James.galbraith

Six months since leaving office, former President Donald Trump is sitting on a $102 million war chest.

But having whipped his supporters into a frenzy with pledges to overturn the election and promises to support Republican candidates in the midterms, he is not spending his campaign money on either.

A review of election filings from Make America Great Again PAC, Save America PAC, and the Save America Joint Fundraising Committee show that not a single penny was transferred or contributed from those Trump-affiliated entities to GOP candidates or committees involved in the midterm elections. Nor did Trump's various groups write a check to support the audit in Arizona that he has repeatedly praised in statements and suggested would lead to the overthrowing of the 2020 election results.

Trump’s groups brought in more than $80 million during the first half of 2021, a large chunk of which was transferred in from Trump-affiliated accounts. He used some of his funds on things like salaries for aides and political advisers, as well as events, travel expenses and fundraising outreach to supporters. He also spent more than $8 million in legal fees paid to various firms and attorneys to advance his attempts to change the results of the 2020 election and defend himself in a second impeachment trial. The one expenditure Trump did make to an outside group was to one in his own orbit: a $1 million contribution to America First Policy Institute, the think tank a handful of his former aides launched when he lost the White House.

Trump's spending decisions suggests that he knows the Arizona audit is just for show and that he is more keen on saving up money for his own purposes than he is on supporting others', at least for now. The spending patterns also stand in contrast to the tone and tenor of the fundraising appeals and public utterances he has been making since leaving office.

Key to Trump’s money-raising success has been continued baseless claims the election was stolen, his plea for support for election audits and reviews in states like Arizona, and his promise that he would continue to move the MAGA movement forward, even while out of the White House. While teasing a run in 2024, he has also repeatedly vowed to first help Republicans win back control of Congress in the midterms by offering his endorsement and even holding rallies in support of candidates.

A Trump spokesperson confirmed that no funds from any of Trump’s political committees have been spent in Arizona or other efforts, like the lawsuit calling for an audit in Fulton County, Georgia. The Washington Post was first to report lack of funding for the Arizona audit before FEC filings were made public.

An adviser said Trump has recently cut checks for candidates he supports, but those would not be visible on this latest July filing. And in a statement on Monday, Trump sought credit for the total amounts of money that major Republican campaign committees raised this year, saying that they did so using his “name and likeness through many of their efforts.”

“I am pleased to see the entire party benefit from ‘Trump,’” Trump said.

While Trump declined to transfer money to other Republicans or GOP committees, he did spend large sums on lawyers. Make America Great Again PAC, which was Trump’s campaign committee during the election and became a political action committee in 2021, spent more than $1 million on legal fees for mega firms Jones Day and Harder LLP, the law firm of Charles Harder. Harder had previously represented Trump in lawsuits brought by porn star Stormy Daniels as well as the Trump campaign in defamation lawsuits against media companies.

Trump’s Make America Great Again PAC also footed the bill for legal consulting fees during Trump’s second impeachment trial. The law firms of Trump’s three impeachment attorneys, Bruce Castor, Michael van der Veen, and David Schoen, were collectively paid more than $600,000.

In addition, more than $2.5 million was paid to Kasowitz, Benson, Torres, LLP, the firm of Trump’s attorney Marc Kasowitz, a prominent New York litigator who has represented Trump in high-profile lawsuits and was Trump’s private counsel during the Russia investigation.

After the November 2020 election, Trump’s attention almost entirely turned towards subverting the election results and various recount efforts. Yet of the nearly $2 million spent on recount-related legal consulting in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia — where the Trump campaign filed lawsuits to contest the general election outcome — only a small fraction was paid to the people who became the face of Trump’s crusade.

Jenna Ellis, who appeared almost daily on television and at local hearings to defend Trump’s election disputes, was paid $22,000 by Trump’s MAGA PAC according to filings. When asked for comment, she said this publication had “no clue what my representation agreement was nor do you care.” She did not elaborate, but Trump has been known to pay associates and aides through limited liability corporations, which make it effectively impossible to track how much they are earning.

Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani, who led efforts to overturn the election and pushed baseless theories of widespread voter fraud, was only paid over $75,000. That payment was for travel expenses and not legal fees. A spokesperson for Giuliani did not reply to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Trump said Giuliani has only been paid expenses, not legal fees.

In a sign of Giuliani’s frustration over the lack of remuneration, the former president’s personal attorney and longtime ally “liked” a tweet on Monday about him not being paid legal fees that read, “just another example of loyalists left to the slaughter.”

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today in the US market, a medium-sized battery EV already has 60-68 percent lower lifetime carbon emissions than a comparable car with an internal combustion engine. And the gap is only going to increase as we use more renewable electricity. That finding comes from a white paper (PDF) published by Georg Bieker at the International Council on Clean Transportation. The comprehensive study compares the lifetime carbon emissions, both today and in 2030, of midsized vehicles in Europe, the US, China, and India, across a wide range of powertrain types, including gasoline, diesel, hybrid EVs (HEVs), plug-in hybrid EVs (PHEVs), battery EVs (BEVs), and fuel cell EVs (FCEVs). The study takes into account the carbon emissions that result from the various fuels (fossil fuels, biofuels, electricity, hydrogen, and e-fuels), as well as the emissions that result from manufacturing and then recycling or disposing of vehicles and their various components. Bieker has also factored in real-world fuel or energy consumption -- something that is especially important when it comes to PHEVs, according to the report. Finally, the study accounts for the fact that energy production should become less carbon-intensive over time, based on stated government objectives. The life cycle emissions of battery EVs in Europe today at 66-69 percent lower than a comparable gasoline-powered car. China is at 37-45 percent fewer emissions for BEVs, and India shows 19-34 percent. As for fuel cell EVs (FCEVs), they "are only abut 26-40 percent less carbon-intensive than a comparable gasoline vehicle," notes Ars. "But if hydrogen was produced using renewable energy rather than steam reformation of natural gas, that number would jump to 76-80 percent -- even better than a BEV's numbers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Every jobseeker welcomes an invitation to a second interview, because it signals a company's interest. A third interview might feel even more positive, or even be the precursor to an offer. But what happens when the process drags on to a fourth, fifth or sixth round -- and it's not even clear how close you are to the 'final' interview? That's a question Mike Conley, 49, grappled with earlier this year. The software engineering manager, based in Indiana, US, had been seeking a new role after losing his job during the pandemic. Five companies told him they had to delay hiring because of Covid-19 -- but only after he'd done the final round of interviews. Another three invited him for several rounds of interviews until it was time to make an offer, at which point they decided to promote internally. Then, he made it through three rounds of interviews for a director-level position at a company he really liked, only to receive an email to co-ordinate six more rounds. "When I responded to the internal HR, I even asked, 'Are these the final rounds?,'" he says. "The answer I got back was: 'We don't know yet.'" That's when Conley made the tough decision to pull out. He shared his experience in a LinkedIn post that's touched a nerve with fellow job-seekers, who've viewed it 2.6 million times as of this writing. Conley says he's received about 4,000 public comments of support, and "four times that in private comments" from those who feared being tracked by current or prospective employers. [...] In fact, the internet is awash with similar stories jobseekers who've become frustrated with companies -- particularly in the tech, finance and energy sectors -- turning the interview process into a marathon. That poses the question: how many rounds of interviews should it take for an employer to reasonably assess a candidate before the process veers into excess? And how long should candidates stick it out if there's no clear information on exactly how many hoops they'll have to jump through to stay in the running for a role? Google recently determined that four interviews was enough to make a hiring decision with 86% confidence, noting that there was a diminishing return on interviewer feedback thereafter. "John Sullivan, a Silicon Valley-based HR thought leader, says companies should nail down a hire-by date from the start of the recruitment process, because the best candidates only transition the job market briefly," reports the BBC. "According to a survey from global staffing firm Robert Half, 62% of US professionals say they lose interest in a job if they don't hear back from the employer within two weeks -- or 10 business days -- after the initial interview. That number jumps to 77% if there is no status update within three weeks. "

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Donald Trump doesn’t pay his bills, and he isn’t loyal to anyone. This is like saying the sky is blue and the sun sets in the west. It’s as plain as the pug nose on Trump’s jowly ape scrotum of a face, and if you end up getting burned by this universal MAGA maxim, you need to load up on aloe and simply take your lumps and/or blisters.

I mean, even Satan lives up to his obligations when, say, he loses fiddle contests. Trump can’t even admit losing to Joe Biden. He’s as good as his word—so long as that word is “knobcheese.”

So I’m not sure what Rudy Giuliani was thinking while traversing the country in the wake of Donald Trump’s election defeat, spritzing his enchanted brain effluent out the sides of his shrunken apple head in order to bewitch we common plebs into thinking Trump was the legitimate president-elect.

Sure, Rudy did a terrible job. Trump would have gotten better legal advice by waterboarding Jeanine Pirro with a few slop buckets full of Stoli, but Rudy really did stick his neck out for Trump. Sure, he might have been hanging out at that Philly dildo store anyway, but without Trump’s electoral obstinance, at most two or three middle-aged men would have been gawking at him during his shambolic jerk-off session … instead of the whole world. 

So, naturally, this short tweet thread from New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman is as pathetic as it is predictable:

For the nontweeters:

Giuliani allies are looking at the Trump $ - even if it isn't $82 million - and are aghast that Trump isn't helping Giuliani with legal fees. Giuliani's friends say he is saying he is close to broke, and his interview w @MelissaRusso4NY makes clear he knows he's in legal jeopardy.

Trump aides have been clear they see no mechanism for paying Giuliani’s legal bills that isn’t problematic for Trump, and they think Giuliani took actions a lawyer should have known were problematic, even if the client wanted it.

But this is of note in the context of Trump having had a previous lawyer who pleaded guilty and then cooperated with an investigation into Trump.

They see no mechanism for paying Giuliani’s legal bills? How about Venmo? Personal checks also work. As do Spanish doubloons. Or Bitcoin. Any form of currency, really. I mean, at the very least, Trump could send Grampa Fiddle-Pants whatever’s in his wallet right now, even if it’s just a half-stamped Subway Club card and a few random shekels.

Trump has reportedly built a political war chest in excess of $100 million, but Giuliani has about as much chance of seeing even a small portion of it as he does of securing Ivanka’s betrothal. 

As for Haberman’s ominous final tweet? Yes, please! What could be more entertaining than Rudy Giuliani flipping on Donald Trump? Other than Michael Cohen flipping, that is.

Rudy’s already professionally and morally bankrupt. Does he have to be financially bankrupt, too? Well, apparently Donald Trump thinks so. And he calls the shots for all these clowns.

It made comedian Sarah Silverman say “THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT” and prompted author Stephen King to shout “Pulitzer Prize!!!” (on Twitter, that is). What is it? The viral letter that launched four hilarious Trump-trolling books. Get them all, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Just $12.96 for the pack of 4! Or if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.

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Responding to an urgent call from protesters to defund police departments and, in effect, reallocate a portion of police budgets to preventative and mental health services, Rochester, New York, is actually doing exactly that, the British online newspaper the Independent reported. And the move was in part prompted by a name less well-known than George Floyd’s. About two months before a Minneapolis cop kneeled on Floyd's neck for more than nine minutes in a deadly detainment, Daniel Prude was killed in a similar fashion in Rochester.

Prude was naked, unarmed, and having a mental health crisis when Rochester police officers Mark Vaughn, Troy Taladay, and Francisco Santiago brutally apprehended him and placed him in a spit hood on March 23 in a detainment that ended with Prude’s death one week later. When Daniel Prude’s brother, Joe Prude, called the police for help and officers responded, they joked about Daniel Prude’s state, the racial justice organization Free the People Roc reported in a Facebook post.

“While cuffed, naked, and laying on the freezing cold ground, RPD officers mocked Daniel Prude and cracked jokes, and put a bag over his head,” the organization said. “RPD officers Mark Vaughn, Troy Talladay, and Francisco Santiago then proceeded to swarm him. While Talladay forced his knee into Daniel’s back and Santiago held down his legs, Vaughn pushed Daniel’s head into the ground using all of his body weight—essentially doing a triangle pushup on his head. Less than ten minutes after he was cuffed, Daniel Prude breathed his last conscious breath.”

Attorney General Letitia James announced earlier this year during a news conference that, although her office determined "there was sufficient evidence" to present Prude’s case to a grand jury, the current laws on deadly force failed Prude. A grand jury voted not to indict the officers accused of killing him.

The only semblance of justice in the case came in the form of a public safety overhaul, marked by the retirement or resignation of the police chief and the city’s entire command staff and a 4% decrease to the city's $95 million policing budget last year, the Independent reported. That amounts to about $3.8 million, and the city again slashed police funding by about $4.5 million this year. A sliver of the money, $130,000, was taken from police overtime and reallocated to youth services, and a large portion went to funding a "person in crisis" team that dispatches staffers who work in mental and behavioral health with officers on police calls involving someone suffering a mental health crisis.

“I’m from this community, and people from this community have spoken after they saw how police treated Daniel Prude. That’s what birthed our program,” Dre’ Johnson, a social worker on the city’s  new crisis team, told the Independent. “I don’t think it’s taking a shot at the police to say that people weren’t happy with the responses they were getting when it came to mental health, or substance abuse and homelessness. There was a void and we’re filling that void.”

Johnson is on a team of 30 employees with similar backgrounds, all more equipped than police to deal with those suffering mental health crises, the Independent reported. “These folks really are having one of the most difficult days of their life,” Johnson told the newspaper, “and it doesn’t need to be compounded by a fear of being hurt by someone who isn’t trained or has the background or skill set to work with that person.”

Renee Brean, a social worker who works with Johnson, told the Independent there is no routine call. “It might be someone who is suicidal or homicidal. It might be someone who has run out of meds,” Brean said. “We’ve responded to calls where there’s a domestic dispute between husband and wife, parents and children. Each crisis looks different.” Brean and those in similar roles act as mediators between police and those in crisis, many of whom have had negative interactions in the past shaping their fear of police. “If we’re paying tax dollars for someone to protect us, and we’re afraid to utilize that service. We’re afraid that the protection will cause harm, or make it worse, that’s an issue,” Brean said.

On a ride-along with Independent journalist Richard Hall, Brean described heading with Johnson to the scene of a woman who had appeared to be having a mental breakdown in the shower with her clothes on. "Johnson tries to arrange a ride home for a woman in distress, while Brean takes care of the children who were playing on the street," Hall wrote. "They go between the police and the ambulance drivers before she is eventually taken to hospital. To the untrained eye, it looks less of a new way of policing and more of an addition to it."

Johnson debriefed with Hall after the call and told him the officer "seemed to get agitated" with the woman "because she wasn’t listening." "I’ve seen many situations go awry because people were talking back,” Johnson said. “The way that we are taught from school is to be as least invasive as possible. The police are trained totally differently. They are trained to issue commands and people have to comply. It turns into a power struggle sometimes."

RELATED: Rochester police chief and entire command staff retire/resign following video of Daniel Prude death

RELATED: Not 1 cop indicted after video shows police put a naked Daniel Prude in a spit hood. He ends up dead

We're seeing dry runs at manufacturing uncertainty about election outcomes as we speak.

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We know that students—including marginalized students, like members of the LGBTQ+ community—learn from and work with professors, staff, and other employees who hold and espouse discriminatory, hateful beliefs while the students attend many evangelical institutions. Anti-LGBTQ statements an administrator at a public college made while serving as a church pastor have come to light, leading to peaceful protests across the street from the church on Sunday, as reported by Idaho Ed News. Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho, however, has stuck by him.

According to the school, Logan Fowler, the director of marketing and communications, did not make any of these hateful comments while at work and is protected by his First Amendment rights. But LGBTQ+ advocates at the school aren’t comforted. 

In one video of a sermon at Truth Baptist Church, according to LGBTQ Nation, Fowler reportedly says, “Our world hates God, hates Christians, and hates the Bible.” In a video posted to the church’s Facebook page, Fowler also suggests that Pride parades foreshadow accepting pedophilia and suggests gay people are “vile.”

During a virtual meeting on Tuesday, students and faculty spoke with the college’s president, Cynthia Pemberton, who stressed that the school couldn’t do anything because Fowler wasn’t at work when he made the remarks. She explained that the college backs workers’ First Amendment rights. 

But people are worried about how Fowler’s rhetoric makes the school look, as well as what the comments could do when it comes to trust, community, and support between staff and students.

“When we have an administrator who speaks in contrast to what we say we believe as an institution,” Lauren Connolly, an associate professor in the English department, said at the meeting. “How do we develop trust between the community and the college?” 

“I am a Christian who believes the Bible is true,” Fowler told the Lewiston Tribune in an interview. “I believe sin is real and so is the Savior Jesus Christ. I will not be bullied into relinquishing my First Amendment rights to practice my religion and exercise free speech as a private citizen and as a pastor in my place of worship ... Those who say Bible believers like me no longer have a place in a public institution are the intolerant ones. Sadly, the rights of Bible believers are under assault, even in America, even in Idaho.”

Fowler did not participate in the Tuesday Zoom call, but on July 16, Fowler shared a video on the church’s YouTube channel addressing the allegations. He said he was charged as being “intolerant,” and that folks were slandering and threatening him, and accused others of being intolerant of him as a Christian and Bible-believer. “Now, Bible believers have no place to co-exist in this world,” he says in the video.

Ultimately, in the Tuesday open meeting (which is a regularly scheduled event), Pemberton said she values that people have First Amendment rights, and told those concerned on the call, “All the beliefs that you’re sharing, the sentiments that you’re sharing, there are people who believe very differently — and we do coexist.” But that sentiment isn't enough of a comfort to all concerned.

In the same meeting, the president of the college’s Gender and Sexuality Alliance (GSA), Kason Seward, said he loves his school and believes it’s put him on the right path for everything he’s wanted in life. According to Seward, however, Fowler’s rhetoric is the sort of speech used to hurt LGBTQ+ people throughout history. 

“I feel betrayed, honestly,” Seward said, adding that he’s now wondering if the school’s support for nondiscrimination policies is anything more than words. 

New Comic: 2021-08-02

Just weeks after its launch, the pro-Trump social network GETTR is inundated with terrorist propaganda spread by supporters of Islamic State, according to a POLITICO review of online activity on the fledgling platform.

The social network — started a month ago by members of former President Donald Trump’s inner circle — features reams of jihadi-related material, including graphic videos of beheadings, viral memes that promote violence against the West and even memes of a militant executing Trump in an orange jumpsuit similar to those used in Guantanamo Bay.

The rapid proliferation of such material is placing GETTR in the awkward position of providing a safe haven for jihadi extremists online as it attempts to establish itself as a free speech MAGA-alternative to sites like Facebook and Twitter.

It underscores the challenges facing Trump and his followers in the wake of his ban from the mainstream social media platforms following the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riots.

Islamic State “has been very quick to exploit GETTR,” said Moustafa Ayad, executive director for Africa, the Middle East and Asia at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that tracks online extremism, who first discovered the jihadi accounts and shared his findings with POLITICO.

“On Facebook, there was on one of these accounts that I follow that is known to be Islamic State, which said ‘Oh, Trump announced his new platform. Inshallah, all the mujahideen will exploit that platform,’” he added. “The next day, there were at least 15 accounts on GETTR that were Islamic State.”

While GETTR does not provide access to its data to track the spread, or virality, of such extremist material on its platform, POLITICO found at least 250 accounts that had posted regularly on the platform since early July. Many followed each other, and used hashtags to promote the jihadi material to this burgeoning online community.

In the months since he was kicked off Twitter and suspended from Facebook, Trump has sought alternative ways to engage with his base online. While his supporters decamped to other online venues — including the social network Parler, where they could express themselves without facing increased scrutiny — Trump’s own effort to create an internet bullhorn has stalled.

In May, he launched a blog — titled “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump” — but it was taken down just weeks later amid widespread ridicule and poor readership.

So far, GETTR has been the highest-profile pro-Trump platform launch, given the names behind it: Jason Miller, former Trump spokesperson, is its chief executive, and the site is partially funded by Miles Guo, the business partner of former Trump advisor Steve Bannon. Trump, himself, is not directly involved in the operation, nor has he officially signed up to the platform. The social network has touted a “free speech” policy that, purportedly, would allow users to fully express themselves without the censorship of tech giants.

Yet this MAGA exodus to fringe social networks that champion unfettered speech has also caught the attention of supporters of Islamic State and other jihadist groups, according to extremism experts.

In response to questions about jihadi material being shared on GETTR, Miller told POLITICO that ISIS was attacking the MAGA movement because Trump had destroyed the group militarily. “The only ISIS members still alive are keyboard warriors hiding in caves and eating dirt cookies,” he said in a text message.

These terrorist communities have similarly faced widespread removals from the largest social networks, which have often promoted their clampdown on Islamic extremists as an example of how the tech companies are policing their global platforms for harmful content.

In response, Islamic State supporters have quickly shifted gears, looking for new spaces online where they can spread their hateful material, as well as piggybacking on tactics and platforms first used in the United States.

“Is Daesh here?” asked an account whose profile photo was of the Islamic State flag account, using the Arabic acronym for jihadi movement. The replies were in the affirmative, with some praising the social network for its willingness to host such content.

Days after GETTR was launched on July 1, Islamic State supporters began urging their followers on other social networks to sign up to the pro-Trump network, in part to take the jihadi fight directly to MAGA nation.

“If this app reaches the expected success, which is mostly probable, it should be adopted by followers and occupied in order to regain the glory of Twitter, may God prevail,” one Islamic State account on Facebook wrote on July 6.

Some of the jihadi posts on GETTR from early July were eventually taken down, highlighting that the pro-Trump platform had taken at least some steps to remove the harmful material.

Larger platforms like Facebook and Twitter now work via the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, an industry-funded nonprofit which shares terrorist content between companies — via a database of extremist material accessible to its members — so that the material can be taken down as quickly as possible.

GETTR has yet to sign up.

In the platform’s terms of service, it outlines how offensive or illegal content, including that related to terrorism, may be removed from GETTR. “This may include content identified as personal bullying, sexual abuse of a child, attacking any religion or race, or content containing video or depictions of beheading,” a clause reads.

Though the site has had notoriously spotty luck in moderating users on the platform — in its early days, it was flooded with a wide spectrum of pornography — Miller has drawn the line at doxxing, or sharing other people’s addresses, or advocating physical harm.

In interviews, GETTR’s chief executive has touted the site’s content moderation policy, primarily based on a combination of human monitoring and algorithms.

Four days after POLITICO submitted several requests for comment to GETTR, many of these accounts and videos are still up.

The overall amount of terrorist propaganda that POLITICO found on GETTR represented a mere fraction of the mostly right-wing content — which also includes the promotion of the Proud Boys white supremacist movement. More mainstream conservative influencers and policymakers like Sean Hannity and Mike Pompeo also regularly post on the platform.

Still, the fact that such jihadi material was readily available on the social network, and GETTR’s failure to clamp down on such extremism, underlined the difficulties that the company faces in balancing its free speech ethos with growing demands to stop terrorist-related material from finding an audience online.

“The content we’re coming across on small platforms is basically similar to the content that is being automatically removed from Facebook and Twitter,” said Adam Hadley, director of Tech Against Terrorism, a nonprofit organization that works with smaller social networks, but not GETTR, in combating the rise of extremist content online.

“Many of the smaller platforms do not have the resources to automatically remove this type of content,” he added. His organization’s membership includes Tumblr and Wordpress, the blogging platform.

Extremism analysts who reviewed POLITICO’s findings said that Islamic State supporters’ use of GETTR appeared to be an initial test to see if their content would escape detection or be subject to content moderation.

In their ongoing cat-and-mouse fight with Western national security agencies and Silicon Valley platforms, jihadi groups are quickly evolving their tactics to stay one step ahead of online removals.

“The terrorist organizations are always experimenting, because they're fighting a real battle to continue to have access to public spaces to spread their propaganda,” said Emerson Brooking, a senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab and the author of “LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media.”

So far, Islamic State supporters are enjoying their incursion into GETTR and the possible new audience they could reach. “We will come at you with slaying and explosions you worshippers of the cross,” wrote an account whose name referenced the extremist group, adding: “How great is freedom of expression.”

Rym Momtaz contributed to this report from Paris.

When Microsoft unveiled its Windows 365 Cloud PC desktop-as-a-service product last month, officials said they'd release pricing on the day the service became generally available, August 2. As promised, the company has published pricing, and it ranges from $20 per user per month for the lowest end SKU, to $162 per user per month for the most expensive one. From a report: Windows 365 is available in two editions: Windows 365 Business and Windows 365 Enterprise. The Windows 365 Business SKUs are capped at 300 users per organization. The $20 per user per month Business price is for a single virtual core, 2 GB of RAM and 64 GB of storage -- and requires the Windows Hybrid Benefit. (Hybrid Benefits are Microsoft's Bring-Your-Own license model, which allows customers to apply existing (or new) licenses toward the cost of a product.) Without the Hybrid Benefit discount, that same SKU is $24 per user per month. At the high end, the Business SKU with eight virtual cores, 32 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage costs $162 per user per month --- or $158 per user per month with the Windows Hybrid Benefit. The Enterprise SKUs for Windows 365 are priced similarly. A single virtual core, 2 GB of RAM and 64 GV of storage will go for $20 per user per month. At the high end, the 8 virtual core, 32 GB of RAM, 512 GB of storage SKU will go for $158 per user per month.

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From today's decision in Klaassen v. Trustees of Indiana Univ., denying a motion for an injunction pending appeal (decided today in an opinion by Judges Frank Easterbrook, joined by Judges Michael Scudder and Thomas Kirsch:

Starting next semester, all students at Indiana University must be vaccinated against COVID-19 unless they are exempt for religious or medical reasons. Exempt students must wear masks and be tested for the disease twice a week….

Given Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905), which holds that a state may require all members of the public to be vaccinated against smallpox, there can't be a constitutional problem with vaccination against SARS-CoV-2. Plaintiffs assert that the rational-basis standard used in Jacobson does not offer enough protection for their interests and that courts should not be as deferential to the decisions of public bodies as Jacobson was, but a court of appeals must apply the law established by the Supreme Court.

Plaintiffs invoke substantive due process. Under Washington v. Glucksberg (1997), and other decisions, such an argument depends on the existence of a fundamental right ingrained in the American legal tradition. Yet Jacobson, which sustained a criminal conviction for refusing to be vaccinated, shows that plaintiffs lack such a right. To the contrary, vaccination requirements, like other public-health measures, have been common in this nation.

And this case is easier than Jacobson for the University, for two reasons.

First, Jacobson sustained a vaccination requirement that lacked exceptions for adults. But Indiana University has exceptions for persons who declare vaccination incompatible with their religious beliefs and persons for whom vaccination is medically contraindicated. The problems that may arise when a state refuses to make accommodations therefore are not present in this case. Indeed, six of the eight plaintiffs have claimed the religious exception, and a seventh is eligible for it. These plaintiffs just need to wear masks and be tested, requirements that are not constitutionally problematic. (The eighth plaintiff does not qualify for an exemption, which is why we have a justiciable controversy.)

Second, Indiana does not require every adult member of the public to be vaccinated, as Massachusetts did in Jacobson. Vaccination is instead a condition of attending Indiana University. People who do not want to be vaccinated may go elsewhere. Many universities require vaccination against SARSCoV-2, but many others do not. Plaintiffs have ample educational opportunities.

Each university may decide what is necessary to keep other students safe in a congregate setting. Health exams and vaccinations against other diseases (measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, varicella, meningitis, influenza, and more) are common requirements of higher education. Vaccination protects not only the vaccinated persons but also those who come in contact with them, and at a university close contact is inevitable.

We assume with plaintiffs that they have a right in bodily integrity. They also have a right to hold property. Yet they or their parents must surrender property to attend Indiana University. Undergraduates must part with at least $11,000 a year (in-state tuition), even though Indiana could not summarily confiscate that sum from all residents of college age.

Other conditions of enrollment are normal and proper. The First Amendment means that a state cannot tell anyone what to read or write, but a state university may demand that students read things they prefer not to read and write things they prefer not to write. A student must read what a professor assigns, even if the student deems the books heretical, and must write exams or essays as required. A student told to analyze the role of nihilism in Dostoevsky's The Possessed but who submits an essay about Iago's motivations in Othello will flunk.

If conditions of higher education may include surrendering property and following instructions about what to read and write, it is hard to see a greater problem with medical conditions that help all students remain safe when learning. A university will have trouble operating when each student fears that everyone else may be spreading disease. Few people want to return to remote education-and we do not think that the Constitution forces the distance-learning approach on a university that believes vaccination (or masks and frequent testing of the unvaccinated) will make in-person operations safe enough.

Seems correct to me; thanks to commenter Dilan Esper for the point.

There needs to be a word. A word that combines frustrating, terrifying, and infuriating. A word for a story that contains information that lets you know that the people who are not just riding on the bus, but steering it toward a cliff, have absolutely no plans for what comes next even as the front wheels leave the ground.

This article from The New York Times starts off describing a specific incident that’s frightening enough, but also strangely heartening. Homeowners in Oregon have been calling their local utility, not to complain about their power being down, but to ask that their power be turned off. That’s because they were concerned that a coming storm might knock down their lines and trigger more fires in what’s already one of the worst fire seasons. Truthfully, being willing to sit at home in the dark, even with the miserable weather that’s swept over much of the Northwest this summer, in order to protect forests and neighbors, seems like the mark of pretty good citizens.

But behind that incident is an astounding admission—utility companies are utterly unprepared for situations like the one behind the fires in Oregon.

In fact, it’s far worse.

Nationwide, electric utilities, grid operators and regulators have struggled to adequately prepare for the hazards of global warming, like storm surges that can knock out substations and heat waves that can cause power plants to falter, with many expecting that the biggest threats will not materialize for decades to come.

As the nation roasts under one set of record highs after another, the West watches water supplies evaporate in the Megadrought, and air conditioners everywhere spin up to levels that trigger blackouts and brownouts, the people who are among those most to blame for the situation now say they are utterly unprepared. Utility companies saying they are still “expecting that the biggest threats will not materialize for decades to come” may be a bigger example of cognitive dissonance than Rep. Elise Stefanik vowing to protect Medicare and Medicaid from “socialist healthcare.”

The Times quotes an energy expert from Texas as saying, “It’s fair to say there was this widespread assumption that the impacts of climate change and extreme weather would unfold more gradually, and there would be more time to prepare.” 

On the one hand, it’s exasperating that the people who are right in the middle of this issue would claim that they didn’t know what was going on, and behave as though they could just sit back for decades before taking steps to address the climate crisis. When I worked at the world’s largest coal company, you can bet they knew what was happening, all the way back into the 1980s. They certainly took steps. They took steps to start dozens of fake “institutes” denying climate change. They took steps to fund anyone they could find who would author a paper claiming manmade climate change wasn’t happening. They took steps to print “Plants need CO2!” banners and “America Digs Coal” bumper stickers. They took steps to fund tea party events, where they could prop up speakers against any form of environmental regulation. They took steps to stuff the campaign coffers of Republican candidates full of cash, so they could stand in front of the nation and make jokes about the climate.

They weren’t ignorant. Just evil. So it’s hard to believe that any electric utility in the nation didn’t know this was coming. 

Going to the airport can be an unpleasant experience. The bipartisan infrastructure plan could help.

If you’re flying out of Singapore Changi, which aviation survey and research group Skytrax ranks as the world’s best airport, you can spend time before your flight in the airport’s tropical butterfly garden.

At second-ranked Tokyo Haneda, you can enjoy one of several open-air rooftop restaurants and a rapid transit monorail system that links terminals. At Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, rated ninth, you can go to a free art museum annex before heading to one of 223 gates spread around a single-terminal concept.

If you’re flying out of the US, however, the best part of a trip to the airport is probably getting to leave. After standing in long lines, waiting in overcrowded gates, and managing delays, wanting to get out of the airport as soon as possible is understandable. And it certainly doesn’t help that the features that push other airports to the top of the rankings would be unrecognizable to someone flying in the US.

No American airport cracks Skytax’s top 30; George Bush Intercontinental Airport, in Houston, is the highest-ranked American airport at No. 31, and only Houston, Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky, Denver, and Atlanta’s airports show up in the top 50.

Not only are few US airports among the world’s best, but overall, they are in bad shape: In 2021, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave America’s aviation system a D+, largely because airports’ basic inefficiencies and lack of space lead to problems like delays and overcrowding. The airport grade was worse than those of other, oft-maligned parts of US transportation infrastructure, like bridges, which earned a C, and roads, which were given a D.

However, federal help for airports may be on the way. The White House and a bipartisan group of senators are working on a plan for a roughly $1 trillion investment in US infrastructure, a number that includes $25 billion for airports.

That bipartisan infrastructure framework (known as the BIF) still has a long runway ahead of it before passage, although an initial agreement has been reached in the Senate. The deal still faces potential challenges in the House, where progressive Democrats have signaled a wariness to back it without guaranteed moderate support for a separate budget package, which includes investments like universal pre-K and green card reforms. But the prognosis is positive overall — a welcome sign for airports needing funding for long-awaited improvements.

If the bipartisan framework does become law, airports’ budgetary needs are so severe — and their spatial challenges so significant — that $25 billion is likely not enough to be a cure-all for their infrastructure challenges. Still, that money would be of help — not necessarily to make US airports more luxurious, but to increase efficiency during check-in, security screenings, and boarding; make air travel a little greener; and to ensure that airports built before television was a thing can meet the needs of 21st-century travel.

American airports were built for 1940s air travel. Flying is very different today.

American airports’ problems are familiar to travelers. In nearly every US airport, the physical space is insufficient to accommodate modern needs, from security checks to health protocols. There are more flights than there are gates, causing delays. And not every airport can afford the latest air traffic control technology, affecting their ability to manage their airspace efficiently.

The growing number of passengers could exacerbate these issues: Over the past two years, ASCE found that air travel growth has outpaced growth in the number of flights, and while the number of passengers obviously took a huge hit during the pandemic, travel is poised to rebound this summer. And even during the pandemic, cargo — another critical factor in the aviation infrastructure equation — took off.

At Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Airport, CEO Candace McGraw said cargo volumes increased 25 percent year to date in 2021, and passenger volumes are beginning to return to normal levels. The US just doesn’t have the infrastructural capacity to meet that type of demand.

We’ve already seen what happens when sudden changes squeeze airports for space: longer lines, more crowds, and delays. New regulations after 9/11 meant that airports needed to adjust for the creation of Transportation Security Administration checkpoints and make room for new baggage screening systems in terminals.

For older airports, in particular, it became a challenge to make everything fit and to accommodate the extra lines they created. Now, with the pandemic, there’s a need for health screening checkpoints, further complicating airports’ spatial geometry, and pressure to renovate HVAC systems and expand cleaning procedures, both of which require additional funding.

The ASCE found that flight delay minutes rose from just over 60 million in 2017 to nearly 100 million in 2019. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics found that weather only accounts for 3 percent of those delays; the biggest culprits are the aircraft arriving late (33 percent), a national aviation system delay (29 percent), and an air carrier delay (25 percent). Tor Anderzen, the author of ASCE’s infrastructure report card, said infrastructure challenges can be blamed for a majority of delays because capacity issues snowball.

For example, let’s say a plane is late arriving in New York because of an air carrier delay — passengers cannot board yet because the plane hasn’t docked at the gate. The plane is at the airport, but because demand is so close to terminal capacity, it has to taxi on the runway for a while before coming in. Now, boarding for that plane’s next flight is delayed 10 minutes. When the plane flies to its next destination, it’s bringing that delay with it, creating a dilemma for air traffic control when it lands in Atlanta. That leads to more delays. By the time it takes off again, to go to Las Vegas, passengers are now looking at a 30-minute delay.

“People are getting frustrated with the system because of the delays,” Anderzen said. “The cost of underinvesting in our aviation infrastructure is not only measured in minutes of delay, in the cost in dollars for lost income. It also ... does impact our mental health as travelers.”

Many of the problems US airports face can be traced back to the fact that most of them were planned and built in a completely different era of travel.

US airport construction really accelerated after World War II, after the Federal Airport Act of 1946 provided grants that could finance up to half of the cost of an airport project. Investments in maintenance and expansion remained relatively low until 1970, when the law was repealed in favor of the Airport and Airway Development Act, which authorized the Airport Improvement Program (AIP), a $3 billion per year (on average) federal grant program, to provide predictable annual funding to airports. That money is helpful, but it only goes so far, especially because it’s limited to areas of the airport terminal meant for public use, meaning it can’t, for instance, improve gate areas in their totality.

More money with fewer restrictions is needed because, as frustrating as things are now, with new coronavirus procedures and a potential spike in travel demand, without further construction and investment they may soon be worse.

US airports need to solve their space problems

The only major US airport to open in the last 30 years is Denver International Airport, a mega project in which the Denver Regional Council of Governments had the luxury of selecting a space in the 1980s rather than the 1940s. The result, which cost $8.2 billion by today’s standards, was North America’s largest airport by land area, with far more space for terminals and concourses than is typical.

Other airports have not been as fortunate. In the years since their initial construction, they have undergone remodeling and expansion, but they’re often limited in how far they can go. At Reagan National Airport, for example, experts say there’s simply no more room to build; at this point, it is what it is.

Most airports, even if far from the city center, are surrounded by residential and commercial development. Localities are stuck with the plots of land they chose for their airports so many decades ago, and there’s very little room for expansion. Even in areas where new land could be acquired, it can prove nearly impossible to buy or build given environmental impact regulations and, critically, community resistance — like airport noise complaints from homeowners.

“They generally have to operate within the footprint they have at this point,” said Janet Bednarek, an aviation history professor at the University of Dayton. “Whatever expansion they had came in the ’50s and ’60s, and that pretty much set the limits to where they could be.”

Ideally, cities with aging airports would be given federal money to start from scratch, as Denver did. That would allow municipalities to design spaces with modern security, health, and capacity considerations in mind. That would mean massive new terminals, plenty of runways, check-in areas with ample space for TSA checkpoints, and maybe even a butterfly garden or two.

But the price tag of the Denver airport shows why that’s not possible. Instead, cities will have to work with the $25 billion that may be coming, which, at best, will allow for remodeling. That comes with far more challenges than simply building from scratch, ranging from utilizing creative architectural choices to maximize existing space (as Reagan would need to do); finding ways to divert passengers and planes around construction without overly worsening the travel experience; and, of course, being restricted to the airport’s current footprint.

Overall, building a new airport is just easier than doing renovations — and more likely to solve US airports’ most common problems. But a renovation is cheaper than new construction, and though arguably unable to completely eliminate all issues, is certainly better than doing nothing at all.

There’s some federal funding for airports, but cities and states are mostly on their own

The aforementioned federal programs aside, Congress has seen airports as state and local responsibilities since 1926, when federal law established state and local governments as the sole proprietors and operators of airports. With the exception of the two airports serving the District of Columbia — Dulles International Airport and Reagan National Airport — American airports are still owned and managed at the local level.

That’s not the case internationally: In China, the government chooses sites and finances the planning and construction of airports, with particular attention paid toward international gateway airports like the new Beijing Daxing International Airport. Bednarek notes this difference makes it hard to directly compare even the largest US airports with those considered the world’s best.

“When [flyers are] comparing some of these international airports to American airports, generally, they’re talking about airports that are consciously designed by national governments in these countries as international gateways,” Bednarek said. “They’re usually the airport that foreigners fly into when they come into the country.”

The US didn’t design its infrastructure to have one showstopping airport that all international travelers come into — in fact, when some of its oldest airports were built, international travel was still done primarily by sea. And no state or local government has the space or money to try to build one.

“In the US ... it would be up to the local authorities to decide what to do,” she continued. “We’re a very big country, and there’s lots of international airports. So it’s a much more diffuse airport market.”

American airports are funded with a mix of revenue they generate, federal grants, and financing through options like selling bonds.

Federally, each of the roughly 400 US airports with 10,000 or more passengers automatically receives an entitlement from the AIP each year. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the busiest airport in the US, typically gets an entitlement of around $130 million. Otherwise, airports generate revenue mostly by charging rents to hotels, restaurants, rental car companies, parking lot operators, and, of course, to airlines for landing fees and terminal space. They also pocket the passenger facility charge (PFC), a collection fee of up to $4.50 on ticket prices, capped by the federal government, essentially a tax on travelers.

These funding sources are enormous revenue generators — parking and rental cars alone generated over $6 billion in 2018 for the 30 large hub airports, Dave NewMyer, a professor emeritus of aviation management and flight at Southern Illinois University, said — but a lot of it goes toward the daily costs of operation, like salaries and wages, contractual services like snow removal or engineering, and repairs and maintenance. That leaves little, if anything, for big construction projects, meaning when large projects are approved, state and local airport authorities have to sell bonds — that is, take on debt — to finance them.

“A lot of people wonder why we don’t rank as high, as far as some of the surveys are done,” NewMyer said. “There’s not a lot of spare money to do that.”

Can the infrastructure plan help make air travel less terrible?

Details of the BIF’s proposed $25 billion in FAA funding aren’t finalized, but the current plan focuses on addressing repair backlogs and investing in emission-reduction technologies. So far, it seems travelers can be optimistic about seeing some improvements — lawmakers in particular seem dedicated to terminal upgrades, which ASCE identified as the top investment need.

Grants to airports to address their aging terminal infrastructure would allow them to potentially expand terminals, or at least get creative in airports where there is no room for expansion.

“Many airports have booming demand, more aircraft coming in than they have gates for,” Greg Pecoraro, the president of the National Association of State Aviation Officials, said. “We need more gates, bigger terminals, and more capacity to be able to park aircraft.”

New York City’s LaGuardia Airport — which is surrounded by development — is an example of what a successful BIF might be able to help fund.

This year, the airport, commonly regarded as the worst in the US, renovated its Terminal B through a public-private partnership — a new trend in aviation. The $8 billion project is the largest public-private partnership in American aviation history, and led to the creation of 72 new gates, a new garage, new concourse, renovated roadway, new taxiway, an enormous mosaic wall, an enlarged departures hall, and free Covid-19 tests. The terminal is 50 percent larger than the one it replaced.

To get around space constraints, LaGuardia reconfigured its airfield layout, rebuilding previously separate terminals as one contiguous building through new construction and moving the entire facility to use more of its land. Overall, the new construction better utilized the existing space in a manner not necessarily replicable at all US airports, but with a creativity that could be repeated with the help of federal funding.

As a public-private partnership, two-thirds of the tab is being paid for through the existing passenger and rental fees and funding from LaGuardia Gateway Partners, in exchange for a lease to operate and maintain Terminal B, and collect its revenue, through 2050. The cost of the project, and the amount of private financing necessary, provides a look into just how expensive a successful terminal modernization project can be.

Airport advocates say BIF funding is a step in the right direction, but insufficient given the enormity of the challenges — especially considering possible short-term and long-term needs, like the ability for travelers to park and charge electric vehicles, funding for research into eco-friendly fuel sources, and terminal accommodations for the air travel of the future, such as air taxis and uncrewed aircraft systems.

Still, should the BIF pass, “people can hopefully expect a more seamless experience,” Pecoraro said. “When they check in, they have an easier time going through security, an easier time checking their baggage and picking up their baggage on the other end. They have easy access to a flight that will arrive and take off in a timely manner because of an improved aviation management system. The route that the aircraft takes will be more direct to its destination, which means lower fuel costs, which means ticket prices remain as low as possible. When people arrive at their destination airport, there’s a gate waiting for them, so that the aircraft pulls right up to the gate.”

Successful passage of the BIF does not mean US travelers will be seeing butterfly gardens or museum annexes in their local airports. Even basic improvements will require massive investment: The Airports Council International estimates that the US backlog for capital infrastructure projects is at least $115 billion over five years.

By that estimate, $25 billion from the BIF could fund almost a quarter of the needed projects over the next five years — and passengers would be able to tell. The flight experience at a BIF-renovated airport won’t be exactly fun, but it should be far less stressful.

---

Correction, August 2: An earlier version of this article misattributed an estimate of the amount required to fund needed airport capital projects to the Airports Council International. AIC estimates at least $115 billion is needed over the next five years, meaning the BIF could fund nearly a quarter of needed airport infrastructure projects in that time frame.

"Since its own brush with antitrust regulation decades ago, Microsoft has slipped past significant scrutiny," argues a new article from The Atlantic. But it also asks if there's now a case for another antitrust action — or if we're convinced instead that "The company is reluctantly guilty of the sin of bigness, yes, but it is benevolent, don't you see? Reformed, even! No need to cast your pen over here!" Right now, it's not illegal to be big. It's not illegal to be really big. In fact, it's not even illegal to be a monopoly. Current antitrust law allows for the possibility that you might be the sole player in your industry because you're just that well managed and your product is just that good, or it's just cost-prohibitive for any other company to compete with you. Think power utilities, such as Duke Energy, or the TV and internet giant Comcast. Antitrust law comes into play only if you use your monopoly to suppress competition or to charge unfairly high prices. (If this feels like a legal tautology, it sort of is: Who's to know what's a fair price if there isn't any competition? Nevertheless, here we are...) Yet if bigness alone is enough to draw scrutiny, Microsoft must draw it. Courts have disagreed on what size market share a product or company must own to be considered a monopoly, but the historical benchmark is about 75 percent. Estimates vary as to what percentage of computers run Microsoft's Windows operating system, but Gartner research puts it as high as 83 percent... Biden, Khan, Senator Amy Klobuchar, and others are asking whether consumers suffer any nonfinancial harm from this lack of competition. Is switching from Windows to Apple's Mac OS unnecessarily hard? Is Windows as good a product as it would be if it faced more robust competition? When Windows has major security flaws, for example, billions of customers and companies are impacted, because of its market share. If we're wondering whether crappy airline experiences are a competition problem, should the same question apply to crappy computer security? In fact, in areas where Microsoft faces strong competition, it's reverting to some of the behaviors that got it sued in the '90s — namely, bundling. Microsoft and Amazon are essentially a duopoly when it comes to cloud services... Microsoft offers its big business customers an "integrated ecosystem" of Windows, Office, and its back-end cloud services; some analysts even point to this as a reason to keep buying Microsoft stock. That's just smart business, right? Yes, unless you're at a disadvantage by not taking the bundle. Some customers have complained that Microsoft charges extra for some Windows licenses if you're not using its cloud-computing business, Azure... Microsoft does much more that we're happy to call "evil" when other companies are involved. It defied its own workers in favor of contracts with the Department of Defense; it's been quietly doing lots of business with China for decades, including letting Beijing censor results on its Bing search engine and developing AI that critics say can be used for surveillance and repression; it reportedly tried to sell facial-recognition technology to the DEA. So why does none of it stick? Well, partly because it's possible that Microsoft isn't actually doing anything wrong, from a legal perspective. Yet it's so big and so dominant and owns so much expensive physical infrastructure that hardly any company can compete with it. Is that illegal? Should it be? It's now the world's second largest tech company by market valuation — over $2 trillion and even ahead of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Tesla (and behind only Apple). For the three months ended in June, Microsoft's net income rose 47% over the same period a year ago, according to TechCrunch, with a revenue for just those three months of $46.2 billion. The Atlantic argues Microsoft has successfully rebranded itself as nice and a little boring, while playing up the fact that it lost a decade in consumer markets like smartphones because it was distracted by its last antitrust lawsuit. Yet meanwhile it's acquired major tech brands like LinkedIn, Minecraft, Skype, and even attempted to buy TikTok, Pinterest, and Discord (as well as "almost two dozen game-development studios to beef up its Xbox offerings"). And of course, GitHub.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Kotaku: A cybersecurity company whose security researcher had once been harassed by Blizzard employees at a hacking conference charged the game developer a 50 percent "misogyny tax" when it sought a quote for security services, according to a new report from Waypoint. The researcher, Emily Mitchell, told Waypoint that she approached the Blizzard booth during the annual Black Hat USA cybersecurity conference in 2015 to see if the major video game company had any open positions. Her shirt, which referenced [to] a security process known as "penetration testing," prompted two unnamed Blizzard employees to ask her questions laced with misogyny and sexual double entendre. "One of them asked me when was the last time I was personally penetrated, if I liked being penetrated, and how often I got penetrated," Mitchell said. "I was furious and felt humiliated, so I took the free swag and left." Two years later, Blizzard approached cybersecurity firm Sagitta HPC (now known as Terahash) to request a quote on one of Sagitta HPC's password-cracking boxes. Mitchell, who was Sagitta HPC's chief operating officer at the time, saw Blizzard's request and immediately remembered what occurred at Black Hat USA 2015. After learning of the incident from Mitchell, Sagitta HPC founder and chief executive officer Jeremi M. Gosney responded to Blizzard's inquiry with a lengthy message decrying her treatment at the hands of Blizzard's employees. "[R]ather than dismiss you and tell you that we will not do business with you, we'd like to give Blizzard the opportunity to redeem themselves," Gosney wrote. (He eventually shared the email on Twitter with Blizzard's name redacted.) "We are committed to combating inequality, and I am calling on Blizzard to do the same. As you may or may not know, today is International Women's Day. And in honor of this day, we are attaching a few conditions if Blizzard wishes to do business with us." These conditions included a 50 percent "misogyny tax" on any business Sagitta HPC did with Blizzard (to be used as a donation to three different organizations devoted to support girls and women in the tech industry), Blizzard becoming a Gold-level sponsor of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference, and a formal letter of apology from Blizzard executives to Mitchell in which they'd further dedicate themselves to supporting equality for women and sexual harassment training. [...] In 2017, the organizers of Black Hat USA, the Las Vegas hacking conference at which Mitchell was originally accosted, promised her that they would not allow Blizzard back as a sponsor for future events. As far as Kotaku can tell from historical information, neither Blizzard nor Activision have had a presence at the cybersecurity event since the year Blizzard staff harassed Mitchell. "Once this incident was reported to us, the Company began an investigation, promptly removed all unauthorized cameras, and notified the authorities," Activision Blizzard told Waypoint. "The authorities conducted a thorough investigation, with the full cooperation of the Company. As soon as the authorities and Company identified the perpetrator, he was terminated for his abhorrent conduct. The Company provided crisis counselors to employees, onsite and virtually, and increased security."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When they try to steal elections, Republicans aren't sending their best.

Forget the home office -- 45% of American teleworkers regularly work from a couch, 38% regularly work from bed and 20% often work outside, according to a study by the home improvement marketing firm CraftJack. Axios reports: People have spent an average of $268 trying to improve their remote work setups, but a whopping 50% still say the pain and discomfort of working from home is enough to send them back to the office. It's not enough for companies to provide stipends for teleworkers to buy ergonomic chairs or desks, Axios' Kia Kokalitcheva notes. Many people simply do not have the space allocated inside their homes for an office setup, and it can be too expensive to move to a bigger place.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Derek Muller, creator of the science-themed YouTube channel Veritasium, won a $10,000 bet with UCLA physics professor Alexander Kusenko, who claimed that Muller's wind-driven land yacht couldn't travel faster than the wind without any additional power sources. After recruiting science stars Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye to help settle the debate, the professor eventually conceded that it was in fact possible. Insider reports: Created by Rick Cavallaro, a former aerospace engineer, Blackbird is unique because it can move directly downwind faster than the wind itself for a sustained period. Any sailor worth their salt can tell you that a boat can travel faster than the wind by cutting zigzag patterns; that's called tacking. But the idea that a vehicle can beat the breeze traveling straight downwind, no tacking involved, is controversial. "I knew this was a counterintuitive problem. To be perfectly honest with you, when I went out to pilot the craft, I didn't understand how it worked," Muller told Insider. Blackbird is so counterintuitive, in fact, that less than a week after Muller released his video (below), Alexander Kusenko, a professor of physics at UCLA, emailed to inform him that it had to be wrong. A vehicle like that would break the laws of physics, Kusenko said. "I said, 'Look, if you don't believe this, let's put some money on this,'" Muller said. He suggested a wager of $10,000, never imagining Kusenko would take it. But Kusenko agreed, and in the weeks that followed, they exchanged data and argued about Blackbird. They even brought in several of science's biggest names, including Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson, to help decide who was right. In the end, Muller emerged victorious.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: On a normally peaceful residential road outside The Hague, the Dutch city that serves as seat of government, the whine of a hoisting crane and welding tools heralds a not-so-quiet housing revolution. Four workers standing above me on a scissor lift next to an apartment complex guide a thermally insulated facade 40 feet wide and one story tall into place against the existing wall. Its brickwork pattern of muted brown, grey and beige, and the triple glazed windows, perfectly fit the building's existing frame and openings. The original windows and the very old brick walls had allowed cold drafts inside, and warm interior air to escape, wasting much of the energy used to heat the building. The new facade is primarily fire-resistant expanded polystyrene -- essentially, hollow spheres that trap air to create a thick insulation layer -- faced with hardened clay and sculpted into hundreds of very thin rectangles known as "brick slips." This new building skin, prebuilt in a factory, was one of a dozen such facades to be attached to local buildings when I visited the suburb on a rainy day in early summer, each structure measured to millimeter precision. The installation is part of a concerted effort to transform energy-inefficient public housing into a set of ultralow-emission homes -- without having to open a wall or remake an attic. The building was being wrapped in the equivalent of a winter jacket -- or summer beer koozie -- avoiding the need to insert insulation inside dozens of walls, lofts and attics. A similarly premade, lightweight, highly insulating material, complete with solar panels, would be installed on the roof, too. The report notes that the average cost to retrofit a family home in the Netherlands is "about $94,000," but it's "comparable to the cost of other routine renovations that deliver no energy savings." "In one neighborhood in the city of Utrecht, more than a dozen houses and some 250 separate apartments retrofitted in 2019 saw their energy requirements fall from 225 kilowatt-hours per square meter to just 50 kilowatt-hours per square meter, on average. The remaining demand for energy was met with solar power."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For some reason, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt believes that protecting the SARS-CoV-2 virus from the threat of masks is his top priority. And this week he has demonstrated that belief both by refusing to meet with the mayor of Kansas City and by filing a lawsuit against St. Louis that’s not just factually incorrect, but riddled with lies meant to disguise Republican failings.

For weeks, cases of COVID-19 have been spilling out of highly Republican counties in southwest Missouri, filling local hospitals, and driving cases to the two cities that flank the state’s glowing red center. Over time, all of Missouri has become caught up in a new wave of disease, as Gov. Mike Parson continued his policy of doing exactly nothing. That sent levels back to where they were in January and brought almost every county in the state to the level of high community spread. All of which puts the state solidly in the areas where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recommended everyone, including those who are fully vaccinated, should wear masks. 

But of course when St. Louis and Kansas City both tried to follow the updated CDC guidelines, Schmitt immediately moved to protect the freedom of the virus. As NPR reports, that included filing a lawsuit against St. Louis City that was “riddled with data errors.” Only that’s a kind way of saying it. Because what Schmitt actually did in his attack on the city was simply to lie in a way that defends Republicans’ anti-mask frenzy. The lawsuit isn’t just wrong, it’s purposeful disinformation that is meant to both provide fodder for anti-maskers elsewhere and elevate Schmitt’s profile among the anti-science right.

And, unfortunately, on Tuesday night local St. Louis County politicians showed that they had been properly cowed by Schmitt and by an audience of anti-maskers when they voted to overturn a mask mandate imposed by County Executive (and medical doctor) Sam Page.

St. Louis City, for reasons that go back to the Civil War, is not part of St. Louis County. The result is generally an unreasonable proliferation of duplicate, poor-quality services and politically supported racism, racism, racism. Also racism. Under its first Black woman mayor, Tishaura Jones, the city will continue with a mask mandate. But the county … not so much. 

Both St. Louis City and St. Louis County announced a resumption of mask mandates on Monday following the revised CDC guidance. In the case of the county, this announcement was made by the executive’s office and the county health director. But no sooner had Dr. Sam Page, a St. Louis County executive, issued this announcement than the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported several members of the county council were lining up to quash the mandate using a new law recently signed by Parson that gives politicians the ability to override health officials.

A letter from Dr. Faisal Khan, acting director of the St. Louis County Department of Public Health, that appears in The Riverfront Times gives all too keen an insight into that county council meeting. When Khan spoke in favor of a mask mandate, he was not only shouted down, he was called a “fat brown cunt” and a “brown bastard” as he was speaking. One of those busy heckling Khan with claims that he was “un-American” was Mark McCloskey, the pink-shirted attorney who became famous in right-wing circles for waving a gun at protesters who dared walk past his palatial home. (It’s not clear if McCloskey—now a Senate candidate—was one of those who was mocking Khan by doing imitations of Simpson’s character Apu.) As Khan writes in his letter to County Council Chair Rita Heard Days, when he attempted to complain about the abuse raining down on him as he was trying to speak, Days responded by cautioning … Khan. “I have never been subjected to the racist, xenophobic and threatening behavior that greeted me in the County Council meeting last night,” wrote Khan. On the way out of the meeting, Khan flashed a middle finger, for which he is now in unspecified “trouble” with the council. “I have to say, however, that when faced with the racist vitriol that Councilman Fitch has been privately and publicly stoking against me since my appointment, I cannot say I am sorry.” 

As CNN reports, council members may have mocked Khan and refused to listen to medical advice about the need for masks, but they welcomed public comments about “disproven claims about Covid-19 vaccines and alternative treatments.” Following this event, the county council voted to overturn the mask mandate, quashing Page’s order and the advice of the county health department. 

None of this will stop Schmitt from continuing his lawsuit against the city. As the Associated Press reports, Schmitt declared that imposing a mask mandate was “unconstitutional,” especially because there is “a widely available vaccine.” That would be the same vaccine that Schmitt has promised to prevent any company, school, or government office from requiring. As Jones noted, Schmitt is another Republican candidate  for the Senate, and this is another in a line of lawsuits he’s launched that are simply nonsense—such as the lawsuit Schmitt filed last year against the Chinese government. It’s all part of how Missouri taxpayers are contributing to Schmitt’s campaign.

But the lawsuit against St. Louis goes beyond nonsensical. As St. Louis Public Radio notes, Schmitt alleges as part of the suit: “Despite having the most restrictive and unconstitutional orders in Missouri, St. Louis County and St. Louis City suffered some of the highest COVID-19 case rates and death rates in Missouri.”

That’s a lie. A quick trip to the Missouri Department of Health shows that both St. Louis County and St. Louis city are below the state average rate of cases. The worst counties are actually exactly where anyone might suspect: in the reddest rural counties like Taney County (78% for Trump) and Douglas County (84% for Trump), several of which are currently cranking out new cases at 10 times the rate of St. Louis. Schmitt’s lawsuit isn’t a “mistake,”—it’s disinformation, something sure to be cited as an authoritative source by right-wing pundits, other Missouri politicians, and anyone looking to “prove” that masks and social distancing are ineffective.

Meanwhile on the other side of the state, Schmitt has also launched a lawsuit against Kansas City. As KMBC reports, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas announced a new indoor mask mandate on Wednesday, two months after declining cases had led Kansas City to drop previous mask requirements. Lucas made it clear at the time he was responding to the same CDC guidelines that resulted in new mask requirements in St. Louis, because Kansas City is also swept up in a sea of counties where current statistics show "high transmission.” 

Naturally, Schmitt immediately announced that he would stand up for the little virus. “I will be filing a lawsuit to protect your freedoms,” wrote Schmitt. “This mask mandate is about politics and control, not science. You are not subjects but citizens of what has been the freest country in the world and I will always fight for you.” In making this claim, Schmitt didn’t address the CDC guidelines or provide any evidence concerning “science.” As with the St. Louis suit, Schmitt’s action is more about providing himself with talking points in his Senate run than anything having to do with the facts.

On Wednesday morning, Quinton made it clear he had attempted to reason with Schmitt. “I reached out to the office of our State Attorney General for a meeting between the two of us on his legal concerns about the mask mandate in Kansas City,” wrote Quinton, “so that we can address any issues and avoid needless litigation expenses. I am told the AG's schedule will not allow it.”

Schmitt isn’t concerned about needless expenses. After all, it’s not like he’s paying for all these failed suits. Far from it. Schmitt is using the office of the attorney general to prove that he’s the most extreme extremist in a primary that includes a former governor who was forced to resign from office after he threatened a woman he had blindfolded and bound. And Schmitt has to beat out the guy who waved an AR-15 around at people who dared walk on “his” sidewalk. Schmitt knows that showing he’s more out there than the other Republican candidates will be hard … but he’s putting in a yeoman effort.

St. Louis will keep its mask mandate. Kansas City will keep its mask mandate. St. Louis County council members will revel in how the new law lets them smack down health officials and a county executive they hate. Schmitt will continue filing lawsuits as an act of anti-virtue signaling on everyone else’s dime. Parson will do nothing— sorry, proudly do nothing. 

And Missouri’s hospitals will stay nice and full.

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Georgia Republicans have taken the next step in their bid to seize control of elections in Fulton County, the state's most populous county, which Joe Biden overwhelmingly won 73%-26%. 

Two dozen GOP state senators are seeking to initiate a performance review of Fulton elections chief Richard Barron, according to a letter obtained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The move is an outgrowth of Georgia's new voter suppression law, Senate Bill 202, which stipulates that following a performance review, the State Election Board can replace a county's election board with an individual for at least nine months. "Then, a temporary superintendent would enjoy full managerial authority of how the county counts votes and staffs polling places," explains AJC.

Initiation of such a review requires a request by at least two state senators and two state representatives. Two Republican representatives have already told AJC they would follow suit, House Speaker Pro-Tempore Jan Jones and Rep. Chuck Martin.

Democrats say the move is a clear escalation of Republicans' intention to execute a takeover of Fulton County elections. 

“It’s been rhetoric until this point. This letter is the first official step in the process,” said Fulton Commission Chair Robb Pitts, a Democrat. Pitts promised a fight but also conceded that current law favors the GOP.

“We’ve got allies in the legislature, we’ve got the courts and the court of public opinion,” he said, adding, "The law, as it currently stands, is on their side.”

Fulton County—which has been the subject of baseless conspiracy theories—experienced some hiccups during both the primary and general election. But multiple recounts in the state reaffirmed Biden's win.

Non-expansion states saw a much smaller drop in new medical debt over the same period.

Medicaid expansion doesn’t just provide more people health insurance — it appears to cut medical debt enormously, a new study has found.

The Affordable Care Act offered states a huge infusion of federal money to expand Medicaid eligibility to low-income adults, and about 30 states took that deal right away in 2014. Since then, new medical debt in those states has fallen 44 percent, a dramatically bigger drop than was seen in the states that refused to expand the program over the same period. Those states showed only a 10 percent decline.

The study was published in JAMA by scholars from Harvard, Stanford, UCLA, and the National Bureau of Economic Research. The researchers noted that nonmedical debt had fallen by similar amounts in expansion and non-expansion states over the time period they studied, 2009 to 2020, strengthening the case that Medicaid expansion was the difference with medical debt.

Medical debt isn’t just bad for people’s finances or their credit rating. It’s bad for their health. The researchers noted high medical debt is associated with reduced health care use and, in general, people with more debt report worse mental health.

“This is a genuinely large effect,” Raymond Kluender, one of the authors and assistant professor at Harvard Business School, said in an email. “The Medicaid expansion was well targeted at a population that was extremely vulnerable to medical bills and who did not (and do not in states that have not expanded) have access to affordable health insurance.”

The states that expanded Medicaid in the years following 2014 experienced a meaningful but smaller reduction in medical debt than states that expanded that first year.

JAMA

In states that expanded Medicaid, both the lowest- and highest-income groups saw their medical debt drop after expansion, but the amount of medical debt added annually decreased much more for the former (by $180, from $458 to $278) than the latter (by $35, from $95 to $60).

In non-expansion states, on the other hand, the lowest-income group averaged a $206 average increase in new medical debt, from $630 to $836. But the highest-income bracket still saw a small decline in new debt for medical care.

“Many of the states with the highest pre-ACA levels of medical debt did not expand Medicaid and subsequently did not experience substantial reductions in medical debt,” the researchers wrote when summarizing their findings.

Those states are concentrated in the South. Eight of the 12 non-expansion states are in the region. Nearly one in four Southerners have some medical debt in collections listed on their credit report, compared to 10.8 percent of people in the Northeast and 12.7 percent in the West.

This dramatic drop in medical debt after Medicaid expansion can be added to the large body of evidence documenting the benefits of the program. Research shows that people have more access to care and better self-reported health after Medicaid expansion. Cancer diagnoses come earlier, and patients are given the prescriptions for medications they need more often. A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper from 2019 concluded that states’ refusal to expand Medicaid had led to more than 15,000 deaths in one year that otherwise would not have occurred.

And as health economists Jonathan Gruber and Benjamin Sommers wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine last year, states were able to implement expansion without a negative impact on their finances. Expanding Medicaid enabled them to cut back on other spending — for uncompensated care, care for people who are in the judicial system, and so on — while expansion was fully subsidized by the feds.

Democrats in Congress are working on a proposal to cover the 4 million uninsured people in non-expansion states who would be insured through Medicaid expansion. They want to include such a provision in their budget reconciliation bill later this year. A new expansion incentive passed as part of the American Rescue Plan has so far not persuaded most of the non-expansion states to reconsider their position.

Overall, the improving economy from 2009 to 2020 led to a drop in all types of debt. But because medical debt declined less than nonmedical debt, there is now more of the former than the latter in the US, according to the new JAMA analysis of a nationally representative sample of depersonalized credit reports.

JAMA

The total medical debt detected in the TransUnion credit reports reviewed by the researchers would translate to $140 billion in debt nationwide. An estimated 18 percent of Americans have some medical debt on their record. But there may also be additional debt not shown in the credit reports — for medical care paid for with a credit card, for example.

Still, the research is a good starting point for understanding the scope of the medical debt problem in the United States — and the difference Medicaid expansion can make.

["It's still a question whether the federal government can mandate the whole country."]

Today, President Biden slipped some significant news. He asked DOJ (presumably OLC) whether the federal government can impose a federal vaccine mandate.

"I asked the Justice Department to determine whether they're able to do that legally, and they can. Local communities can do that, local businesses can do that," the president said. "It's still a question whether the federal government can mandate the whole country. I don't know that."

I have four immediate reactions.

First, is there sufficient statutory authority to impose such a mandate? Of course Congress could enact a new statute. But Congress doesn't actually legislate anymore. It's more likely that the President relies on some extant authority. To impose the eviction moratorium, the CDC relied on fairly generalized statutes that concern quarantines and the like. And many courts have held this authority was inadequate. I doubt there is any statute that could justify a true, nationwide vaccine mandate. And if OLC tries to repurpose some old authority, DOJ will face a major major question problem. No mouse-hole can fit an elephantine-sized vaccine mandate.

Second, Jacobson v. Massachusetts (whatever it means) does not fully resolve the issue. That case concerned the state's general police power. The federal government lacks a generalized police power. Rather, it has enumerated powers. What enumerated power would give the executive branch the ability to forcibly jab millions of Americans with a needle–perhaps in the absence of clear statutory authority? There is caselaw about a federal draft, though that authority is closely tied to the federal war power. You know, I thought we were done arguing about mandates with California v. Texas. Alas, we are stuck in a loop.

Third, DOJ should be careful how it defines a "mandate." In Jacobson, there was no forcible mandate to be vaccinated. People could instead choose to pay a $5 fine or get jabbed. (Roughly $150 in present-day value). If the Biden OLC tries to depart from this "choice" construction, and impose a straight-up mandate–punishable by criminal sanction–they will have difficulty relying on Jacobson. I hope to say much more about Jacobson soon. My article, The Irrepressible Myth of Jacobson v. Massachusetts should hit law review submission boxes shortly. (I previewed it here).

Fourth, from a policy perspective, this idea strikes me as counter-productive. The worst way to encourage people to get a shot is to mandate it. People will resist and engage in civil disobedience. I think there is a good reason why most nations around the world have not imposed forcible mandates.

Now if OLC never publishes this opinion, we can presume the answer is "No, you cannot impose a nationwide vaccine mandate." I'm grateful Biden slipped here.