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[gemini://michaelnordmeyer.com/gemlog/2023-02-01-how-would-you-feel-if-google-indexed-the-gemini-space.gmi](gemini://michaelnordmeyer.com/gemlog/2023-02-01-how-would-you-feel-if-google-indexed-the-gemini-space.gmi)
"If Google would start supporting the Gemini protocol and indexing the Gemini space, presumely to make better SERPs for users of the Gemini space available, would you feel bad about it?"
kw: google privacy adoption
these type of suggestions are inevitable.
John R. Allen, a retired four-star Marine general who was the president of the Brookings Institution, had been accused of secretly lobbying for the government of Qatar. federal prosecutors have closed an investigation into whether he secretly lobbied for the government of Qatar and that no criminal charges will be brought against him in the case The F.B.I. agent’s application provided a detailed account of a period in June 2017, when General Allen met frequently with Richard G. Olson, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan, and Imaad Zuberi, a businessman with ties in the Middle East. General Allen traveled to Doha, Qatar, during that period.
Federal prosecutors have signaled a particular interest in potential violations involving Persian Gulf nations, which have developed close ties to business and political figures in the United States. According to the F.B.I. agent’s application, General Allen was recruited by Mr. Olson and Mr. Zuberi to help defuse a diplomatic crisis between Qatar and its Persian Gulf neighbors — and the former general saw the moneymaking potential for his involvement. The F.B.I. agent’s application said that General Allen had agreed to travel to Doha at Mr. Zuberi’s expense and negotiated a payment of $20,000, which he referred to as a “speaker’s fee.”
“General Allen has never acted as an agent of the Qatari government,” Mr. Phillips said. “He never had an agreement — written or oral — with Qatar or any other Qatar-related individual or entity. Neither General Allen nor any entity with which he was or is affiliated ever received fees — directly or indirectly — from the Qatari government for his efforts. Brookings never received a contribution from Qatar or any Qatari government-related entities or individuals in connection with General Allen’s activities.”
Federal law requires that anyone lobbying for a foreign government register with the Justice Department, and in recent years the department has tried to crack down on suspected violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA.
On Tuesday, workers for Cognizant, a major Alphabet and YouTube contractor, filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board that they were being retaliated against for announcing a decision to join the AWU. They say Alphabet changed its policy to make relocation to Austin, Texas, mandatory for all workers, and noncompliance would result in “voluntary termination.” This, the workers say, is against NLRB rules that state that no major policy can be changed once organizing has been made public.
The tech industry has certainly shown it will go to unsavory lengths to limit worker pay and power. In 2015, Apple, Google and other tech companies agreed to pay a $415-million settlement after a lawsuit alleged the companies had colluded to keep pay low with a “non-poaching” agreement between CEOs. The tech sector seems to be betting that these massive, algorithmically orchestrated firings will not only cut labor costs, but also once again remind increasingly empowered tech workers of their insecurity, and the power the companies still hold. It’s a bet that has historically paid off and has helped transform the tech giants into some of the most profitable companies in history. it’s spurring interest in further tech worker organizing. “I think this really highlights the need for the people not just in the Microsoft ecosystem, but across the industry to organize,” he says. “I think this was a wake-up call. There’s a wave coming. And there’s no stopping it.”
>A federal appeals court rejected Johnson & Johnson‘s plan to use a legal strategy to push about 38,000 talc lawsuits into bankruptcy court, hampering the controversial tactic the company and a handful of other profitable businesses have used to move mass personal-injury cases to chapter 11.
>The Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday dismissed the chapter 11 case of J&J subsidiary LTL Management LLC, which the consumer-health-goods giant created in 2021 to move to bankruptcy court the mass lawsuits alleging its talc-based baby powder products caused cancer.
>The unanimous ruling was a rebuke to an emerging corporate restructuring strategy in which companies facing mass tort litigation invoke a Texas law to create a new subsidiary with minimal business operations and make it responsible for tort liabilities before putting that subsidiary in bankruptcy.
>A J&J representative didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Monday. The company has denied that its talc products are unsafe and said resolving the tort claims in a chapter 11 plan was more efficient and fair for injury claimants than litigating or settling each claim one by one.
On Thursday and Friday, about 32,000 Disney employees will be voting on a contract offer from management. These workers do everything from performing as characters to working in restaurants and shops, driving buses, trams and monorails as well as working at front desks and performing housekeeping duties at hotels.
Those working under this contract, all of them full-time employees, represent more than 40% of all workers at Disney World. The company’s five-year offer would raise salaries for cast members by a minimum of $1 an hour per year, taking most workers to at least $20 an hour by 2026. That would be $5 an hour more than the Florida minimum wage, which is in the process of being increased from the current $11 an hour .. This is a “very strong offer” with guaranteed raises each year of the five-year agreement, said Andrea Finger, a Disney spokesperson. She said the majority of employees will see raises totaling 33% to 46% during the life of the contract.
The company’s offer would pay housekeepers and bus drivers at least $20 an hour immediately and culinary staff would start at $20 to $25 per hour, depending on their role.
There will also be retroactive pay increases dating back to October 1, when the previous contract expired, providing lump-sum pre-tax payments of about $700 to full-time workers.
But union leadership is urging members to vote no. The unions say Disney presented this as its best offer and that is why it’s going to membership for a vote – not because there is a tentative agreement, which is the point at which an offer normally goes to rank-and-file union members for a vote.
And this time around, all indications are that the company’s offer will be rejected.
The six union locals working under the current contract want an immediate $3 an hour raise, or a 20% raise, for what it says is 75% of the members currently making $15 an hour, plus an additional $1 an hour raise every year after that. “While Disney insists at the bargaining table that this is the best offer, we know Disney can do better, and Disney knows they must do better,” said Hollis. He said the workers who would get more than a $1 an hour pay increase are in jobs where Disney is having trouble filling openings and retaining workers. Revenue was up 36% and profits more than doubled from the previous fiscal year. And both revenue and operating profits are above what the company posted in fiscal year 2019, before the pandemic, with a 12% rise in revenue and a 10% gain in earnings.
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Through its savvy but legal exploitation of the U.S. patent system, Humira’s manufacturer, AbbVie, blocked competitors from entering the market. For the next six years, the drug’s price kept rising. Today, Humira is the most lucrative franchise in pharmaceutical history. AbbVie orchestrated the delay by building a formidable wall of intellectual property protection and suing would-be competitors before settling with them to delay their product launches until this year. Over the past 20 years, AbbVie and its former parent company increased Humira’s price about 30 times, most recently by 8 percent this month. Since the end of 2016, the drug’s list price has gone up 60 percent to over $80,000 a year, according to SSR Health, a research firm. AbbVie did not invent these patent-prolonging strategies; companies like Bristol Myers Squibb and AstraZeneca have deployed similar tactics to maximize profits on drugs for the treatment of cancer, anxiety and heartburn. But AbbVie’s success with Humira stands out even in an industry adept at manipulating the U.S. intellectual-property regime.
“Humira is the poster child for many of the biggest concerns with the pharmaceutical industry,” said Rachel Sachs, a drug pricing expert at Washington University in St. Louis. “AbbVie and Humira showed other companies what it was possible to do.”
The Supreme Court did not disclose its longstanding financial ties with former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff even as it touted him as an expert who independently validated its investigation into who leaked the draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.
The court’s inquiry, released last week with Chertoff’s endorsement, failed to identify who was responsible for the unprecedented leak. The decision to keep the relationship with Chertoff quiet is a reflection of a pattern of opacity at the nation’s highest court, whose rulings affect every American. the court in recent years has privately contracted with The Chertoff Group for security assessments, some broadly covering justices’ safety and some specifically related to Covid-19 protocols at the court itself.
The estimated payments to Chertoff’s risk assessment firm, for consultations that extended over several months and involved a review of the justices’ homes, reached at least $1 million. The exact amount of money paid could not be determined. Supreme Court contracts are not covered by federal public disclosure rules and elude tracking on public databases.
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the person who has to bake a loaf [of bread] to earn money to buy a slice of bread is not free
"Corporate America is fighting back hard and the government is not on the workers' side at this point, unless the American people realise what's happening, realise the barrier and ask their elected officials to change the law."
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Lawyers for the unnamed girl said her parents took her to Frimley Park Hospital in Surrey, southeast England, with a high fever, drowsiness, and vomiting, Metro reported. These symptoms are "red flags for meningitis and sepsis," according to the BBC News, but doctors sent her home with paracetamol, or acetaminophen.
Her parents returned to the hospital when her condition worsened, and doctors diagnosed her with meningococcal sepsis. She later experienced multi-organ failure.
The severity of her sepsis later led to her needing the quadruple-limb amputations, Elizabeth-Anne Gumbel KC, who is representing the family, said, the BBC reported. The girl had above-knee amputations of both legs, and above-elbow amputations of her arms.
Her family argued that if doctors had immediately treated her with antibiotics, she would not have been so ill and might have kept her limbs.
A new study shows that firms of all types are giving workers phony managerial titles in order to avoid paying them overtime a new study shows that firms of all types and sizes are giving workers phony managerial titles in order to avoid paying them overtime in what researchers see as an exploitation of federal labor laws. “If you are a manager and you're paid over a certain amount, in fact, that lifts the burden of firms having to pay you overtime,” said Lauren Cohen, a professor at Harvard Business School and one of the paper’s authors.
The logic at the time of the law’s creation was that managers are a special class of employee with a particular stake in the company’s future success. But today, many such workers are managers in name only, and the national threshold is only $455 a week, or under $24,000 a year. Cohen and his fellow researchers scoured job listings in the 2010s and discovered that right above that weekly $455 threshold, there was a 485 percent increase in the number of salaried positions with fancy-sounding managerial titles. Companies, it seemed, were often doling out fancy-sounding titles to salaried employees and then paying them just enough to legally shirk overtime rules. “We find widespread evidence of firms appearing to avoid paying overtime wages by exploiting a federal law,” the researchers state in their paper, which was recently published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research. https://www.nber.org/papers/w30826 On average, the strategy appears to save companies significant amounts of money (and costs workers just as much). The researchers estimate that firms pocket 13.5 percent in overtime payments for each bullshit manager title they hand out.
The overtime-evasion trick held across industries and around the country, according to the data, but was most obvious within industries and states where workers had fewer rights and less bargaining power, as well as in low-wage industries that are more often dinged for overtime violations, like retail and food and drink services.
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Match-owned dating app Hinge confirmed it’s testing a higher-priced premium subscription of $50 to $60 per month — a significant increase over the current $35 per month pricing. The company had earlier teased the new offering during Match’s Q3 2022 earnings in November, calling it Hinge’s equivalent of Tinder’s top-tier “Platinum” subscription, as a comparison, and touting its potential to drive the revenue per payer “meaningfully higher.” The company said it would invest further in marketing Hinge in the U.S. and abroad in the fourth quarter, to help further grow the brand. On the success of this expansion and the new premium tier, Match is forecasting Hinge to deliver at least $100 million in incremental revenues this year, the company told investors during November’s earnings call. Bloomberg’s report also noted Tinder was testing a $500 monthly plan, which Match also confirmed but declined to provide details.
The lawsuit filed on Thursday alleges their employer has engaged in widespread wage theft resulting from repeated and ongoing problems with payroll. Through an online form, the union has received more than 1,000 reports from members describing problems ranging from missed and incomplete paychecks to improperly deducted taxes and health care premiums, among other issues.
The union has filed class action grievances against the company for violations of its collective bargaining agreement, and in December, the union filed Unfair Labor Practice charges against Kroger through the National Labor Relations Board. “As our case will show, Kroger has engaged in a persistent pattern of wage theft through its failure to correct ongoing and systemic payroll problems resulting from its new ‘MyTime’ software,�? said Matthew Handley, whose firm Handley Farah & Anderson PLLC filed the suit. “The company’s failure to correct these problems is in clear violation of federal and state law, and we intend to seek every remedy available on behalf of these workers. “What we once thought was an isolated local glitch has since revealed itself to be a national problem, said Mr. Federici. “We have spoken to several other UFCW local unions around the country and they’ve all reported widespread and egregious payroll errors. It is outrageous that we should have to bring a lawsuit like this to ensure our members are paid properly and promptly.
The company’s sole director Ayang Sony had arranged for him to travel from China to work for her company under her direction and supervision - but that required a $16,500 premium.
While Song claimed the money was a refundable deposit, it was not returned when Sun’s employment ended - something the Employment Relations Authority has now found to have been a breach of the Wages Protection Act 1983. Sun signed an employment contract to work 40 hours a week over five days at $22 an hour when he got the job. But, once he started in the job he was forced to work longer hours for less money. Some fortnights he wasn’t paid at all and others he was underpaid which reduced his hourly rate to below the minimum wage of $15.75 for the next 18 months. A thorough investigation concluded the company had breached minimum employment standards by failing to pay Sun the minimum wage for all hours worked, not paying time-and-a-half and providing alternative holidays for working public holidays, failing to keep full holiday and leave records, not paying for unworked public holidays, not keeping full wage and time records and not providing compliant employment agreements.
The company also breached the act by taking the illegal premium payment from Sun to secure the job.
The inspector found Sun was entitled to $65,503.78 for underpayment of wages, holiday pay, other allowances and required the company to pay that money to him.
The company they are paying, ServSafe, doubles as a fundraising arm of the National Restaurant Association — the largest lobbying group for the food-service industry, claiming to represent more than 500,000 restaurant businesses. The association has spent decades fighting increases to the minimum wage at the federal and state levels, as well as the subminimum wage paid to tipped workers like waiters. For years, the restaurant association and its affiliates have used ServSafe to create an arrangement with few parallels in Washington, where labor unwittingly helps to pay for management’s lobbying. First, in 2007, the restaurant owners took control of a training business. Then they helped lobby states to mandate the kind of training they already provided — producing a flood of paying customers. The president of the National Restaurant Association, Michelle Korsmo, declined to be interviewed. In a written statement, she said the group had sought to protect both public health and the financial health of the industry. As money flowed in from the National Restaurant Association’s training programs, its overall spending on politics and lobbying more than doubled from 2007 to 2021, tax filings show. The national association donated to Democrats, Republicans and conservative-leaning think tanks, and sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to state restaurant associations to beef up their lobbying.
During the Clinton and Obama administrations, the association was a major force in limiting employer-provided health care benefits. And though pressure from liberal groups has grown and workers’ wages have fallen for decades when adjusted for inflation, the group helped assemble enough bipartisan opposition to scuttle a bill in 2021 to raise the federal minimum wage for all workers to $15 per hour over five years.
The association had also won a series of battles over state-level wage minimums, though its fortunes reversed last year. Both the District of Columbia and Michigan moved to eliminate the “tip credit” system — where restaurants are allowed to pay waiters a salary below the minimum wage, on the expectation that tips from customers will make up the rest. That was the first time any state had eliminated the tip-credit system in more than 10 years.
Legally, the National Restaurant Association and its state-level affiliates are a species of nonprofit called a “business league,” with more freedom to lobby than a traditional charity.
Since the 1960s, their lobbying has focused heavily on the minimum wage — arguing that labor-intensive operations like restaurants, which employ more workers at or near the minimum wage than any other industry, could be put out of business by any significant increase in employee costs.
Fifteen years ago, they had just lost a battle in that fight.
Over the association’s objections, Congress had raised the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour. Former board members said they were searching for a new source of revenue — without asking members to pay more in dues.
“That’s when the decision was contemplated, of buying the ServSafe program,” said Burton “Skip” Sack, a former chair of the association’s board. “Because it was profitable.”
At the time, the ServSafe program was run by a charity affiliated with the restaurant association. The association bought the operation, transforming it into an indirect fundraising vehicle.
After that, state restaurant associations in California, Texas and Illinois lobbied for changes in state law.
Previously, those states had required food-safety training for restaurant managers, which typically was paid for by restaurants themselves. After the association’s takeover of ServSafe, lobbying records show, the state affiliates pushed for a broader and less-common type of mandate, covering all food “handlers” like cooks, waiters, bartenders and those who bus tables.
The three state legislatures agreed, in lopsided votes. “This law was happening with or without our participation in the process,” said the president of the California Restaurant Association, Jot Condie. California legislative records show his association was the sponsor of the bill that imposed the mandate.
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The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites
without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year, according to the company, which declined to provide a list.
Google’s chairman at the time said it was the one technology the company had held back because it could be used “in a very bad way.” Some large cities, including San Francisco, have barred police from using facial recognition technology.
And it’s not just law enforcement: Clearview has also licensed the app to at least a handful of companies for security purposes.
Clearview has shrouded itself in secrecy, avoiding debate about its boundary-pushing technology. When I began looking into the company in November, its website was a bare page showing a nonexistent Manhattan address as its place of business. The company’s one employee listed on LinkedIn, a sales manager named “John Good,” turned out to be Mr. Ton-That, using a fake name. For a month, people affiliated with the company would not return my emails or phone calls.
Clearview’s app carries extra risks because law enforcement agencies are uploading sensitive photos to the servers of a company whose ability to protect its data is untested.
Clearview was founded by Richard Schwartz — who was an aide to Rudolph W. Giuliani when he was mayor of New York — and backed financially by Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist behind Facebook and Palantir.
One of the odder pitches, in late 2017, was to Paul Nehlen — an anti-Semite and self-described “pro-white” Republican running for Congress in Wisconsin — to use “unconventional databases” for “extreme opposition research,” according to a document provided to Mr. Nehlen and later posted online. Mr. Ton-That said the company never actually offered such services.
Clearview deployed current and former Republican officials to approach police forces, offering free trials and annual licenses for as little as $2,000. Mr. Schwartz tapped his political connections to help make government officials aware of the tool,
The company’s main contact for customers was Jessica Medeiros Garrison, who managed Luther Strange’s Republican campaign for Alabama attorney general.
One reason that Clearview is catching on is that its service is unique. That’s because Facebook and other social media sites prohibit people from scraping users’ images — Clearview is violating the sites’ terms of service.
“A lot of people are doing it,” Mr. Ton-That shrugged. “Facebook knows.”
Mr. Thiel, the Clearview investor, sits on Facebook’s board. Mr. Nancarrow declined to comment on Mr. Thiel's personal investments.
Clearview also hired Paul D. Clement, a United States solicitor general under President George W. Bush, to assuage concerns about the app’s legality.
Mr. Clement, now a partner at Kirkland & Ellis, wrote that the authorities don’t have to tell defendants that they were identified via Clearview, as long as it isn’t the sole basis for getting a warrant to arrest them. Mr. Clement did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
“It’s creepy what they’re doing, but there will be many more of these companies. There is no monopoly on math,” said Al Gidari, a privacy professor at Stanford Law School. “Absent a very strong federal privacy law, we’re all screwed.”
if your profile has already been scraped, it is too late. The company keeps all the images it has scraped even if they are later deleted or taken down
“We’ve relied on industry efforts to self-police and not embrace such a risky technology, but now those dams are breaking because there is so much money on the table,”
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bill is designed to prevent dominant online platforms—like Apple and Facebook and, especially, Google and Amazon—from giving themselves an advantage over other businesses that must go through them to reach customers. As one of two antitrust bills voted out of committee by a strong bipartisan vote (the other would regulate app stores), it may be this Congress’ best, even only, shot to stop the biggest tech companies from abusing their gatekeeper status. according to the tech giants and their lobbyists and front groups, the bill, which was introduced by Amy Klobuchar and Chuck Grassley, respectively the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, would be a disaster for the American consumer. In an ongoing publicity push against it, they have claimed that it would ruin Google search results, bar Apple from offering useful features on iPhones, force Facebook to stop moderating content, and even outlaw Amazon Prime. It’s all pretty alarming. Is any of it true?
The legislation’s central idea is that a company that controls a marketplace shouldn’t be able to set special rules for itself within that marketplace, because competitors who object don’t have any realistic place to go. No business can afford to be left out of Google’s search index, and few online retailers can make a living if they’re not listed on Amazon. So the Klobuchar-Grassley bill, broadly speaking, prohibits self-preferencing by platforms that hit certain size thresholds, like monthly active users or annual revenue. To take a simple example, it would mean Amazon can’t give its in-house branded products a leg up over other brands when someone is shopping on its site, and Google can’t choose to give YouTube links when someone does a video search unless those links are objectively the most relevant. The bill would impose other constraints on Amazon, like preventing it from using data gleaned from third-party sellers to improve the sales of its own brands. (Last month, the House Judiciary Committee asked the DOJ to investigate Amazon executives for allegedly lying to Congress about whether the company does this.) But Mitchell, who supports the bill, says it doesn’t go far enough. She thinks a breakup is needed “Google devoted 41 percent of the first page of search results on mobile devices to its own properties and what it calls ‘direct answers,’ which are populated with information copied from other sources, sometimes without their knowledge or consent.” Keeping users on Google properties means more opportunities to show ads and more ways to take a cut of a transaction
florida eviction
Tenants in properties owned by private landlords have faced the highest rise in rent since comparable records began seven years ago, official data shows. Rents rose 4% last year as landlords, who face their own squeeze from higher mortgage rates, passed on those costs. Myron Jobson, senior personal finance analyst at Interactive Investor, said: "Higher rents have been accompanied by higher energy bills which continues to squeeze budgets.
"It is a tricky situation if you are looking for a new tenancy. Many renters could decide to remain in existing tenancy agreements with fixed rents, rather than risk a move and spend more on rent." The impact of higher mortgage rates is not only hitting those who are re-mortgaging, but also the prospects of first-time buyers. "We're holding off to see if the rates go down and we're going to rent instead.
### "I don't want to just survive, I want to live as well."
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Retinal cells grown from stem cells can reach out and connect with neighbors, according to a new study, completing a “handshake” that may show the cells are ready for trials in humans with degenerative eye disorders. once they are separated from adjacent cells in their organoid, they can reach out toward new neighbors with characteristic biological cords called axons. “The last piece of the puzzle was to see if these cords had the ability to plug into, or shake hands with, other retinal cell types in order to communicate,” says Gamm, whose new results on successful connections between the cells was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Up to a dozen firefighters who saved lives at the Grenfell Tower have been diagnosed with cancers; the majority of which are understood to be digestive cancers and leukaemia, for which there is no cure Firefighters, some aged only in their 40s, are suffering with rare cancers linked to the high levels of unprecedented exposure to contaminants during the huge rescue effort.
Up to a dozen have been diagnosed with cancers, the majority of which are understood to be digestive cancers and leukaemia, for which there is no cure.
But it is feared this could be the tip of the iceberg, with some cancers taking up to 25 years to appear. In the June 2017 blaze firefighters ran out of air in the tower and many sat in their contaminated suits for more than 10 hours.
Some waited in the smoke-logged basement of the block for up to six hours.
Including those both inside and outside the Tower, and including those in attendance in the days after, around 1,300 firefighters are thought to have been involved. “However, firefighters are left in the dark due to the lack of regular health surveillance and proper monitoring of exposures in the UK.
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Salauddin is neither a powerful politician nor an affluent business tycoon. An Uber driver by profession, over the last three years, Salauddin has become a quasi-celebrity as a gig industry organizer: spearheading strikes, engaging with policymakers, and highlighting issues in the media to help improve the working conditions of his peers. Walking alongside Salauddin sent a strong message to Gandhi’s supporters: He is serious about India’s unemployment issues. In 2019, Salauddin co-founded the Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers (IFAT), a coalition of unions that now has over 36,000 members. He currently serves as the federation’s national general secretary. In 2020, he also launched the Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union (TGPWU), which now has over 10,000 members, including cab drivers, food and grocery delivery workers, and e-commerce delivery persons from the southern state. Salauddin, who has a degree in computer studies, switches between Hindi and English smoothly. He speaks confidently about the “unfair practices of platforms,” and frequently refers to “the algorithm” when talking about why gig workers suffer due to apps. Unlike many other union leaders in India, Salauddin is extremely tech- and media-savvy. He regularly keeps in touch with local and foreign journalists, sharing screenshots and press releases via WhatsApp. He’s articulate and knows how to build a story.
A fundraiser for the family of an airline ground crew employee who was killed at Montgomery Regional Airport after being "sucked into the engine" of a commercial plane has raised more than $70,000.
The worker killed in the incident was identified as 34-year-old Courtney Edwards by the Communications Workers of America. She was a mother of three.
Edwards, a ground agent for Piedmont Airlines, died on Dec. 31 after she was sucked into the engine of an Embraer E175 that was at the gate in Montgomery with the parking brake set, according to a statement from the National Transportation Safety Board.
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Shankar Mishra, the former Wells Fargo executive fired by the bank after he urinated on an elderly woman while intoxicated during an Air India flight in late November, was arrested in New Delhi, according to Indian media reports. “He unzipped his pants and urinated on me and kept standing there until the person sitting next to me tapped him and told him to go back to his seat, at which point he staggered back to his seat,” the woman wrote.
After her clothes were soaked in urine, she was offered “airline pajamas and socks.” She then changed out of her urine-tainted clothes during a trip to the bathroom. She criticized the way in which Air India staff handled her complaint. She wrote that they refused her request to switch seats, even though there was an open spot available in first class.she wrote that airline crew had asked her to return to the urine-soaked seat, which by this time was covered with a sheet, but she refused. the man had sobered up by then and approached her, breaking down in tears and apologizing. He then begged her not to file a complaint so as to spare his family, she wrote. “In my already distraught state, I was further disoriented by being made to confront and negotiate with the perpetrator of the horrific incident in close quarters,” she wrote.
“I told him that his actions were inexcusable, but in the face of his pleading and begging in front of me, and my own shock and trauma, I found it difficult to insist on his arrest or to press charges against him.”
The woman blasted the airline for initially refusing to reimburse her ticket. She wrote that airline staff also refused her request to have the carrier foot the bill for cleaning her pee-stained clothing. He faces charges of committing an obscene act in a public place; assault or criminal force to a woman with intent to outrage her modesty; and misconduct in public by a drunken person.
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public research suggests that encrypted material may eventually be unlocked by powerful computers.. Shor’s algorithm would make a quantum computer exponentially faster than a classical one at cracking an encryption system based on large prime numbers — called RSA after the initials of its inventors — as well as some other popular cryptography techniques, which currently protect online privacy and security. But implementing Shor’s technique would require a much larger quantum computer than the prototypes available. The size of a quantum computer is measured in quantum bits, or qubits; researchers say it might take a million or more qubits to crack RSA. The largest quantum machine available today — the Osprey chip announced in November by IBM — has 433 qubits.
In the paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, they claim that it could break strong RSA keys — numbers with more than 600 decimal digits — using just 372 qubits. In an email to Nature on behalf of all the authors, Guilu Long, a physicist at Tsinghua University in China, cautioned that having many qubits is not enough, and that current quantum machines are still too-error prone to do such a large computation successfully. “Simply increasing the qubit number without reducing the error rate does not help.”
while Shor’s algorithm is guaranteed to break encryption efficiently when (and if) a large-enough quantum computer becomes available, the optimization-based technique could run on a much smaller machine, but it might never finish the task.
There are an estimated 25 million safe deposit boxes in America, and they operate in a legal gray zone within the highly regulated banking industry. There are no federal laws governing the boxes; no rules require banks to compensate customers if their property is stolen or destroyed.
Every year, a few hundred customers report to the authorities that valuable items — art, memorabilia, diamonds, jewelry, rare coins, stacks of cash — have disappeared from their safe deposit boxes.
But even when a bank is clearly at fault, customers rarely recover more than a small fraction of what they’ve lost — if they recover anything at all. The combination of lax regulations and customers not paying attention to the fine print of their box-leasing agreements allows many banks to deflect responsibility when valuables are damaged or go missing.
“The big banks fight tooth and nail, and prolong and delay — whatever it takes to wear people down,” said David P. McGuinn, the founder of Safe Deposit Specialists, an industry consulting firm. “The larger the claim, the more likely they are to battle it for years.”
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The proportion of publications that send a field in a new direction has plummeted over the last half-century. Data from millions of manuscripts show that, compared with the mid-twentieth century, research done in the 2000s was much more likely to incrementally push science forward than to veer off in a new direction and render previous work obsolete. Analysis of patents from 1976 to 2010 showed the same trend.
“The data suggest something is changing,” says Russell Funk, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis
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- relateoak2hkvdty6ldp7x67hys7pzaeax3hwhidbqkjzva3223jpxqd.onion
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- 3M
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Relatelist.com is the special search engine for Business intelligence.
We research published in Internet documents on almost all web-sites.
Actually we know more than 45 million people from about 6 million companies.
With Relatelist.com you may see another side of corporate world. Use it to discover the real relationship between big and small companies, goverments, media and military agencies, intelligence service, banks, international organisations etc.
After paying about $1,500 for home office equipment: a computer, two headsets and a phone line dedicated to Arise; after paying Arise to run a check on her background; after passing Arise’s voice-assessment test and signing Arise’s nondisclosure form; after paying for and passing Arise’s introductory training, to which she devoted three days, unpaid; after paying for and passing a certification course to provide customer service for Arise client AT&T, to which she devoted 44 unpaid days; after then being informed she had to get more training yet — an additional 10 days, for which she was told she would be paid, but wasn’t; and then, after finally getting a chance to sign up for hours and do work for which she would be paid (except for her time spent waiting for technical support, or researching customer issues, or huddling with supervisors), Tami Pendergraft spent three weeks fielding telephone calls from AT&T customers, after which she received a single paycheck.
For $96.12.
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- www.pennlive.com
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- 3M
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More than 105,000 people are on the U.S. waiting list for an organ transplant. Thousands will die before it’s their turn. Thousands more never even get put on the list, considered too much of a long shot.
“The number of organs we have available are never going to be able to meet the demand,” said Dr. Amit Tevar, a transplant surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “This is our frustration.”
That’s why scientists are looking to animals as another source of organs. A Maryland man lived two months after receiving the world’s first heart transplant from a pig last January — an animal genetically modified so its organs didn’t trigger an immediate attack from the human immune system. The FDA is considering whether to allow additional xenotransplantation experiments using kidneys or hearts from gene-edited pigs.
If the Food and Drug Administration agrees, the initial experiment will be outside a patient’s body. Researchers would place a pig-turned-humanlike liver next to a hospital bed to temporarily filter the blood of someone whose own liver suddenly failed. And if that novel “liver assist” works, it would be a critical step toward eventually attempting a bioengineered organ transplant — probably a kidney.
More complex is getting human cells to take over.
“We can’t take billions of cells and push them into the organ at once,” Ross said. When slowly infused, “the cells crawl around and when they see the right environment, they stick.”
i dont care about specific finance details
its real simple:
is all potential user tracking technologies removed?
if no, WHY?? (suddenly i’m looking at the money as a huge conflict of interest)
furthermore… do people want tracking so they can visit microsoft.com facebook.com google.com ?
ok fine. [no fault of mozilla]
but personally, i cant relate to these mainstream desires. i try not use it and i barely support what the project is doing.
so basically what firefox is doing could be interpreted as benign catering to mainstrean userbase(at best!). but firefox has less value by my high standards.
if ff uses this alibi, then all the Freedom and Transparent sentiment is extinguished instantly.
firefox does not stand fully against mainstream privacy technology.
firefox is betting that privacy advocates will not win.
maybe thats true. maybe we should just settle for the lesser evil.
it would be cooler if firefox sponsored smaller more radical privacy projects.
currently it feels like ff sucks the wind out of the sails of radical projects to grease acceptance to mainstream of the last resisters.
i do not think mozilla will support radical technologies.
- rad tech is assumed to replace what firefox currently does.
- firefox is happily accepting money from google to continue development of their mainstream project.
what if ff is right? what if google/facebook would win and force tech elites to login to windows.com .
ff would be the last competitor before an antitrust situation would sweep the internet into a dark age. that would not be good.
how bad would it be to use googlechrome for 5min per day to check your bank.and then switch to existing rad tech? it might be feasible…(and beneficial to rad tech! like gemini).
or maybe the gov would let sites force js for every webpage!! that would be bad.
that seems seems like exactly where we have ended up these days under mozilla’s leadership. it obviously hasnt been working.
but maybe the floor could somehow be lower!
currently many sites refuse to serve nojs,vpn,tor. it could always defy extrodinary disbelief into literal clownshow donaldtrump amazonkillerdrone land.
maybe TUIR could be adapted to fit lemmy
some people blame a profit incentive:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulture_fund
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- themarkup.org
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- 3M
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An investigation by The Markup and STAT found 49 out of 50 telehealth websites sharing health data via Big Tech’s tracking tools
Virtual care websites were leaking sensitive medical information they collect to the world’s largest advertising platforms.
URLs users visited:49 sites
Personal info (e.g. full name, email, phone):35 sites
When user initiated checkout:19 sites
User's answers to questionnaires:13 sites
When user added to the cart:11 sites
When user created an account:9 sites
On 13 of the 50 websites, we documented at least one tracker—from Meta, Google, TikTok, Bing, Snap, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Pinterest—that collected patients’ answers to medical intake questions.
Health privacy experts and former regulators said sharing such sensitive medical information with the world’s largest advertising platforms threatens patient privacy and trust and could run afoul of unfair business practices laws. They also emphasized that privacy regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) were not built for telehealth. That leaves “ethical and moral gray areas” that allow for the legal sharing of health-related data
Google:47 sites
Facebook:44 sites
Bing:27 sites
TikTok:23 sites
Snapchat:15 sites
Pinterest:11 sites
Linkedin:9 sites
Twitter:7 site
Rather than providing care themselves, telehealth companies often act as middlemen connecting patients to affiliated providers covered by HIPAA. As a result, information collected during a telehealth company’s intake may not be protected by HIPAA, while the same information given to the provider would be.
Together, the companies in this analysis reflect an increasingly competitive—and lucrative—direct-to-consumer health care market. The promise of a streamlined, private prescription process has helped telehealth startups raise billions as they seek to capitalize on a pandemic-driven boom in virtual care.
The industry’s rapid growth has been enhanced by its ability to use data from tools like pixels to target advertisements to increasingly specific patient populations and to put ads in front of users who have visited their site before.
“It’s a pure monetization play,” said Eric Perakslis, chief science and digital officer at the Duke Clinical Research Institute. “And yes, everybody else is doing it, it’s the way the internet works.… But I think that it’s out of step with medical ethics, clearly.”
The increased attention reflects growing fears about how health data may be used once it enters the black boxes of corporate data warehouses—whether it originates from a hospital, a location tracker, or a telehealth website.
“The health data market just continues to kind of spiral out of control, as you’re seeing here,” said Perakslis.
But thanks to their business structures, many of the companies behind telehealth websites appear to be operating on the outskirts of health privacy regulations.
The telehealth companies that responded to our detailed queries said their data-sharing practices adhered to their privacy policies. Those kinds of policies commonly include notice that some—but not all—health data shared with the site is subject to HIPAA. Many companies responded that they were careful to ensure that data shared via third-party tools was not considered protected health information.
But the structure of those companies’ businesses—and the inscrutable language in their privacy policies and terms of use—make it difficult for consumers to know what data would qualify as protected, and when.
Further complicating decisions for patients, at least 12 of the direct-to-consumer companies we examined promise on their websites that they are “HIPAA-compliant.” That could encourage users to think all the data they share is protected and lead them to divulge more, said Hartzog. Yet the regulations apply to the websites’ data use only in limited cases.
Facebook’s transparency tool..did not provide details about the specific data Facebook ingested during those interactions. A TikTok pixel collected some of that same information from RexMD, but TikTok’s report on our “usage data from third-party apps and websites” had just one line: “You have no data in this section.”
On some websites, users’ data was also being collected by “custom events,” meaning that a website owner deliberately created a custom tracking label that could have a phrase such as “checkout” in it but wouldn’t necessarily show up in the tech platforms’ transparency tools.
Without updated laws and regulations, experts said patients are left to the whims of rapidly evolving telehealth companies and tech platforms, who may choose to change their privacy policies or alter their trackers at any time.
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- www.nbcnewyork.com
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- 3M
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Conlon is an associate with the New Jersey based law firm, Davis, Saperstein and Solomon, which for years has been involved in personal injury litigation against a restaurant venue now under the umbrella of MSG Entertainment.
"MSG instituted a straightforward policy that precludes attorneys pursuing active litigation against the Company from attending events at our venues until that litigation has been resolved.
They had identified and zeroed in on her, as security guards approached her right as he got into the lobby.
"It was pretty simultaneous, I think, to me, going through the metal detector, that I heard over an intercom or loudspeaker," she told NBC New York. "I heard them say woman with long dark hair and a grey scarf."
they knew she was an attorney.
They knew my name before I told them. They knew the firm I was associated with before I told them.
A sign says facial recognition is used as a security measure to ensure safety for guests and employees. Conlon says she posed no threat
"This whole scheme is a pretext for doing collective punishment on adversaries who would dare sue MSG in their multi-billion dollar network,"
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- web.archive.org
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apple creates fake union run by managers to trick employees into thinking they have their needs represented.
According to a recent complaint by the Communications Workers of America, Apple illegally created a work group driven by managers to try to stop union organizing efforts.
In a filing on December 16 with the US National Labor Relations Board, the Communications Workers of America accused Apple of "soliciting employees to join an employer-created / employer-dominated labor organization as a means of stifling union activities." This kind of action is forbidden under US federal labor law.
The CWA also accused Apple of holding mandatory anti-union meetings, something the company has been accused of before. During the sessions, store management reportedly claimed that Apple would be legally barred from negotiating on specific topics if workers unionized, which is false.
if a site (ex: stackoverflow) forces me use captcha and accept google scripts… i’ll just walk away and never look back.
its an overly extreme and detrimental reaction but i think i can afford to forgo those answers for what i’m working on. i guess my tasks arent so hella important.
FYI: TUI browser wont require captcha. and using ddg with tor stops it from adding redirect links to the results.🌈
related https://news.yahoo.com/abbvies-humira-gets-u-rival-111842508.html