Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Blue light may not be as disruptive to our sleep patterns as originally thought

Contrary to common belief, blue light may not be as disruptive to our sleep patterns as originally thought -- according to scientists. According to the team, using dim, cooler, lights in the evening and bright warmer lights in the day may be more beneficial to our health.

Ice sheet melting: Estimates still uncertain

Estimates used by climate scientists to predict the rate at which the world's ice sheets will melt are still uncertain despite advancements in technology, new research shows.

Early-life exposure to dogs may lessen risk of developing schizophrenia

Ever since humans domesticated the dog, the faithful, obedient and protective animal has provided its owner with companionship and emotional well-being. Now, a study suggests that being around 'man's best friend' from an early age may have a health benefit as well -- lessening the chance of developing schizophrenia as an adult.

'Upgraded' CRISPR tool

Scientists have captured the first images of a new gene editing tool that could improve upon existing CRISPR-based tools.

Buttigieg Is Shocked, Shocked at McKinsey’s Transgressions. But It Was Notorious When He Joined It.

Early in his political career, 2020 presidential candidate and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg talked proudly of his years at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company—his most “intellectually informing experience,” at “a place to learn … all the things about business I didn’t know.” With Buttigieg’s rise to fourth place in the polls, however,  the firm’s unsavory activities have come under increasing scrutiny—its work in the past decade with authoritarian states like Saudi Arabia and China, its immigrant detention cost-cutting advice so inhumane it shocked even ICE workers.

Under pressure for more transparency about his role at McKinsey, Buttigieg prevailed upon the firm to waive his NDA and released his client list. But the campaign has dismissed scrutiny of his clients on the basis that he was a just one cog with no decision-making power.

And in response to the firm’s recent scandals, Buttigieg has noted that he “left the firm a decade ago” and called “what certain people in that firm have decided to do…extremely frustrating and extremely disappointing.”

But McKinsey was mired in high-profile scandals prior to Buttigieg’s decision to work there after graduating from Oxford in 2007—and throughout his time there. It was implicated in the 2001 Enron scandal (among other things, one of the company’s chief executives, Jeffrey Skilling, was a former McKinsey man) and had become notorious as the brains behind countless corporate cost-cutting schemes that slashed jobs, such as the 2007 “Project X” plan, in which Chrysler closeed U.S. plants and lay off thousands of factory workers.

Perhaps the most notorious of these was the sprawling insurance scandal that became known as “the McKinsey documents,” in which McKinsey revolutionized the insurance industry to maximize profits at the expense of vulnerable policyholders.

In the early 1990s, Allstate, then one of the country’s biggest auto insurers and looking to pare down how much it was spending on claims, hired McKinsey to do what McKinsey is best-known for doing: cut costs. McKinsey dutifully developed a strategy to “radically alter our whole approach to the business of claims” and boost company profits, which Allstate implemented in 1995. Internal documents released years later showed that McKinsey cast the claims process as a “zero-sum economic game,” where “Allstate gains” and “others must lose,” as one PowerPoint slide put it—the “others” being claimants who had suffered the very misfortunes and disaster their insurance was meant to cushion.

The strategy increased income thirtyfold. Revenue soared from a yearly average of $82 million in the preceding decade to an average of $2.5 billion in the decade that followed. During that time, the amount Allstate paid out per every dollar it charged customers for premiums dropped from around 69 cents to 43.5 cents. By 2007, it had hit a record profit of nearly $5 billion. The strategy was considered such a success that two years later, the program was expanded beyond auto insurance to fire, water and roof damage for homes.

Allstate’s surging profits meant hardship for its customers. Claimants who had diligently paid their premiums for years were suddenly abandoned at precisely the moment of crisis their insurance was meant for. Many received low offers that covered only a fraction of the costs. Some were treated as frauds and potential criminals. Others were tied up in court until they simply gave up on ever recouping their losses.

A host of other insurers also made use of McKinsey. Insurance giant State Farm hired McKinsey in the early 1990s; like Allstate, by 2007, its profits had doubled over 1990s levels.A 2007 analysis by the Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss., found that between 2002 and 2005 alone, even as eight major hurricanes wreaked destruction along the coast and, particularly, in Florida, the insurance giant’s fire and casualty subsidiary saw its net worth more than double to $7.7 billion and its payouts per premium dollar drop from 70.6 percent to 51.6 percent.

By the time Hurricane Katrina struck land in August 2005, property insurers across the country were operating according to the McKinsey strategy, as the Bloomberg Marketscover story “The Insurance Hoax” later detailed. Reports abounded of insurers low-balling, underpaying, or simply flat-out refusing to fulfill Katrina-related claims. In November 2005, Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti filed a suit accusing McKinsey and nine other defendants, including Allstate and State Farm, of “rigging the value of policyholder claims and raiding the premiums held in trust by their companies for the benefit of policyholders to cover their losses.” The state accused McKinsey of heading an insurance conspiracy.

 

The McKinsey-designed insurance strategy was major news through the 2000s. This was thanks to numerous lawsuits by both private attorneys and state officials like Foti, who went to war with Allstate and State Farm on behalf of consumers railroaded by the companies after not just auto collisions and fires, but natural disasters like tornadoes and hurricanes.

They were given a boost by Santa Fe lawyer David Berardinelli, who sued Allstate in 2000 for bad faith denial of an insurance claim, and temporarily obtained 12,500 pages of PowerPoint slides outlining McKinsey’s strategy. Forbidden from copying the documents, Berardinelli took copious notes and published an exposé titled From Good Hands to Boxing Gloves: The Dark Side of Insurance in 2006, the year before Buttigieg joined McKinsey.

Insurers went to extreme lengths to block other damning documents about McKinsey’s advice coming out publicly during lawsuits. Ordered to release internal documents by a Missouri court in 2007, Allstate simply refused and was held in contempt, racking up $25,000-a-day fines that ultimately totaled more than $7 million. It took an order from Florida’s insurance commissioner to finally bring the documents into the light of day, and even then Allstate initially refused, relenting in April 2008 only after Florida suspended it from selling new insurance policies in the state.

The documents made national headlines in outlets like the Chicago Tribune and CNN, which produced a February 2007 report looking at insurers' practice of low-balling claimants. Former claims agents admitted to the network they had offered as little as $50 to policyholders who had suffered bodily injury and used what employees called “the three D’s”: delay, deny and, if it comes to it, defend.

The insurer’s refusal to release the documents was understandable given what their contents revealed. Inside were McKinsey’s PowerPoint slides positing a “zero-sum game” between Allstate and its policyholders. “Leakage” was McKinsey’s term for paying policyholders more than necessary. The company’s bet was that when faced with a “take it or leave it offer,” most claimants would choose to take it, particularly in the midst of the financial insecurity in the wake of an accident. McKinsey advised Allstate that while most customers could be treated with “good hands” (as in the company’s slogan, “You’re in good hands with Allstate”) and get a quick settlement, those who refused the low-ball figures the insurer offered should get the “boxing gloves” treatment and be made to wait three years or more for a resolution.

If policyholders lawyered up, McKinsey counseled that the company “align alligators”—adopt tougher legal action—and then “sit and wait.” Clients fighting Allstate often gave up in the face of years of litigation, local trial attorney David Shapiro told theSarasota Herald-Tribune. “There are many lawyers who won’t take an Allstate case,” he said.

“[Allstate] pay[s] less than every single insurance company, and they certainly will spend more on litigation,” one former Allstate lawyer told the paper.

McKinsey  also recommended the adoption of a computer program named Colossus to remove the discretion of claims agents in favor of “establishing a new fair market value” for bodily injuries. The program could allegedly be “tuned” to produce low-ball offers from the get-go. McKinsey instructed claims agents “to stay within the Colossus range or below it in most cases.” The program would lead to profits, McKinsey assured Allstate, and “shareholders will notice.”

 

The long-running scandal raises the question of why Buttigieg, as rival candidate and Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard put it, “chose to work for a company like McKinsey.” But it also raises another question: How much of the firm’s ethos—putting corporate profits over the health and economic security of the US public with a ruthless, amoral zeal—was internalized by him?

According to Buttigieg, his first client for the firm was the health insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. By his own account, according to the New York Times, the insurer had “had grown in such a way that there was a great deal of duplication and some people didn’t even know what the people working for them were doing.” Two years later, it laid off 10% of its workforce, froze pay for non-union workers and increased its rates.

As the Huffington Postreported, Buttigieg went on to serve as part of a team that recommended cuts to the U.S. Postal Service and the replacement of unionized postal workers with privatized staff. And as the Intercept’s Ryan Grim noted, Buttigieg would later credit his “great experience” at McKinsey with exposing him “to a lot of different ideas and ways of solving problems,” coming to view running the city of South Bend as akin to “running a corporation” and to see its 100,000 residents as “stakeholders.” Buttigieg’s technocratic style of mayordom earned him critics in South Bend, including residents, the director of a local charity for the homeless, and a city council member and now mayoral rival, who complain of top-down, data-driven policies that made life harder for the homeless and accelerated the displacement of communities.

Buttigieg, the Rhodes Scholar, is known for doing his homework. It stretches credulity that he was unaware of the massive insurance scandal engulfing the company before and throughout his years there, one that laid bare the heart of McKinsey’s business strategy: Maximize profits, no matter what the human cost.

Marking a big win for privacy and immigrant rights, the California Department of Justice has cut off deportation agents from access to the state’s law enforcement network. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/12/california-doj-cuts-ice-deportation-officers-state-law-enforcement-database

What are the limitations of existing free and open-source (FOS) electronic design automation (#EDA) tools?

What is it missing to design a chip with 1+ Million gates?

Which will be the first foundry to open a process design kit (PDKs)?

These are some of the questions that will be addressed at the third Free Silicon Conference (#FSiC2020) which will be held in Zurich on June 4-6 2020.

More info at:
https://wiki.f-si.org/index.php/FSiC2020

Picture: the Raven chip of Tim Edwards
https://peertube.f-si.org/videos/watch/e8404429-4d32-4741-ac11-1beb0f16348e

Facebook Stock Got Hammered Because the FTC Plans App Crackdown

On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is preparing a potential injunction against Facebook. The agency claims that Facebook’s efforts to regulate apps have stifled competition and given unfair advantage to Facebook’s own products.

https://www.ccn.com/facebook-stock-got-hammered-because-the-ftc-plans-app-crackdown/

#deletefacebook #privacy

“The Algorithm Made Us Do It”: How Bosses at Instacart “Mathwash” Labor Exploitation

Instacart is messing with workers’ tips, again. The company’s workers are so fed up hundreds of them are out on strike this week.

Microsoft und Co. an Schulen? Das geht gar nicht. Warum erklärt der nachfolgende Kommentar. Leitet ihn bitte an Eltern, Schüler, Lehrer, Entscheidungsträger etc. weiter - es gilt die digitale Mündigkeit zu bewahren. 🧙‍♂️

Nutzt E-Mail, Messenger, das Fediverse etc. zur Verbreitung.

Vielen Dank! ❤️

https://www.kuketz-blog.de/kommentar-microsoft-google-apple-und-co-aus-bildungseinrichtungen-verbannen/

I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing

Why are those Star Wars droids so lovable? It’s science!

OBG-Why?

A new bill in Ohio would force doctors to re-implant a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy into a person’s womb.

Remember When Military Veterans Ran on Actual Records of Accomplishment?

He was a difficult personality and his policy toward Native Americans was atrocious, but Andrew Jackson had an actual record of military accomplishment when he ran for president. No one could argue that Ulysses S. Grant wasn’t ready for the presidency when he ran. Dwight Eisenhower led the biggest naval armada in human history and […]

Sex workers and antitrafficking groups warned that SESTA/FOSTA would put victims and consensual sex workers in danger. They were right. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/12/observing-international-day-end-violence-against-sex-workers-means-looking-closely

I mean, seriously, how many places out there have engineers who develop an M.2 breakout board to debug their phone and then release the schematics so you can make one for your own phone? It's basically Hogwarts over here @purism -- I'm surrounded by wizards.

https://source.puri.sm/eric.kuzmenko/librem5-m2-breakout

CAP Publicly Distanced Itself From the UAE. 8 Months Later, It Was Still Meeting with UAE Lobbyists.

This January, the Center for American Progress (CAP) declared it would no longer accept funding from the United Arab Emirates (UAE). “With a rising undemocratic tide around the world, and serious questions about which side of that struggle our own president stands on, it seemed clear that all Americans should take extra steps and leave no doubt where they stand,” a spokesperson for CAP told the Guardian.

The pledge came amid public outcry over Saudi Arabia’s murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for the Washington Post, in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018. Since 2014, CAP had received between $1.5 million and $3 million from the UAE, a close ally of Saudi Arabia. CAP, founded by Clinton staffer John Podesta, is widely seen as the think tank that wields the most influence on the Democratic Party. During this time, the group had been conspicuously silent on the U.S.-UAE-Saudi war on Yemen, which was condemned by human rights groups.

But CAP appears not to have taken all steps to rid itself of UAE influence. According to Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) records, which disclose lobbyists’ financial relationships with foreign governments, a high-level CAP staffer continued meeting with a UAE lobbyist for at least eight months after CAP pledged to stop taking UAE donations.

FARA filings show that Harbour Group, a lobbying firm, received $2,863,574.34 from the UAE and $160,008.09 from Saudi Arabia during the six-month period ending on March 31, 2019.

That same filing shows that, during this time period, Richard Mintz, managing director of Harbour Group, had “multiple contacts” with Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at CAP known for his close relationship with the UAE. These meetings extended from October 1 to March 30, indicating they continued for two months after CAP pledged it would stop taking UAE money. While the record does not disclose details of these meetings, it says the topic of their discussions were “UAE foreign policy.”

It didn’t stop there. A newly released FARA filing shows that, from April 1 to September 30, Harbour lobbyists repeatedly met and communicated with Katulis. During that time period, the lobbying firm received $3,558,776.35 from the UAE (no U.S. lobbying payments from Saudi Arabia were listed).

While FARA documents are scant on details, frustrating transparency advocates, the filing notes that Richard Mintz, managing director of Harbour Group, met with Katulis from April 1 to September 30. Under "subject matter," the filing merely states “Iran/Yemen/Red Sea”—three topgeopoliticalconcerns of the UAE.

The same filing notes that two other Harbour Group lobbyists had contact with Katulis: Adam Sharon who had a “lunch, catch-up meeting” with him on August 22, and Matthew Triaca, who sent Katulis an email on August 29.

The two FARA documents only list meetings up to the end of September, so the meetings may be ongoing.

While these meetings do not contradict CAP’s statement that it is no longer receiving UAE money, it does raise questions about ongoing UAE influence.

Asked for comment, CAP spokesperson Sam Hananel told In These Times via email, “The Center for American Progress no longer accepts funding from the United Arab Emirates. Following the conclusion of the grant period, CAP staff finalized and submitted reports associated with past work.”

CAP declined repeated requests to comment on the content of the meetings between Mintz and Katulis. The refusal is notable, given that CAP has called for increased transparency on lobbying disclosures, citing the threat of Russian interference.

Harbour Group, Katulis and Mintz declined a request for an interview.

Think tanks meet with all sorts of people, and a meeting alone does not prove undue political influence. However, a large number of meetings over a significant time span suggests a closer relationship, and one more likely to be mutually beneficial.

CAP and Katulis’ relationship with UAE lobbyists goes back further. A recent report by Ben Freeman of the Center for International Policy found that UAE “foreign agents,” most commonly Harbour’s Richard Mintz, contacted Katulis “at least 11 times according to their 2018 FARA filings, primarily regarding a ‘CAP group trip to UAE/KSA’ in late April and early May 2018,” writes Freeman (who also provided In These Times the FARA documents for this article.). The records show that then, as now, Mintz was the main contact for Katulis.

The report, further, notes that CAP was among the top five think tanks most contacted by the UAE in 2018.

CAP has long exerted significant influence over the center of the Democratic Party, and played a tremendous role in shaping Obama administration policy, with Timereporting in 2008 that “not since the Heritage Foundation helped guide Ronald Reagan's transition in 1981 has a single outside group held so much sway.” Katulis’ bio boasts his political influence, noting that, “for more than a decade, he has advised senior U.S. policymakers on foreign policy and has provided expert testimony several times to key congressional committees.”

Katulis, meanwhile, wears another hat: He is a senior advisor to Albright Stonebridge Group, a “global business strategy firm” with offices in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The UAE office is led by Jad Mneymneh, who previously served in the Crown Prince Court of Abu Dhabi’s Office of Strategic Affairs.

While a spokesperson for the firm said its does not lobby the U.S. government or take on “client work that involves activities covered by FARA,” journalist Lee Fang noted on Twitter that the group is an influence peddler.

While the firm may not partake in activities that warrent FARA reporting, its staffer—Katulis—does perform such activities at CAP, like testifying before Congress.

There is reason to think that Katulis’ relationships have had an impact. A January 16 Intercept report by Ryan Grim and Clio Chang found that, in the aftermath of the Khashoggi killing, Katulis objected to an initial statement from CAP condemning Saudi Arabia for the murder and calling for concrete consequences. Thanks to Katulis’ input, the statement was watered down and instead called for “additional steps to reassess” the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia.

CAP’s statement that it would no longer take UAE funding came amid public scrutiny fueled, in part, by these revelations.

The implications of these ties are not theoretical. The Yemen war has killed at least 100,000 people, and the U.S.-Saudi-UAE coalition is responsible for more than 8,000 of 12,000 known civilian deaths, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project. For more than four and a half years, the powerful think tank has tacitly supported the Yemen War through its silence. Even as the mainstream of the Democratic Party turned against the war under President Trump, the think tank stayed mum, despite weighing in on a number of other foreign policy issues, from Russian interference in the election to Trump’s decision to exit the Iran nuclear deal. During a heated -congressional effort to end U.S. support for the Yemen War by invoking the War Powers resolution, CAP was silent, coming out in support only after the resolution passed with broad Democratic backing. (It was ultimately vetoed by Trump in April.)

Some of Katulis’ own writing appears to contradict even CAP's belated statement of “full support” for U.S. withdrawal from the Yemen War. In March 2019, Katulis and CAP chief operating officer Gordon Gray co-authored an article that played down the importance of ending U.S. support for the war.

“Ending U.S. military support for the Saudi-led coalition will not stop the war or address the humanitarian crisis,” they wrote. “Successfully and comprehensively addressing the grave situation in Yemen will require patient diplomacy, which inevitably will see ups and downs given the nature of the conflict and the combatants inside and outside Yemen.”

Though no longer funding CAP directly, the UAE government was likely delighted to see such a statement come from a leading Democratic Party-aligned think tank.

The POST Act isn’t the end of the fight against privacy-invasive NYPD surveillance. It is a crucial first step. https://www.gothamgazette.com/opinion/8909-surveillance-and-the-city-past-time-post-act-nypd

New ice river detected at Arctic glacier adds to rising seas

Geologists, examining the desolate Vavilov ice cap on the northern fringe of Siberia in the Arctic Circle, have for the first time observed rapid ice loss from an improbable new river of ice, according to new research.

November 2019 was 2nd hottest on record for the planet
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191216151506.htm #climatechange #climatecrisis

Effects of natural gas assessed in study of shale gas boom in Appalachian basin

A new study estimated the cumulative effects of the shale gas boom in the Appalachian basin in the early 2000s on air quality, climate change, and employment. The study found that effects on air quality and employment followed the boom-and-bust cycle, but effects on climate change will likely persist for generations to come. The study, which also considered how to compensate for these effects, provides insights for long-term decision making in this field.