[Plura-list] Cops are legally entitled to reject "high IQ" candidates; How the CARES Act bails out the super-rich
Cory Doctorow
doctorow at craphound.com
Mon Jun 8 13:13:58 EDT 2020
Today's links
* Podcast: part 5 of "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town": The
lair of the crustypunk.
* Cops are legally entitled to reject "high IQ" candidates: You must be
this stupid to ride.
* How the CARES Act bails out the super-rich: $1200 for thee, not me.
* Private equity's coming for your pension: In a pinch, apex predators
eat anything.
* Big mail providers block indie mailing lists: The enclosure of email.
* This day in history: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2019
* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing
projects, current reading
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👩🏿🎤 Podcast: part 5 of "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town"
My latest podcast is up! It's part five of my new reading of my 2005
novel "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town," a book Gene Wolfe
called "a "lorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read.”
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/06/07/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-05/
This week's episode reveals the home of Kurt, a crustypunk high-tech
dumpster diver bent on building a citywide open mesh wifi network. He's
based, in part, on Toronto's legendary dumpster diver Darren Atkinson,
subject of my first-ever Wired article:
https://www.wired.com/1997/09/es-dumpster/
But Kurt's home is based on the weird workshop/chop-shop/home/clubhouse
of Igor Kenk, Toronto's most notorious bike thief - a charming Slovenian
ex-cop/hoarder whose story was told in an incredible 2010 graphic novel,
KENK.
https://boingboing.net/2010/08/13/kenk-graphic-novel-h.html
Here's the MP3 of this week's reading:
https://archive.org/download/cory_doctorow_podcast_345_202006/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_345_-_Someone_Comes_to_Town_Someone_Leaves_Town_005.mp3
Here's previous episodes:
https://craphound.com/podcast/?s=%22someone%20comes%22
Here's my podcast's RSS feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast
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👩🏿🎤 Cops are legally entitled to reject "high IQ" candidates
Back in the 1990s, a man named Robert Jordan tried to join the New
London, CT, police department, but he was rejected because of his
intelligence test score.
It was too high.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story?id=95836
The New London police force administered an intelligence test, and
excluded anyone who scored below 20 or above 27 - on the ground that
smart people might get bored with policing and leave.
The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals found that this did not constitute
illegal discriminatory hiring practices.
Now, "intelligence tests" are psuedoscientific horseshit, a modern form
of phrenology.
But it says volumes about US policing that forces deliberately excluded
people whom they believed to be "smart" from their ranks.
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👩🏿🎤 How the CARES Act bails out the super-rich
Remember when Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin defended capping pandemic
relief payments to Americans at $1,200 by saying it was a "liquidity
bridge" that would last them for *10 weeks*?
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/19/shared-microbial-destiny-2/#trickle-down
Well, obviously that won't do for the wealthy. The wealth-transfer to
millionaires in the CARES Act is far more generous: those $1200 checks
cost $285B, while relief for the rich clocks in at $292B, as Allan Sloan
details in a Propublica explainer:
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-cares-act-sent-you-a-1-200-check-but-gave-millionaires-and-billionaires-far-more
First: "Eliminating Required Distributions From Retirement Accounts":
Did you inherit a retirement fund that's so large that if you took cash
out of it, you'd have to pay taxes on it?
Me neither.
But *someone* is saving $11.72B in taxes due to this.
Next: "Charitable Deductions": Allowing people to deduct up to 100% of
their annual income for charitable donations will save its beneficiaries
$4.83B.
"Most of the value of the deduction goes to just a small number of the
very wealthy."
"Pass-Through Entities": If you - like Trump and Kushner - derive your
income through "partnerships, LLCs and other so-called pass-through
entities," rejoice! You're participating in a $140.61B bounty, courtesy
of the CARES Act.
"Corporate Interest Deductions": These were capped to discourage
reckless corporate borrowing for stock buybacks, etc - by raising the
ceiling on these, Congress has gifted financial engineers $12.09B in
tax-savings.
Finally: "Corporate Loss Treatment": Companies like Boeing will be able
to able to claim generous refunds on losses stretching back 5 years, at
35% on losses in 2015/16/17, even though the top corporate tax rate is
21% - turning losses into profits, courtesy of the USG.
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👩🏿🎤 Private equity's coming for your pension
Private equity firms' business model: buy companies using the companies'
own cash using "leveraged acquisitions"; pay "investors" fortunes in
"special dividends" and then leave the companies to fail.
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/04/a-mind-forever-voyaging/#prop-bets
The victims of this looting are a who's-who of productive economy
businesses: Hertz, AMC, and especially hospitals, especially especially
emergency rooms, whose "customers" arrive in no condition to ask
questions about "surprise bills."
https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/29/mind-control-skepticism/#looters
PE has found a new mark: you.
The Department of Labor just published guidance that allows PE funds to
be included in your 401(k) retirement plans.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/06/private-equity-gets-new-pockets-to-pick-your-401k-in-funds-repeatedly-cited-by-the-sec-for-abuses.html
Now, 401(k)s are already cons: the idea that pensions should be
determined by how luck you get in the stock market casinos was always a
recipe for dooming retired Americans to eating cat-food in their golden
years.
("Listen, here's the thing. If you can't spot the sucker in the first
half hour at the table, then you *are* the sucker")
But sometimes, suckers get lucky, and so PE has shown up to take their
winnings before they leave the casino. PE-managed retirement funds will
have a 7% (and up!) management fee - that means that even if you're
beating inflation, you'll actually come out behind every year.
Instead of benefiting from compounding gains, you'll see compounding
losses. And good luck if you want to pull your money out of one of these
wallet-drainers: PE is "illiquid," with "investors" pledging to leave
their money sit regardless of performance.
You get your money out when the fund closes - PE funds that opened
before the financial crisis have taken 12-15 years to close out, while
Calpers is still waiting to cash out PE funds it bought into in 1992!
About those fees: you won't even know they're being charged: PE
companies extract the fees from the companies they "invest" in, and then
pay their own investors out of any profits that remain *after* they've
taken their chunk.
PE funds don't just cheat the companies they invest in - they cheat the
investors who back them. PE performed well in the 1980s and from
1995-99; they've been coasting on "brand fumes" ever since.
These are powerful fumes, and they've besotted plenty of super-rich
people, who helped PE double its share of global equity since 2004.
They've done so with the help of a lot of funny accounting.
It starts with lying about returns when raising capital to start a fund,
and continues by lying about valuations during bad markets (the
technical term is "smoothing");
PE companies also report their earnings a quarter late, which can make
them look like safe refuges at the start of a crisis, when the rest of
the economy is reporting loses.
When you apply PE's funny accounting to Target Date Funds, the preferred
retirement fund for people who don't closely follow markets, you get an
especially toxic mix.
But worst of all is that your retirement fund might be providing PE
funds with the capital they need to buy your employer and fire you.
"One wonders why the SEC does not think it’s important to tell investors
that private equity is in the business of firing people and too often
bankrupting companies. Shouldn’t investors be warned that private
equity’s tender ministrations, funded in a tiny way by his 401(k), could
wind up lowering his paycheck or costing him his job?" -Yves Smith,
Naked Capitalism
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👩🏿🎤 Big mail providers block indie mailing lists
There's lots of reasons for the renaissance in "newsletters" (what we
used to call moderated mailing lists), but top of the list was the
realization by all kinds of companies, organizations and individuals
that trusting Google or Facebook was a very bad bet.
Google delivered the first warning shot when it started shuttering its
social networking tools based on inscrutable business logic.
But FB showed us the worst endgame when it deployed algorithms that
located vibrant "fan pages" and dialed down their ability to reach
subscribers who'd asked to see updates; then approached those neutered
page owners with offers to "boost their reach" for pay.
Allowing a Big Tech company to hold your customers hostage was obviously
a losing bet. But thankfully, there's one major, federated platform left
online, the original one: email.
By switching to email to communicate with stakeholders, businesses, orgs
and individuals could insulate themselves from the arbitrary decisions
of Big Tech execs whose indifference or greed had destroyed so many
successful, hard-built lists.
And what's more, a raft of companies - Mailchimp and its competitors -
sprang up to help these companies run their lists. But these companies
leave a lot to be desired, starting with their widespread deployment of
"read receipts" and other privacy-invading tricks.
And then there's their role in enabling a bunch of toxic behavior (I've
unsubscribed from hundreds of Mailchimp lists, but I never signed up for
any of them, and the company won't tell me which other lists I'm on and
let me unsubscribe from them, too).
But running a moderated mailing-list isn't rocket science. If you
operate your own mail-server, you can set up a free/open list-management
tool like Mailman in minutes.
Email is federated, right? So you don't need to pay Big Tech or a
spying, spammy mailing list company.
Well...
Email is much more federated in practice than it is in reality.
Most of us get our email from one of a few giant email providers -
Google, Apple, or our ISPs, like AT&T; and its myriad subsidiaries - as
well as secret rules for selecting blocking or passing email means that
sending mail from your own mailserver is harder than it's ever been.
I've been running my own mailserver since the 20th century (more
accurately, Ken Snider has run one for me!).
I routinely find that I can't exchange email with people because their
mail provider has blacklisted my mailserver for looking spammy, despite
the fact that the server has one user, me. I admit that I live in email,
but I don't send THAT much.
For example, AT&T; - and its subsidiaries - blocked email from my server
for FIVE YEARS, despite calls, emails, and public shaming on Twitter and
elsewhere.
Needless to say, spam is still alive and well (and inspiring even more
onerous, secretive mail procedures).
Now, I have a newsletter, the plura-list. It's a small, cozy thing that
I started in January as a way of getting the threads I post to Twitter
(and mirror to my blog, Pluralistic.net) in a single daily email.
https://mail.flarn.com/mailman/listinfo/plura-list/
This weekend, I lost every single subscriber who had used a Mac.com,
Me.com, or other Apple-controlled mail provider.
Why? Because Apple had been rejecting email from my server after an
algorithm flagged it as spam.
(It's not spam. The list uses a double opt-in where you have to sign up
and then click a link that's sent to your email).
Now, if you get bounces from a mailserver and don't unsubscribe the
bouncing account, there's a good chance the mailer will block you as a
spammer.
So after my mailing list manager saw a bunch of bounces from Apple's
mailservers, it kicked every Apple user out automatically.
Which raises the question, why did Apple start bouncing my emails?
That's not clear, but the best guess is that some subscribers didn't
open their emails for several consecutive days, which caused Apple to
assume that the list was spam, and start to bounce ALL messages sent to
ALL Apple users.
There are ways around this. I could sign up with Mailchimp or one of its
rivals - companies that have done deals with the big mail services to
treat their email as non-spam. Or I can dial the number of bounces
before unsubscribe way up (and risk being blocklisted for that!).
I'm manually resubbing all those Apple users today (which has its own
email death-penalty risk), and if you are a subscriber and want to
ensure that the mail isn't blocked, you can add the list address
(plura-list at pluralistic.net) to your address book.
In the early days of the spamwars, open internet advocates warned that
making it harder to send mail would lead to concentration and
monopolization of the original federated channel, and that it would
drive professionalization among spammers.
Which is exactly where we've landed.
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👩🏿🎤 This day in history
#15yrsago Ecommerce sites use personal info to charge you more
https://web.archive.org/web/20050610002111/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/003641.php
#15yrsago Social network analyzer for Enron's emails
https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~jheer/projects/enron/
#15yrsago David Byrne on what phonograms mean and will mean
https://web.archive.org/web/20050607000912/http://www.davidbyrne.com/journal/current.php
#10yrsago Terrorists figure out how to get America to attack itself:
leave harmless, "suspicious" bags around
https://web.archive.org/web/20100611143725/http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/local&id;=7483747&rss;=rss-wabc-article-7483747
#10yrsago Potemkin insurgency: US paying Afghan security firms to bribe
Taliban leaders https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/world/asia/07convoys.html
#5yrsago LA Times editorial board calls for prosecution of journalistic
sources
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-snowden-leniency-20150604-story.html
#5yrsago Lessons from Pratchett
https://knitmeapony.tumblr.com/post/113439203459/things-i-learned-from-sir-terry-pratchett-and-his
#5yrsago Corporations influence politics, but not in the way you think
you do
https://www.salon.com/test/2015/06/07/your_boss_wants_to_control_your_vote_the_real_reason_to_fear_corporate_power/
#5yrsago How and why to default on your student loan
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/opinion/sunday/why-i-defaulted-on-my-student-loans.html
#5yrsago Watch: John Waters gave the 2015 commencement address at RISD
and CRUSHED IT https://vimeo.com/129312307
#1yrago Training a modest machine-learning model uses more carbon than
the manufacturing and lifetime use of five automobiles
https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.02243
#1yrago Pharma company will pay $15.4m in fines for bribing docs to
prescribe an overpriced med that brings in $1b/year
https://gizmodo.com/drug-company-to-pay-just-15-4-million-over-doctor-brib-1835274587
#1yrago Adversarial interoperability: reviving an elegant weapon from a
more civilized age to slay today's monopolies
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay
#1yrago Inequality makes a nation poorer
https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2019/05/how-inequality-makes-us-poorer.html
#1yrago Amazon's facial recognition fear crusade ramps up: now they're
paying Facebook to show you pictures of suspected criminals to scare you
into getting a surveillance doorbell
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pajm5z/amazon-home-surveillance-company-ring-law-enforcement-advertisements
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👩🏿🎤 Colophon
Today's top sources: Fipi Lele.
Currently writing: My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel
about truth and reconciliation. Friday's progress: 514 words (22079 total).
Currently reading: Adventures of a Dwergish Girl, Daniel Pinkwater
Latest podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 05)
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/06/07/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-05/
Upcoming appearances:
* Cogx, Jun 8, "Freedom and Civic Duties: How to beat surveillance
capitalism and reclaim your privacy" 9AM Pacific. Free registration via
https://ti.to/cogx/cogx-2020/en/discount/SPCXSFP100
* Discussion with Nnedi Okorafor, Torcon, June 14
https://www.torforgeblog.com/torcon-2020/
Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book
about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531
"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies
here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
This work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
That means you can use it any way you like, including commerically,
provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link
to pluralistic.net.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are
included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the
basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
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*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla* -Joey "Accordion Guy"
DeVilla
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