coronavirus. One of the mutations is present in the highly contagious variant that ripped through California earlier this year. The other mutation is similar to one found in the South African variant and believed to make the virus more resistant to vaccines.

Still, scientists caution it is too early to know for sure how pernicious the new variant emerging in India really is.

Over 13 days in mid-April, Bhopal officials reported 41 deaths related to Covid-19. But a survey by The New York Times of the city’s main Covid-19 cremation and burial grounds, where bodies were being handled under strict protocols, revealed a total of more than 1,000 deaths during the same period.

“Many deaths are not getting recorded and they are increasing every day,” said Dr. G.C. Gautam, a cardiologist based in Bhopal. He said that officials were doing this because “they don’t want to create panic.”

This virus appears to evolve rapidly. If it turns out that a new mutant that arises anywhere can evade vaccines and is equally or more lethal, the world just might be forced to do another pandemic response all over gain. If a bad combination of mutations arises, that new variant could start a whole new pandemic. An October 2020 estimate of the pandemic cost in the US alone is $16 trillion. All of that would seem to be a very good argument for a more intense global effort to get all people vaccinated as soon as possible. 

A COVID tale of two countries and two leaders

One of the unemployed and homeless in São Paulo cooking dinner

The ex-president undeniably lied to the American people about the seriousness of the pandemic. he even denied there would be an epidemic in the US. He downplayed a need for lockdowns. He constantly mocked mask wearing and attacked experts who argued that masks were necessary. He blamed states, especially democratic states, for a poor response. At one point even said that he had no responsibility in dealing with the pandemic. The ex-president had no plan to distribute vaccine, apparently not caring and/or maybe even wanting to sabotage the US response effort.

That massive leadership incompetence and failure led many state governors and tens of millions of Americans to follow the president's lead and ignore, downplay or deny there was a significant problem. One US expert recently estimated that the US should have been able to limit US deaths to about 100,000 had the ex-president and his administration been competent, focused and serious.

The New York Times writes about the awful and still deteriorating situation in Brazil. There are striking similarities between Brazil and the US. 

RIO DE JANEIRO — Rail-thin teenagers hold placards at traffic stops with the word for hunger — fome — in large print. Children, many of whom have been out of school for over a year, beg for food outside supermarkets and restaurants. Entire families huddle in flimsy encampments on sidewalks, asking for baby formula, crackers, anything.

From the start of the outbreak, Brazil’s president has been skeptical of the disease’s impact, and scorned the guidance of health experts, arguing that the economic damage wrought by the lockdowns, business closures and mobility restrictions they recommended would be a bigger threat than the pandemic to the country’s weak economy.

That trade-off led to one of the world’s highest death tolls, but also foundered in its goal — to keep the country afloat.

And about 117 million people, or roughly 55 percent of the country’s population, faced food insecurity, with uncertain access to enough nutrition, in 2020 — a leap from the 85 million who did so two years previous, the study showed.

Last year, as governors and mayors around Brazil signed decrees shutting down nonessential businesses and restricting mobility, Mr. Bolsonaro called those measures “extreme” and warned that they would result in malnutrition.

The president also dismissed the threat of the virus, sowed doubts about vaccines, which his government has been slow to procure, and often encouraged crowds of supporters at political events.

As a second wave of cases this year led to the collapse of the health care system in several cities, local officials again imposed a raft of strict measures — and found themselves at war with Mr. Bolsonaro.

Early this month, as the daily death toll from the virus sometimes surpassed 4,000, Mr. Bolsonaro acknowledged the severity of the humanitarian crisis facing his country. But he took no responsibility and instead faulted local officials.

In an open letter addressed to Brazilian authorities in late March, more than 1,500 economists and businesspeople asked the government to impose stricter measures, including lockdown.

“It is not reasonable to expect economic activity to recover from an uncontrolled epidemic,” the experts wrote.

Laura Carvalho, an economist, published a study showing that restrictions can have a negative short-term impact on a country’s financial health, but that, in the long run, it would have been a better strategy.  

Creomar de Souza, a political analyst and the founder of the consultancy Dharma Politics in Brasília, said the president underestimated the threat the pandemic posed to the country and failed to put together a comprehensive plan to address it.

“They thought it wouldn’t be something serious and figured that the health system would be able to handle it,” he said.

The similarities are obvious. One can argue that failed presidential leadership in the US needlessly caused hundreds of thousands of lives and, say, about $10 trillion (or more) in needless economic loss. It could even have caused needless deaths and economic loss in countries like Brazil that looked to and emulated the US president as an authority on how to deal with the pandemic. That US authority turned out to be grossly incompetent at best, and active sabotage at worst.

Should the US government donate some food, money or vaccine to try to help Brazil, or does the US owe nothing because the US has no moral or any other kind of authority? After all, Brazil is a sovereign state and it decides its own policies and fate. What about other nations that need help, especially ones that at least tried in good faith to deal with the pandemic?

How To Think About Packing the Supreme Court

Just a short comment this time, offering two simple observations. In the aftermath of the McConnell scandal in which Republicans violated their Constitutional obligation to "advise and consent" and the failure of Ruth Bader Ginsberg to retire during the Obama administration, the SCOTUS is now more brazenly partisan than it has been in many decades - perhaps ever. Given the lifetime appointments of the three new and young Drumpf Justices, a "debate" about whether or not to "pack the court" - ie, to alter the size of the court to appoint politically favorable judges - is now underway. But is the debate at all meaningful?

Theh first issue raised was of course the reciprocity problem: if the Democrats packed the court now, what's to stop Republicans from doing it in future?

Now the function of any honest debate is to shed light on the issues surrounding a topic and to find a reasonable solution. On this basis it's clear that the "topic" of the reciprocity problem is not the function of the court, but the political consequences of action. It is therefore a dishonest "debate". The actual topic at hand is the function of the Supreme Court and how best to implement it. The Constitution says this about that:

Article III Section 1. The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The judges, both of the supreme and inferior courts, shall hold their offices during good behaviour, and shall, at stated times, receive for their services, a compensation, which shall not be diminished during their continuance in office.

Section 2.

The judicial power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority;--to all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls;--to all cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction;--to controversies to which the United States shall be a party;--to controversies between two or more states;--between a state and citizens of another state;--between citizens of different states;--between citizens of the same state claiming lands under grants of different states, and between a state, or the citizens thereof, and foreign states, citizens or subjects.

In all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in which a state shall be party, the Supreme Court shall have original jurisdiction. In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.

Of note is the fact that lifetime appointments are not specified, nor is the number of Justices. What is clear however is that the range of responsibilities given the SCOTUS is wide indeed.

The Supreme Court was founded in the Constiution but established and ordained by Congress which, in the Judiciary Act of 1789, declared the Court to consist of a single Chief Justice and five additional justices. These six Justices were charged with among other things appellate jurisdiction over all cases involving US citizens. There were some four million citizens in 1789, which is roughly the size of metro Los Angeles today. Six justices representing 4,000,000 citizens comes to a ratio of 1 Justice to about 670,000 citizens. In 1894 the Court was expanded to its present nine Justices, and the population had grown to some 63,000,000 by 1890. That created a proportion of 7,000,000 citizens to each justice, affording each American just 1/10th the representation on the SCOTUS that it had enjoyed in 1789. Today of course there are still nine Justices, but with roughly 330,000,000 citizens, bringing the ratio to one Justice for every 37,000,000 or so citizens, bringing today's representation to less than 1/50th of what it was during George Washington's last presidency.

Today, fully one third of the Surpreme Court was appointed by the least popular president in American history. The Court has never enjoyed so much power as it does today, and never has it been less accountable to or representative of the American people. Administrations could pack the Court for literally decades and not likely reach the ratio of 1789.

Let the packing begin, I say.

Experiments in automation: Automated electric vehicle manufacturing

An interesting article in the New York Times focuses on an experiment in automated electric vehicle manufacturing. The aim is to employ low volume factories that mostly or completely eliminate humans from the assembly line and replace those workers with six different stations composed of robots programmed to do several tasks instead of one or two. 

The small factory concept is intended to significantly reduce five major cost components in vehicle manufacturing, manufacturing plant construction, employee costs, metal shaping, painting and welding. The vehicles are intended to be made mostly of polypropylene and non-metallic composite materials that can be made in any shape or color, with parts held together by adhesives instead of welds. The assembly line would be replaced by robot stations, each doing several jobs and the vehicle carried from station to station by a robot carrier.

A robot station

The NYT writes:

A small electric vehicle company backed by UPS wants to replace the assembly lines automakers have used for more than a century with something radically different — small factories employing a few hundred workers.

The company, Arrival, is creating highly automated “microfactories” where its delivery vans and buses will be assembled by multitasking robots, breaking from the approach pioneered by Henry Ford and used by most of the world’s automakers. The plants would produce tens of thousands of vehicles a year. That’s far fewer than traditional auto plants, which require 2,000 or more workers and typically produce hundreds of thousands of vehicles a year.

The advantage, according to Arrival, is that its microfactories will cost about $50 million rather than the $1 billion or more required to build a traditional factory. The company, which is based in London and is setting up factories in England and the United States, says this method should yield vans that cost a lot less than other electric models and even today’s standard, diesel-powered vehicles.

“The assembly line approach is very capital-intensive, and you have to get to very high production levels to make any margin,” said Avinash Rugoobur, Arrival’s president and a former General Motors executive. “The microfactory allows us to build vehicles profitably at really any volume.”

The company hopes its electric vehicles will disrupt the normally sleepy market for delivery vans. Such vehicles are well suited to electrification because they travel a set number of miles a day and can be charged overnight. Arrival has already won over UPS, which has about a 4 percent stake in the company and plans to buy 10,000 Arrival vans over the next several years.

The use of composites, which can be produced in any color, would eliminate three of the most expensive parts of an auto plant — the paint shop, the giant presses that stamp out fenders and other parts, and the robots that weld metal parts into larger underbody components. Each typically costs several hundred million dollars.

“For high-volume applications, this doesn’t seem workable,” said Kristin Dziczek, senior vice president of research at the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. “Automation is great for things that are repetitious and precise. But if they are talking about very low volume, it could be viable.”

“We’ve been very pleased as we get the equipment working in our simulations,” Mr. Abelson said. “Now it’s the commissioning process. It’s installing the equipment and getting it right.”

Humans install interior parts and some other components by hand

Whether this concept will work as planned is still untested. But it is a reminder that automation will continue to progress. Presumably more jobs will be lost than created, but the amount of loss is disputed. One line of argument posits that automation is more likely to change jobs than destroy them, so the impact may be hard to predict with reasonable accuracy.

THE BEST - or YOUR FAVORITE - ERA

 Let's revisit the old adage about what was or what wasn't the best era in American history.

People tend to have romantic memories of "the good old days" OR adversely, think the good old days weren't so grand.

When my parents emigrated to the U.S. after the 2nd WW, they found a vibrant country, but they also were willing to close their eyes to injustices that might have been obvious to you or me.

My ERA, was the 60s and 70s, an era of change, of great people, more rights for blacks and women, a progressive movement. AND YES, there was sex, drugs, and rock n roll.

My son born in 1990 in Canada, thought HIS era was the best. Granted where we were living at the time slanted his views. Racial tolerance, programs for the disabled, universal health care, gender equality.

At the same time he looked at American history, AND Canadian history, with horror and wondered how we could have been so close-minded.

I rebutted that unfortunately his generation had a lot to answer for, less respect for elders, less respect for authority, lousy music, everything handed to them without having to put in the blood, sweat and tears previous generations had to put in.

NOW we are lamenting, daily, about the post-Trump ERA, or the era of white nationalism, or the era of American decline, and the same infections are hitting Canada, where Conservatives keep promoting mini-Trumps as their candidates.

BUT is it really SO bad? THINK ABOUT IT.

When I was working part time as a school crossing guard prior to Covid, I saw effeminate boys walking side by side to school with the macho kids.

I saw blacks and whites walking together, I saw girls in hijabs hanging out with mini-skirted girls.

Everywhere there are now ramps for the disabled, gay couples walk hand in hand, at least in my home town here in Minny. We have seen rapid development of vaccines and while there is still strife in the world, no world wars or any major wars of any kind.

Doesn't that mean THIS has become the best era?

Depends if you see the glass half full or half empty, or if you are a pessimist or an optimist.

BUT for me the 60s and 70s were the best era, culturally, economically, with social movements that changed how we view the world.

Of course, someone is going to suggest no one era was better or worse than another, everything in flux.

I say NAY, the 80s and 90s were horrible, horrible music, punks instead of hippies, AIDS, a backward slide to conservatism, gadgets and toys more important than relationships.

BUT my point being, that is MY perception, others will disagree.

SO have YOUR say, what Era was the best in your eyes??