Equifax’s Maddening Unaccountability →

Last week, Americans woke up to news of yet another mass breach of their personal data. The consumer credit reporting agency Equifax revealed that as many as 143 million Americans’ Social Security numbers, dates of birth, names and addresses may have been stolen from its files — just the kind of information that allows for identity theft and other cybercrimes.
...
There are technical factors that explain why cybersecurity is so weak, but the underlying reason is political, and it’s pretty simple: Big corporations have poured large amounts of money into our political system, helping to create a regulatory environment in which consumers shoulder more and more of the risk, and companies less and less.
...
No software system can be free from bugs (or intruders), and users must be mindful of the risks. But the inherent lack of perfect automotive safety doesn’t mean we don’t try to make cars safer. Obviously, people should drive more carefully, but seatbelts, airbags and better car design reduce injury enormously, and that has been great for the industry as well as consumers. The software industry should be no different.
Perhaps the most maddening part of the Equifax breach is that the credit-rating industry is itself unforgiving in its approach to even the smallest error. I’m still dealing with the damage to my credit rating that resulted when I forgot to return a library book and a collection agency was called in (for a paltry sum). The Equifax executives who let my data be stolen will probably suffer fewer consequences than I will for an overdue library book. Even if they do get fired, it is likely that they will be sent off with millions of dollars in severance, which is common practice for executives. (I would like to note that I am available for such punishment any time.)

Soul Snatchers: How the NYPD’s 42nd Precinct, the Bronx DA’s Office, and the City of New York Conspired to Destroy Black and Brown Lives (Part 1) →

The NYPD operates by its own rules (as too often happens in our country), but its particular criminality is staggering. A handful of officers, from the tens of thousands employed by the city, have come out over the last few years, to expose the corruption. This should be one of the biggest stories of this country this year, if not decade. And yet...

Just three days after Donald Trump was inaugurated, New York City agreed to something that is so scandalous, so huge, that only the incoming presidency of Donald Trump could’ve outshined it. New York City agreed to pay $75 million (that’s $75,000,000) out in a police corruption case that should’ve rocked the city and the nation to its core. They likely chose that date and time on purpose. The case had been in litigation for years and years, but the city chose one of the most fragile, news heavy times in the history of modern American media to drop an absolute bomb. The city admitted that it was forced to dismiss over 900,000 arrests and summonses because they simply didn’t have the evidence to back them. These weren’t 900,000 stops that were made, but 900,000 legal actions accusing people of crimes that they did not commit. They were all bogus. Not 9,000. Not 90,000 — which seems like an outrageous number, but 900,000. Not only that, but the case actually had its very own deleted email scandal, where almost every single email Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly ever sent was deleted — never to be found again. Yeah, really.
...

To understand the misconduct, brutality, forced pleas, false witnesses, and corruption that I am about to share, you must first understand the unjust system that police officers themselves have bravely identified as being the root source of it all — arrest quotas. Yes, racism and bigotry and white supremacy, conscious or otherwise, are all essential underlying problems with policing in America, but arrest quotas, or the departmental demand that each officer has a certain number of arrests, preferably with certain types of crimes, on the backs of certain types of people, are the vehicle that allows America’s worst instincts to wreck havoc on the lives of everyday people in New York. Gentrification has essentially pushed these horrible practices out of the eyesight of New York’s privileged class and the victory of Stop and Frisk being cut down gave the both city and the NYPD cover for something that is arguably far worse.

The systemic foundation of the next four parts of this series was not set by me, but by heroic, award-winning officers within the NYPD who believed with all of their heart that arrest quotas, imposed on everyday cops by their supervisors, were not only deeply unjust for the hundreds of thousands of New York City residents affected by these quotas who are frequently targeted and arrested without cause, but that the system is poisonous for officers themselves — actually breeding the worst instincts of racism, brutality, and corruption from the top down.

Showing the Algorithms Behind New York City Services →

If the principles in Mr. Vacca’s bill become law, it could turn out be as important to public society in the city and around the country as the smoking ban signed into law by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in 2002.
...
Governments also have access to oceans of data. Algorithms can decide where kids go to school, how often garbage is picked up, which police precincts get the most officers, where building code inspections should be targeted, and even what metrics are used to rate a teacher.
...
At their most powerful, algorithms can decide an individual’s liberty, as when they are used by the criminal justice system to predict future criminality. ProPublica reporters examined the risk scores of 7,000 people assigned by a private company’s algorithm. The recidivism rankings were wrong about 40 percent of the time, with blacks more likely to be falsely rated as future criminals at almost twice the rate of whites, according to Julia Angwin, who led the investigation.
...
Mr. Vacca said he is not claiming that algorithms used by the city are necessarily flawed by bias, but their power cannot be ignored. As a committee chairman, he plans to convene hearings before he leaves office in December.

The Science of Sex Differences: Still Under Construction →

Having spent the last few years researching the science of sex differences, I have interviewed firsthand some of those whose work Damore cites. What is clear is that we know relatively little. What is also clear is that the evidence so far does not suggest that whatever small psychological sex differences there are between women and men can reliably explain the enormous gender inequalities we see in society. There are too many other factors at play, most of which have nothing to do with biology.
...
It is dangerously easy to marry the small amounts of data we have about sex difference with our firmly rooted gender stereotypes. As sociologist Wolfe proved in his blistering review, studying humans is of no use if social, historical and cultural context is removed.

Immigrants Don't Drain Welfare. They Fund It. →

Groups like The American Immigration Council have long argued that, contra conservative depictions of “moocher,” immigrants have long given more to the welfare system than they take from it. “In one estimate, immigrants earn about $240 billion a year, pay about $90 billion a year in taxes, and use about $5 billion in public benefits,” a 2010 report by the Council found. “In another cut of the data, immigrant tax payments total $20 to $30 billion more than the amount of government services they use.” And a report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 2013 found that “more than half of undocumented immigrants have federal and state income, Social Security, and Medicare taxes automatically deducted from their paychecks.” Those immigrants are essentially helping to underwrite the welfare system, providing an enormous subsidy to it every year without being able to reap any of the benefits.
...
...From construction sites in Virginia to farms along the California coastline, immigrants provide essential labor in an evolving economy. The Chamber of Commerce report found they are more than twice as likely as native-born Americans to start a new business each month. In fact, immigrants started 28 percent of all new businesses in the United States in 2011. Immigrants pay billions in taxes to the government every year; in Texas alone, they generate $1.6 billion annually in taxes. To deport millions en masse, sending them back to their home countries—to say nothing of Donald Trump’s proposal to uproot American citizens born here—would be economically disastrous.

This Is How Big Oil Will Die →

...the internal combustion engine has too many moving parts.
...
A New York City cab driver puts in, on average, 180 miles per shift (well within the range of a modern EV battery), or perhaps 50,000 miles per work year. At that usage rate, the same vehicle will last roughly 10 years. The economics, and the social acceptance, get better.
And if the vehicle was owned by a cab company, and shared by drivers, the miles per year can perhaps double again. Now the capital is depreciated in 5 years, not 10. This is, from a company’s perspective, a perfectly normal investment horizon.
A fleet can profit from an electric vehicle in a way that an individual owner cannot.
Here is a quick, top-down analysis on what it’s worth to switch to EVs: The IRS allows charges of 53.5¢ per mile in 2017, a number clearly derived for gasoline vehicles. At 1/4 the price, a fleet electric vehicle should cost only 13¢ per mile, a savings of 40¢ per mile.
40¢ per mile is not chump change — if you are a NYC cab driver putting 50,000 miles a year onto a vehicle, that’s $20,000 in savings each year. But a taxi ride in NYC today costs $2/mile; that same ride, priced at $1.60 per mile, will still cost significantly more than the 53.5¢ for driving the vehicle you already own. The most significant cost of driving is still the driver.
But that, too, is about to change. Self-driving taxis are being tested this year in Pittsburgh, Phoenix, and Boston, as well as Singapore, Dubai, and Wuzhen, China.
And here is what is disruptive for Big Oil: Self-driving vehicles get to combine the capital savings from the improved lifetime of EVs, with the savings from eliminating the driver.
The costs of electric self-driving cars will be so low, it will be cheaper to hail a ride than to drive the car you already own.
...
The battle over oil has historically been a personal battle — a skirmish between tribes over politics and morality, over how we define ourselves and our future. But the battle over self-driving cars will be fought on a different front. It will be about reliability, efficiency, and cost. And for the first time, Big Oil will be on the weaker side.
Within just a few years, Big Oil will stagger and start to fall. For anyone who feels uneasy about this, I want to emphasize that this prediction isn’t driven by environmental righteousness or some left-leaning fantasy. It’s nothing personal. It’s just business.

If We Care About Inequality, We Must Confront Capital →

The owners of this wealth, or capital, capture around 30 percent of the income produced by the country every year. This income flows to them, not because they work for it, but merely because they own income-generating assets like real estate, equity, and debt. In 2015, total US capital income was around $4.8 trillion.
...
It is worth emphasizing just how much income at the top of society comes from passive ownership of investments rather than from working. The top 0.01 percent of individuals in society have an average income of $28 million. Three-fourths of that income, or $21 million, came from capital in 2014.
If we want to get serious about creating a fair and egalitarian society, we must confront capital directly. Wage levels are important. Benefit levels are important. But getting those things right will not be enough so long as nearly one-third of the national income flows out passively to a handful of people at the top of society.
Current liberal efforts to tackle wealth inequality are woefully inadequate. Policies aimed at building the assets of low-income families, the typical approach to this issue, rarely succeed on their own terms and, even if they did succeed, would only be an insignificant drop in the bucket. For wealth and capital income to become more fairly distributed throughout society, the ownership of existing assets must be reordered towards that end.

Jubilee Year, anyone?