Things That Make You Feel Old

The Rolling Stones played their first gig 57 years ago today.

The club at which they played that gig closed over 20 years ago.

They are still touring though.

Paint It Black may be my favorite song of theirs:

Trump Caves

He declared defeat in his effort to put a citizenship question on the censue, though he has promised to use government records to terrorize brown people:

President Trump on Thursday abandoned his quest to place a question about citizenship on the 2020 census, and instructed the government to compile citizenship data from existing federal records instead, ending a bitterly fought legal battle that turned the nonpartisan census into an object of political warfare.

Mr. Trump announced in the Rose Garden that he was giving up on modifying the census two weeks after the Supreme Court rebuked his administration over its effort to do so. Just last week, Mr. Trump had insisted that his administration “must” pursue that goal.

“We are not backing down on our effort to determine the citizenship status of the United States population,” Mr. Trump said. But rather than carry on the fight over the census, he said he was issuing an executive order instructing federal departments and agencies to provide the Census Bureau with citizenship data from their “vast” databases immediately.

Even that order appears to merely reiterate plans the Commerce Department announced last year, making it less a new policy than a means of covering Mr. Trump’s retreat from the composition of the 2020 census form.

This is definitely a cave by Trump, though he is trying to cast it as another stalwart attempt to promulgate his war against minorities.

Maybe California Rate Payers Should Burn Them to the Ground

The Wall Street Journal has revealed that Pacific Gas and Electric has systematically short changed its maintenance and infrastructure obligations for years, and the federal judge tasked with overseeing the utility is less than amused.

So are everyone else in the Golden State:

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published a major story based on extensive Freedom of Information Act disclosures, providing evidence of PG&E’s systematic, willful neglect not just of maintenance but even of inspections of its transmission lines, despite knowing full well that their decrepit state constituted a serious fire risk. At least some officials appear to have labored under the misapprehension that making a point of not knowing about the condition of many of their assets would somehow absolve them of responsibility.

The raw facts are appalling and led a judge tasked to monitor PG&E after past safety violations to demand answers, pronto. From a Wall Street Journal story mere hours after it broke its account about the PG&E’s willful negligence:

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered PG&E Corp. to respond, “on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis,” to a Wall Street Journal article that said the company has failed to upgrade hundreds of miles of high-voltage power lines despite knowing they could fail and spark wildfires.

William Alsup, a U.S. district court judge in Northern California, is overseeing PG&E’s probation after the company was convicted of safety-related violations following a natural-gas explosion that killed eight people in 2010. After an online version of the article was published Wednesday, he gave the company until July 31 to file a “fresh, forthright statement owning up to the true extent of the Wall Street Journal report” not to exceed 40 double-spaced pages.

“In the past, the offender has responded to some of the Court’s questions by filing thousands of records and leaving it to the judge to find the needles in the haystacks,” the judge wrote.

Now to the account that got Judge Alsup so riled up. From the Journal:

The failure last year of a century-old transmission line that sparked a wildfire, killed 85 people and destroyed the town of Paradise wasn’t an aberration, the documents show. A year earlier, PG&E executives conceded to a state lawyer that the company needed to process many projects, all at once, to prevent system failures—a problem they said could be likened to a “pig in the python.”

Even before November’s deadly fire, the documents show, the company knew that 49 of the steel towers that carry the electrical line that failed needed to be replaced entirely.

In a 2017 internal presentation, the large San Francisco-based utility estimated that its transmission towers were an average of 68 years old. Their mean life expectancy was 65 years. The oldest steel towers were 108 years old.

Even as fire risks increased starting in 2013 due to sustained droughts, it kept putting off upgrading its oldest transmission lines. But at least as bad is that PG&E was grossly, one might even say deliberately, ignorant of the state of its network. How can you be in the business of operating a network and not have basic information about its historical and current condition?

You know, this might be a good time for people to start collecting signatures to repeal the bill that the utilities pushed through making it harder for municipal and state takeovers more difficult.

Kafkaesque and Orwellian are Inadequate Words to Describe This

The CIA is arguing for an extension and broadening of The Intelligence Identities Protection Act because they need to conceal their role in torture and other crimes against humanity.

I'm serious about this. The state security apparatus is actually using their role in torture to call for greater legal jeopardy for reporting the misdeeds of the state security apparatus:

The C.I.A. is quietly pushing Congress to significantly expand the scope of a law that makes it a crime to disclose the identities of undercover intelligence agents, raising alarms among advocates of press freedoms.

The agency has proposed extending a 1982 law, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which makes it a crime to identify covert officers who have served abroad in the past five years. Under the C.I.A.’s plan, the law would instead apply perpetually to people whose relationships with the intelligence community are classified — even if they live and operate exclusively on domestic soil.

………

The C.I.A.’s proposal “seriously expands the felony criminal penalties that could be used against journalists, against whistle-blowers and against public-interest organizations,” said Emily Manna, a policy analyst for Open the Government, a group promoting accountability. “It opens the door to a ton of abuses and secrecy to a much greater extent,” she said.

The proposal would also outlaw the identification of American citizens who serve as classified agents or informants for intelligence agencies, or otherwise help them. Currently, the identities law covers only classified informants who reside and act abroad.

The push was aimed at protecting clandestine officers, said Timothy Barrett, the C.I.A. press secretary. In the past five years, he said, “hundreds of covert officers have had their identity and covert affiliation disclosed without authorization,” and under current law, the identities of officers who are based on domestic soil but travel frequently overseas are not protected.

………

The C.I.A. also argued that lawmakers’ original rationale for only protecting agents abroad — that they faced special physical danger — was “no longer valid” because “organizations such as WikiLeaks” are willing to go to great lengths to publish government secrets, and because of the fallout from revelations about the C.I.A.’s defunct torture program, according to a copy of the agency’s written justification for the proposal obtained by The New York Times.

Still, critics said that the agency’s proposed language is too broad, covering people who have not been in harm’s way abroad for years.

The proposal also comes at a time when defense lawyers at the military commissions system at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are trying to identify eyewitnesses from the C.I.A. black sites whom they could potentially call to testify about their clients’ treatment, including in the case against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other detainees accused of aiding the Sept. 11 attacks.

Last month, when the Senate Intelligence Committee unveiled its annual intelligence bill, Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, flagged his concern that the C.I.A. provision would allow the protections for undercover identities to apply indefinitely.

“I am not yet convinced this expansion is necessary and am concerned that it will be employed to avoid accountability,” he wrote.

The C.I.A.’s push comes against the backdrop of a sharp increase in the prosecution of current and former officials accused of providing government secrets to the news media in recent years. It also comes against the unprecedented Justice Department decision in May to expand the criminal case against the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, to include Espionage Act charges for soliciting, obtaining and publishing classified information — including files that identified people in dangerous countries who had helped Americans.

Congress enacted the identities law after Richard S. Welch, the C.I.A.’s station chief in Athens, was murdered in 1975 and Philip Agee, a former C.I.A. officer who had grown to oppose American foreign policy, revealed numerous covert officers’ identities.

The identities law supplemented the Espionage Act, which more broadly makes it a crime to disclose potentially harmful defense-related information to someone not authorized to receive it. The identities act is narrower but easier to use in some respects: Prosecutors need only prove that the disclosed identity met the definition for “covert.”

Prosecutors have only rarely used the law, but they won a conviction under it in a 1985 case involving a C.I.A. clerk in Ghana and in the 2012 case of John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer who pleaded guilty to telling a reporter the name of a covert officer involved in the agency’s interrogations.

Another part of the identities law, which prosecutors have not used, might apply to journalists under some circumstances. It covers outsiders who do not have authorized access to classified information but learn about and disclose covert identities anyway, “in the course of a pattern of activities intended to identify and expose covert agents.”

………

In a House committee report accompanying the 1982 bill, lawmakers stressed that they intended to limit its coverage to clandestine agents abroad, or agents who may be “temporarily in the United States for rest, training, or reassignment” before returning abroad, because they face special dangers.

The 1982 report also said that the public should be able to discuss intelligence informants living in the United States, saying they “may be employees of colleges, churches, the media, or political organizations. The degree of involvement of these groups with intelligence agencies is a legitimate subject of national debate.”

(emphasis mine)

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

The headline in American Conservative, :Americans Shocked to Find their Rights Literally Vanish at U.S. Airports," pretty much says it all.

The article is about how the Department of Homeland Security, CBP, and ICE have asserted that they have the right to search your digital devices without a warrant, probable cause, or access to an attorney.

I seriously need to consider an app that allows people to encrypt their devices and put the decryption key in escrow with your attorney.

It's a Start

Maryland just passed a law requiring that the state pension fund publicly report all fees charged to it by Wall Street.

While this is not my preferred solution, I would prefer the Banksters be kicked out of public pensions completely, but I think that this is a step to that path:

A new Maryland law requires greater transparency in disclosing millions of dollars in fees paid by the state’s pension system to Wall Street investment firms.

The Maryland State Retirement and Pension System has reported paying about $370 million annually in fees to the firms that invest its $51 billion in assets.

But the real amount of fees paid is anywhere from $460 million to $570 million. That’s because so-called “carried interest fees” — a cut of the Maryland fund’s profits that goes to the outside investment managers — have not been not disclosed publicly.

That’s about to change.

………
At one point, the legislation sought to cap the amount of fees the firms could charge the pension system, but it was amended to become a bill requiring greater disclosure. Both chambers of the General Assembly passed the revised bipartisan legislation unanimously and Republican Gov. Larry Hogan signed it into law.

The pension system now must publicly disclose the amount it pays in carried interest fees by the end of each calendar year. The first report, due Dec. 31, will include the fees from fiscal years 2015 through 2019.

It's a start.

Monetizing the Public Commons

If you look at Uber, or Lyft, or Airbnb,^* onc cannot help but wonder if the source of these organizations business prospects is an attempt to make money from taking something of value from the rest of us.

For Uber and Lyft, it is increased congestion in cities, along with not paying drivers a living wage, while with Airbnb, it is skyrocketing rents as non-resident investors bid up the prices of homes.

The same is true of scooters, which The Independent properly describes as a plague.

With all of them, you have private entities making sidewalks less usable because of the people using the sidewalks, and for dockless scooters, you further have them strewn randomly around sidewalks, creating a falling hazard and blocking access for the disabled.

This is not high tech entrepreneurship, this is tech bros with more venture capital money than ethics taking the public pathways that we already paid for from us.

The technical term for this is, "Negative Externalities," but I will call it a theft of the commons:

In cities all over Europe, in every cafe, people are talking about the same thing. No, not Brexit: it’s those damn electric scooters.

The plague started last year and has spread like wildfire: Brussels to Lisbon, Paris to Wroclaw. Silicon Valley start-ups showed up one day with vans full of them – an oversized, motorised version of the children’s toy everyone knows. They dumped them on pavements; you can find and rent them with a smartphone app and ride them around town.

If this sounds pretty cool, it actually isn’t. On the surface they look like a futuristic, green transport solution: but the problems have quickly become obvious everywhere they spring up.

They need little advertising because people start literally tripping over them as soon as they appear. The scooters, which are surprisingly large and heavy, litter public places by design, blocking pavements and making life particularly difficult for people with reduced mobility. In most larger cities there are also something like six competing systems – blocking about six times as much pavement as necessary. Their loud alarms, triggered by drunk people trying to ride them without paying, are a familiar drone in the early hours of the morning. And a string of deaths of people riding them – and collisions with people who were just walking along minding their own business – have spurred city authorities into action. It’s the free market at its best.

Britain, almost alone, has managed to stay mostly scooter free: saved by its strict road regulations. One law dating from 1853 bans the riding of a “carriage of any description” on the pavement – while licensing rules mean that they would have to be insured and number plated to be ridden on the roads. Thus the dockless schemes are de facto banned. The UK has got this absolutely spot on: they are neither appropriate to ride on the pavement, nor any different from any other motorised vehicle.

………

Could they be tamed and become a useful part of cities’ transport mix? A docking scheme – similar to the one used by Boris Bikes – would solve the biggest issue: the blocking of pavements. But of course, the tech firms pushing them haven’t bothered with that – they would have to apply for planning permission, and buying land in prime city centres would probably render the whole thing unprofitable. Better just to fly-tip their product wherever they fancy: I have seen it in Brussels, at 3am: men silently unloading scooters out of an unmarked van and leaving them on the pavement, like a reverse burglary.

There’s also no reason in principle why individuals couldn’t simply buy and own an electric scooter like they own a bike or car. Most of the problems come from the dockless rental system which encourages user to leave them strewn around the place.

Also, why, when you can get a ticket for riding a bicycle without a helmet, are the helmet laws not being enforced.

With docked scooters, at least, there is a requirement that the businesses pay for their own storage infrastructure, as opposed to obstructing the sidewalks, but, of course, that won't attract the VC bucks.

^*Full disclosure, I use Airbnb.

In the Annals of Unserious Aircraft Carrier Design………

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

The Nevskoye Design Bureau has revealed a design for a nuclear powered Russian supercarrier, but it is seriously weird:

The Nevskoye Design Bureau (part of Russia’s United Shipbuilding Corporation) unveiled the newest Project 11430E ‘Lamantin’ nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Its mockup was shown on the design bureau’s display stand at the St. Petersburg international maritime defense show.

………

According to the materials presented on the Nevskoye Design Bureau’s display stand, the aircraft carrier that will get a nuclear-powered propulsion unit will displace 80,000-90,000 tonnes, feature a maximum length of 350 meters, have sea endurance of about 120 days and will be capable of developing a speed of about 30 knots. The aircraft carrier will have a crew of 2,800 and its air task force will comprise 800 personnel. The carrier will have a service life of over 50 years.

All I have to work from is the picture, but this is not a half baked design.

First, and most tellingly, is the inclusion of both catapults and a ramp.

It makes no sense, once you have accommodations for the first catapult, the impact on the design, and the cost, for subsequent catapults is far less.

What's more, ramp launched aircraft can carry less fuel and weapons.

The second oddity is what appears to be a sonar installation in the bow of the model (the white spot on the bulbous bow), which is rarely (if ever) put on an aircraft carrier, if just because when launching and recovering aircraft it will be operating at very high speeds, which means that ambient noise would obscure any information from the system.

Finally, the island appears to be designed with little regard for managing deck operations,.

The last two items are admittedly minor nitpicks, and would probably be modified in a back and forth between design bureau and customer, but the ramp and the cat is just weird.

Linkage

• Behold, the most (intentionally) poorly designed website ever created (Ars Technica) I've seen worse, though those were unintentional, and that's not including Geocities.
• How to speak Silicon Valley: 53 essential tech-bro terms explained (The Guardian) The Devil's Tech-Bro Dictionary.
• Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s Friendly Police Fantasy (The American Conservative) Buttigieg ignores reality, which is that people fear police because their impunity is a petri dish for sociopaths.
• Court Upholds Conviction Of Cop Who Threatened, Beat, Tased, And Arrested A Man For Complaining About Being Beaten By Him Earlier (Techdirt) Speaking of which.
• The Jeffrey Epstein case is why people believe in Pizzagate (The Week) The similarities between the Pizzagate hoax and the Jeffrey Epstein matter are rather striking.
• Jeffrey Epstein Is the Ultimate Symbol of Plutocratic Rot (New York Times) People have known that Epstein raped girls for years, and given him a pass because he is rich and powerful.

Have some Llamas with Hats:

No.

Will Bunch asks, "Can Democrats grow a spine before American democracy collapses in a limp, lifeless heap?"

Sadly, the answer is know.

When the only dominant moral imperative of Congressional Democrats is careerism, taking a risk to do the right thing is simply not on the agenda.

Is This Like a Money Market Fund Breaking the Buck

A major equity fund in the UK has suspended redemptions, meaning that investors cannot access their funds, which are normally supposed to be available within 24 hours.

This sounds a lot like what happened to institutional money market funds during the financial crash in 2008, when you could not redeem from funds that were supposed to be a safe as cash:

There’s still no sign of relief for the hundreds of thousands of investors whose money is trapped in one of the UK’s biggest equity funds, the Woodford Equity Income Fund. The fund is supposed to offer its shareholders daily liquidity, meaning they can take part or all of their money out any day of the week. But that was before a slow-motion (but accelerating) run on the fund forced its manager, hedge-fund legend Neil Woodford, into taking the last-gasp decision, on June 3, to place a ban on redemptions. Since then, investors have been unable to access their money. And it’s not clear how much longer this could go on.

The problems at Woodford have raised serious questions about just how liquid other equity funds in the UK may be. In the past few days, UK’s biggest broker, Hargreaves Lansdown announced that it plans to remove the Lindsell Train UK Equity Fund, the largest managed UK shares fund, and the Lindsell Train Global Equity Fund, from its Wealth 50 Best List due to liquidity concerns, which prompted shares in Lindsell Train Investment Trust to tumble 22% on Friday.

………

The Woodford Equity Income fund has performed terribly for the past two years. Bad bets were made, often on unlisted assets, resulting in big losses, which in turn triggered a cascade of redemptions as the sharpest investors began yanking out their money. The total amount under management at Woodford has steadily shrunk by almost two thirds since 2015, from £10.2 billion to £3.7 billion.

At the very least, Woodford’s investors will have to hang on for another three agonizing weeks, when the decision to gate the fund is scheduled to be revisited. When the last 28-day review period came up, around a week ago, Woodford told the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority that the fund was still not ready to reopen its doors.

………

Most of Woodford’s liquid assets are already gone having been sold off when the giant flood of redemptions began. By this spring, only three of the fund’s 105 holdings were FTSE 100 companies, and only 26 paid out dividends, which is highly unusual for a fund that is supposed to be almost exclusively devoted to equity-income.

In recent weeks Woodford has reduced his holdings in Raven Property and Horizon Discovery, two long-term investments, as well as other listed companies, including BCA Marketplace, New River Reit and Oakley Capital Investments. But most of the remaining assets are highly illiquid, which means selling them will be a lot more difficult, unless at a very heavy discount.

By EU law, equity funds like Woodford’s are allowed to hold a maximum of 10% of their portfolio in transferable securities that are not dealt in an “eligible market” such as the FTSE 250. To get around this rule, Woodford reportedly bundled up his fund’s illiquid unlisted assets and listed them on the minuscule Guernsey-headquartered International Stock Exchange, which despite its impressive-sounding name has barely any trading activity at all.

This was enough to lend his most illiquid assets the appearance, albeit flimsy, of liquidity. The move was within the letter — though not the spirit — of the law, according to the FCA chief executive Andrew Bailey. Mr Bailey told the Commons Treasury select committee that Woodford Equity Income fund was “sailing close to the wind,” adding that “listing something on an exchange where trading does not actually happen, as far as I can see, does not actually count as liquidity.”

So, they engaged in dodgy bookkeeping combined with a run on the fund.

Yet another dodgy player at the big casino.

They have learned nothing.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

Well, I Guess That We Can All Clap Ironically

Seriously, the Trump administration isn't even trying to create the flimsiest facade of ethics.

Case in point, Bob Barr, who is refusing to recuse himself from the Jeffrey Epstein case, despite the fact that his father hired Epstein at one point, and Barr's law firm once had him as a client, and defended him from the same charges.

Seeing as how Trump was a close associate of Epstein, we know where THIS is going.

Absolutely shameless:

U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr does not plan to recuse himself from the current investigation into multi-millionaire and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, according to sources who spoke to CNN and Fox News.

A Department of Justice official told CNN on Tuesday that “Bill Barr has consulted with career ethics officials at DOJ and he will not recuse from current Epstein case.”

Barr, however, has recused himself “from any review of the earlier case in Florida,” in which Epstein received a controversial plea deal.

………

CNN legal analyst Elie Honig said Barr’s decision not to recuse himself from the current case was “trouble.”

“I have zero confidence Barr will let this case play out in its natural course if it should start to implicate or do collateral damage to powerful, politically-connected people,” he tweeted.

Un-dirty-word-believable.