Silicon Valley is eating the world. Hopefully they leave something for the rest of us.
Percentage of Americans who are concerned that Amazon is forcing brick-and-mortar stores out of business : 64
Who have a favorable impression of the company : 71
Amount by which Jeff Bezos’s net worth increased the day after the launch of Amazon Go, a cashierless store : $2,800,000,000
Rank of cashier among the most common US jobs : 2
...This Cambridge Analytica scandal proves that Facebook ought to be heavily regulated, and that’s not good for Facebook’s bottom line.
I take issue, though, with the phrase “ended up in the hands of”. The implication with that phrasing is that Cambridge Analytica hoodwinked Facebook, or breached some sort of defenses. They didn’t. The information Cambridge Analytica obtained was exactly the information Facebook provides to advertisers by design...
This is a bright spot in an otherwise all-too-often dark institution. The conclusion:
From time to time, transformational leaders take office. They show everyone else exactly what can be done and how to do it. That’s Larry Krasner right now – and he’s showing the nation how to dismantle mass incarceration from the inside out.
The heart of the article is about a memo Krasner wrote to his staff. I'll quote one rule in particular which could go a long way toward turning around a bureaucracy addicted to grinding down people, to get at taxpayer funds:
Krasner instructed his prosecutors to now add up and justify the exact costs of every single person sentenced to a crime in Philadelphia. Stating that the city is currently spending an astounding $360 million per year to jail around just 6,000 people, Krasner then gave examples of all of the things that such money could be doing in the city currently. Stating that it costs between $42,000 and $60,000 per year to incarcerate a person, he reminded the prosecutors that the average total family income of a person in the city was just $41,000. The annual cost of incarceration, Krasner reminded his prosecutors, was currently more per year than the beginning salary of teachers, police officers, firefighters, social workers, addiction counselors, and even prosecutors in his office.
Krasner wrote, “If you are seeking a sentence of 3 years incarceration, state on the record that the cost to the taxpayer will be $126,000.00 (3 x $42,000.00) if not more and explain why you believe the cost is justified.”
Krasner then closed out his document with five new policies changing the harsh probation rules in Philadelphia. It’s these very policies that functioned as a trap for Meek Mill.
Speaking at the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on Friday, President Donald Trump announced a policy idea that at a normal time, from a normal president, would have dramatically moved financial markets. But of course, nothing of the sort happened.
He said that unless he can get Mexico and Canada to agree to sweeping changes to the North American Free Trade Agreement that would eliminate the US-Mexico bilateral trade deficit, he “will terminate the deal and we’ll start over again.”
Specific companies that depend on the ability to easily import goods from Mexico to the United States should have seen their share prices plummet while firms that compete with Mexican imports should have seen prices soar. Instead, it was a blah day on financial markets, with the Dow up slightly and no particularly surprising moves from individual companies.
...
Perhaps the most telling moment of the entire speech came at the end, when Trump offered a desultory announcement of new sanctions on North Korea: ...
Trump appears unable to describe either the actual contents of the new sanctions or what policy goals the sanctions are intended to advance. He doesn’t even appear to be particularly supportive of the new policy, just saying blandly that “hopefully something positive can happen.” ...
Foreign policy is where the president’s discretionary authority is at its maximum. Yet it’s clear on that this crucial issue — as on everything else — Trump is essentially a peripheral player in the Trump administration and even in the Trump White House.
Somebody decided on this new policy, and they presumably did it for some reason, but Trump neither knows nor cares. I, too, hope something positive can happen. But if a time comes when the United States needs strong leadership from the Oval Office, we’re not going to get it.
Fifty years after the federal Fair Housing Act banned racial discrimination in lending, African Americans and Latinos continue to be routinely denied conventional mortgage loans at rates far higher than their white counterparts.
...
The disproportionate denials and limited anti-discrimination enforcement help explain why the homeownership gap between whites and African Americans, which had been shrinking since the 1970s, has exploded since the housing bust. It is now wider than it was during the Jim Crow era.
This gap has far-reaching consequences. In the United States, “wealth and financial stability are inextricably linked to housing opportunity and homeownership,” said Lisa Rice, executive vice president of the National Fair Housing Alliance, an advocacy group. “For a typical family, the largest share of their wealth emanates from homeownership and home equity.”
...
Reveal’s analysis included all records publicly available under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, covering nearly every time an American tried to buy a home with a conventional mortgage in 2015 and 2016. It controlled for nine economic and social factors, including an applicant’s income, the amount of the loan, the ratio of the size of the loan to the applicant’s income and the type of lender, as well as the racial makeup and median income of the neighborhood where the person wanted to buy property.
An Illinois contractor bidding to build President Donald Trump’s wall on the Mexican border was among three men arrested Tuesday in connection with the bombing of a mosque in Minnesota and the attempted bombing of a women’s health clinic in Illinois.
Michael B. Hari, 47, was arrested and charged Tuesday in federal court in lllinois with arson and possession of machine guns.
According to the complaint, Hari and two accomplices — 29-year-old Michael McWhorter and 22-year-old Joe Morris — were responsible for the bombing of a mosque in Bloomington, Minnesota, on Aug. 5, 2017, and the attempted bombing of the Women’s Health Practice in Champaign, Illinois, on Nov. 7. All three are now facing federal arson charges.
...
Hari is a former sheriff’s deputy who lives in Charence, Illinois, where he ran Crisis Resolution Security Services Inc., which had put in a bid for Trump’s border wall.
In a YouTube video promoting the proposal, a narrator says the wall would be “culturally significant, a powerful architectural statement of the determination of the American people to defend their nation and its Anglo-Saxon heritage, western culture, and English language” and would defend “our way of life from other people who have different value systems.”
The strike also shines a light on the shifting fortunes of the American workforce. Like the “Fight for 15” movement to raise the minimum wage, and other recent grass-roots progressive movements, the West Virginia strike should expand mainstream notions of what it means to be “working class” and economically vulnerable.
When pundits and political observers (and the president) talk about “working-class” Americans, they have an archetype in mind: the white, blue-collar male worker. Journalists who travel to Rust Belt communities in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio often take as a given that those workers—and laborers like them—are representative of working-class Americans. But since the 1970s, working-class labor has shifted from “making stuff” to “serving people,” a product of globalization, technological change, and a policy regime that prioritized the flow of capital above all else. Increasingly, the typical working-class American looks more like a fast food worker or paid caregiver—jobs held predominantly by white women and people of color—than someone who wears a hard hat to the job site. And while most definitions of “working class” center on workers without college degrees, there are many laborers with college diplomas whose prospects are now similar to those without them.
The protagonists of the trends we report on are mainly college-educated suburban white women. We tell their stories not because college-educated white women are the most Democratic slice of the electorate (they aren’t) or because they are the most progressive voices within the Democratic Party (they aren’t) or because they have a special claim to lead the left moving forward (they don’t: nor do they pretend to). Rather, what we report here is that it is among these college-educated, middle-aged women in the suburbs that political practices have most changed under Trump. If your question is how the panorama of political possibility has shifted since November 2016, your story needs to begin here.
...
The fact that professional women from mid-life to early retirement years comprise the strong majority of new leaders and activists means that even those with no prior experience in political organizing have lifetimes of experience in working for change within existing systems. In contrast to some of the voices the media have embraced as national spokespersons of the “Resistance,” the actual grassroots are pervasively pragmatic. These are individuals who have honed their skills in the “slow boring of hard boards,” to use Max Weber’s definition of politics, over years of professional and community life—and are now bringing those skills to bear full-strength on local political action.
Democratic Party officials seem notably less sophisticated about how organizing works. Nancy Reynolds, the retired librarian, worked throughout the fall of 2017 with a tight network of women (their partnership forged on a chartered bus to the January 2017 Women’s March) to coordinate phone canvassing and door-knocking across Hampton Township. They elected three Democrats to a five-person township council that had been all-Republican as long as anyone could remember. As Reynolds tried to explain to a party strategist aggrieved that the party’s online calling tools went unused, “My friends won’t make calls for you. They’ll make calls for me.” In this exchange, as in many others we have witnessed, we’ve seen to what extent the ones needing education in political organizing are actually the nominal political professionals. The “amateurs” already get it.