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Post by mhbruin on Dec 23, 2022 9:32:00 GMT -8
Eucalyptus: The plant named after what it would say if you pruned it.
If A Tech Company Get's It's Virtual Wrist Slapped, Does It Feel the Slap?
Facebook owner Meta has agreed to pay $725m (£600m) to settle legal action over a data breach linked to political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.
The long-running dispute accused the social media giant of allowing third parties, including the British firm, to access Facebook users' personal data.
The proposed sum is the largest in a US data privacy class action, lawyers say.
Tech author James Ball told the BBC it was "not a surprise" that Meta has had to agree to a serious pay-out but that it was "not that much" money to the tech giant.
"It's less than a tenth of what it spent on its efforts to create 'the metaverse' last year alone," he said.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 23, 2022 9:33:07 GMT -8
Non-Zero COVID
Nearly 37 million people in China may have been infected with COVID-19 on a single day this week, the Bloomberg news agency has reported, citing minutes from an internal meeting of the country’s National Health Commission held on Wednesday.
In all, the report which was published on Friday said about 18 percent of the country’s population – 248 million people – are likely to have contracted the virus in the first 20 days of December.
Meanwhile in the US
AVERAGE DAILY U.S. COVID DEATHS: 417
TWO-WEEK CHANGE: ↑ 15.0%
AVERAGE DAILY HOSPITALIZATIONS: 40,952
CHANGE, TWO WEEKS ↑ 9.2%
AVERAGE DAILY ICU ADMISSIONS: 4,848
CHANGE, TWO WEEKS: ↑ 13.7%
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 23, 2022 9:40:20 GMT -8
Will Silicon Valley Become Bacteria Valley? It Doesn't Have a Good Ring to It.
Cryptocurrency hasn’t worked out so well for tech investors. Neither has the metaverse so far. Self-driving cars have been slow to arrive, and social media doesn’t have the hyper-fast growth that it did a few years ago.
So where can a savvy tech investor turn these days in search of the next big idea? Two words: dietary supplements.
Some venture capitalists who have made fortunes investing in software and hardware are putting tens of millions of dollars into companies that make probiotic pills, capsules filled with plant extracts and other nutritional supplements as a potential new frontier.
As a consumer product, supplements are associated more with the Kardashians or Joe Rogan than with Silicon Valley. The industry is infamous for its lack of regulation under a 1994 federal law that exempts supplements from most Food and Drug Administration oversight, and it has boomed in recent years despite questions about efficacy.
Now, venture capitalists are betting that advances in DNA sequencing and related techniques will usher in a new and more credible wave of supplements, focused especially on gut health.
Roelof Botha, the managing partner of Sequoia Capital, one of the largest venture capital firms in the world, is among those buying in. He said there’s a “societal reawakening” about the complex biome of the human gut where hundreds of species of bacteria live.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 23, 2022 9:52:12 GMT -8
Not Even Election Consultants Like Krysten
If Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) decides to run for reelection next year, she’ll do so without the help of the big-name Democratic ad makers and pollsters who helped her win her Senate seat in 2018, and without access to the voter database maintained by the Democratic Party.
NGP VAN, which manages Democratic voter data, is set to cut off Sinema’s access at the end of January, according to a source with direct knowledge of the situation. The ad makers who worked with her in 2018, Dixon/Davis Media Group, have split with her campaign. Two other Democratic sources said polling firm Impact Research made the same decision.
Both Dixon/Davis and Impact have the type of pedigree you would expect for firms that work with senators in key races. Dixon/Davis worked on President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, while Impact Research does polling for President Joe Biden. Both firms made the decision before Sinema’s recent party switch.
Krysten Hates An Empty Fridge and Middle Seats
The Incredible 37-Page Guide for Staffing Sen. Kyrsten Sinema
Aides to the Arizona senator were expected to get her groceries, fix her internet, and learn her very specific preferences for airline seats, according to an internal memo.
The 37-page memo is intended as a guide for aides who set the schedule for and personally staff Sinema during her workdays in Washington and Arizona. And while the document is mostly just revealing of Sinema’s exceptionally strong preferences about things like air travel—preferably not on Southwest Airlines, never book her a seat near a bathroom, and absolutely never a middle seat—Sinema’s standards appear to go right up to the line of what Senate ethics rules allow, if not over.
One section of the staffer guide explains that the senator’s executive assistant must contact Sinema at the beginning of the work week in Washington to “ask if she needs groceries,” and copy both the scheduler and chief of staff on the message to “make sure this is accomplished.” It specifies Sinema will reimburse the assistant through CashApp. The memo also dictates that if the internet in Sinema’s private apartment fails, the executive assistant “should call Verizon to schedule a repair” and ensure a staffer is present to let a technician inside the property.
The Senate ethics handbook states that “staff are compensated for the purpose of assisting Senators in their official legislative and representational duties, and not for the purpose of performing personal or other non-official activities for themselves or on behalf of others.”
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 23, 2022 10:06:23 GMT -8
Judges on a RampageFar-right, activist judges are on a rampage against Democratic policies. Last month, tens of millions of eligible Americans were prevented from getting up to $20,000 of their federally held student loans canceled by President Joe Biden under his long-awaited debt relief program. Unfortunately, this setback to the Biden administration’s carefully-crafted, broadly popular executive order did not come from elected officials accountable to any American constituency. Instead, the hopes of millions of Americans with debilitating student debt were dashed by a single right-wing federal district court judge in Texas appointed by former President Donald Trump. Although the Biden administration has appealed this ruling, its long-overdue student debt relief program will now, at a minimum, be stalled for many months. This begs an important question: How can a lone Trump-appointed judge in Texas, through a single opinion, overturn the Biden administration’s meticulously planned executive order in all 50 states? This issuance of a universal, or nationwide, halt on federal policy by a single right-wing judge is not a one-off incident. Over the past two years, activist district court judges have been issuing this kind of sweeping injunction of Biden’s policies, and even the laws of Congress, with alarming frequency. In April, U.S. District Court Judge Kathryn Mizelle, a Trump appointee in Florida, struck down the Biden administration’s mask mandate for public transportation, a common-sense public health measure meant to reduce the spread of the deadly COVID-19 virus. In June 2021, U.S. District Court Judge Marcia Howard, a former President George W. Bush appointee in Florida, halted a provision in the American Rescue Plan Act that provides $4 billion in debt forgiveness, grants, and training, and education to farmers and ranchers of color to redress the effects of discrimination. On dubious legal grounds, Trump-appointed district court judges have also blocked Biden’s plan for a 100-day pause on deportations upon his taking office and his effort to end Trump’s inhumane “Remain in Mexico” policy. And, as of this month, a Bush-appointed judge appears poised to strike down an Affordable Care Act provision requiring employers to cover treatment like HIV-prevention pills and other preventative medical services. It’s Time For Democrats To Get Serious About Injunctions
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 23, 2022 10:08:12 GMT -8
28 QOP On a Rampage Against Child Sex-Abuse Victims
In the House vote Wednesday on the Respect for Child Survivors Act, 28 Republicans said no to the legislation that aims to address the FBI’s mishandling of child sex abuse cases.
The bipartisan bill was introduced in the House of Representatives in the wake of the investigation of Larry Nassar, the longtime doctor for the U.S. women’s national gymnastics team. Multiple reports of Nassar’s sexual abuse of children and young women on the team were ignored for years. Through this legislation, the FBI would be required to use multidisciplinary teams of trained professionals in investigations of sexual abuse to address the problems of poorly conducted interviews and the re-traumatizing of survivors.
Nassar was convicted in federal and state trials in 2017 and 2018 and is serving 60 years in federal prison before he begins his state prison sentences.
Despite opposition from the GOP lawmakers, the bill passed in the House on a vote of 385 to 28. But many are calling attention to the hypocrisy of the Republicans who voted no.
Among the Republicans who opposed the bill were Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) and Lauren Boebert (Colo). Both embrace far-right views and have previously made anti-LGBTQ comments equating queer adults to predators, labeling them as “groomers” — a right-wing rhetorical smear that has been used to discredit the LGBTQIA+ community in discussions about civil rights.
In November, Greene called openly gay California state Sen. Scott Wiener (D) a “communist groomer” in response to a tweet he posted about how her rhetoric promotes anti-LGBTQ violence. Boebert has also perpetuated anti-LGBTQ fearmongering, such as her comments labeling drag queens and transgender people as “groomers.”
According to a report by the Human Rights Campaign, references to pedophiles and “grooming” in relation to the LGBTQIA+ community grew by 400% on social media after Florida approved its so-called Don’t Say Gay bill barring teachers from talking about LGBTQ people and issues in classrooms. This bill was among numerous attacks against the LGBTQ community this year, including state measures to stop gender-affirming medical care.
The right-wing talking points have been blamed for inciting hate crimes and violence across the nation, including the devastating mass shooting at a gay club in Colorado Springs, Colorado, last month in which five people were killed and 25 were injured.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 23, 2022 10:10:43 GMT -8
Is This the Smoking Gun?New transcripts of closed-door testimony to the Jan. 6 House committee show Donald Trump and his allies had a direct hand in the Nevada Republican Party’s scheme to send a phony electoral certificate to Congress in 2020 in a last-ditch attempt to keep the former president in power. The documents made public Wednesday evening included interviews with state party leader Michael McDonald and Republican National Committeeman Jim DeGraffenreid in February. Both men served as fake electors in Carson City on Dec. 14, 2020. That day, six Nevada GOP members signed certificates falsely stating that Trump won Nevada in 2020 and sent them to Congress and the National Archives, where they were ultimately ignored. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is digging into the role that these fake electors in key battleground states had in Trump’s attempt to cling to power after his 2020 defeat. McDonald and DeGraffenreid invoked Fifth Amendment protection hundreds of times in their separate interviews with the Jan. 6 committee, refusing to answer questions about their involvement and the extent to which Trump's top allies had helped in orchestrating the plot. Still, the transcripts provide an unprecedented view into the Trump team's coordinated efforts in Nevada to overturn the results of the election — efforts that included direct communication between McDonald and the president himself. Transcripts reveal link between Trump, Nevada fake electors
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 23, 2022 10:16:36 GMT -8
What About the Tom Brady Football Index of Inflation?
A measure of inflation closely watched by the Federal Reserve slowed last month, another sign that a long surge in consumer prices seems to be easing.
Friday's report from the Commerce Department showed that prices rose 5.5% in November from a year earlier, down from a revised 6.1% increase in October and the smallest gain since October 2021. Excluding volatile food and energy prices, so-called core inflation was up 4.7% over the previous year. That was also the smallest increase since October 2021.
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