[Plura-list] Youtube is automatically blocking criticism of the Chinese Communist Party; Facebook shelved research that showed they were sowing division; Hertz's bankruptcy was caused by private equity looting

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* Youtube is automatically blocking criticism of the Chinese Communist
Party: Filternet error, working as intended.

* Facebook shelved research that showed they were sowing division: Sort
by controversial.

* Hertz's bankruptcy was caused by private equity looting: It was debt,
not pandemic.

* West Virginia's governor Jim Justice: billionaire, deadbeat: It's only
theft if you're poor.

* Twitter's porn filters are dampening discussions of "cumgate": Dominic
Cummings, unofficial mayor of Scunthorpe.

* Understanding Bayesian reasoning: Stats for self-defense.

* Ammosexuals point their guns at their crotches: Musketfuckers gonna
musketfuck.

* How to pay artists while fighting censorship and Big Tech: The
internet needs blanket licenses.

* The Toronto Star's new owners donated to far-right Tories: Canada's
largest newspaper is now in the tank for plutes and white nationalists.

* This day in history: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2019

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing
projects, current reading

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🧘🏻‍♂️ Youtube is automatically blocking criticism of the Chinese
Communist Party

Youtube's automated filter system is blocking comments critical of the
Chinese Communist Party; a Google spokesperson called it "an error in
our enforcement systems."

https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270290/youtube-deleting-comments-censorship-chinese-communist-party-ccp

Banned phrases include "共匪” (“communist bandit”) and “五毛” (“50-cent
party”).

The automated censorship has been taking place for at least six months,
when the first support requests appeared on Youtube's own help pages.

https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/17821466?hl=en

The issue was brought to prominence this month by the activist Jennifer
Zeng.

https://twitter.com/jenniferatntd/status/1260557177711968257

As The Verg's James Vincent notes, the censorship is all the weirder
because Youtube and Google are banned in China.

Though the company did secretly develop a censoring/surveilling search
tool ("Project Dragonfly") intended for the Chinese market, which was
(allegedly) killed after googlers strongly objected to it once they
discovered its existence.

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🧘🏻‍♂️ Facebook shelved research that showed they were sowing division

Leaked internal Facebook docs reveal that top company execs were told
that the company's "engagement algorithm" was sowing division among its
users, by feeding people ever-more-fringe versions of their own beliefs.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-division-top-executives-nixed-solutions-11590507499

The slides warned that the algorithm served "more and more divisive
content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the
platform" and  "64% of people who joined an extremist group on Facebook
only did so because the company’s algorithm recommended it to them."

Writing in The Verge, Nick Statt attributes the emphasis on controversy
to FB VP of Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan, an ex-GW Bush official who
attended the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings to give moral support to
the accused rapist.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270659/facebook-division-news-feed-algorithms

Kaplan is Facebook's sop to the right; and he championed Facebook's
political ad policy of allowing provable falsehoods to appear in paid
political ads. He also sidelined proposals to weaken the influence of
hyperpartisan "supersharers," who are disproportionately rightist.

Facebook's marketing material promises advertisers that it can use
machine learning and surveillance data to convince potential customers
to buy whatever they're selling, but, as with all marketing material,
these self-serving claims should be viewed skeptically.

That said, I'm willing to believe that machine learning systems *can*
"sort by controversial," making rough judgments about which material is
likely to evince anger from readers, just by looking at simple signals
like vocabulary choices (e.g. "pro-life" vs "pro-choice").

Sort by controversial is indeed cause for concern - but it's a far cry
from the feats mind-control that Facebook claims it can perform when it
is trying to sell its advertising platform to marketers.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/


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🧘🏻‍♂️ Hertz's bankruptcy was caused by private equity looting

I have a weird soft spot in my heart for Hertz, because they were the
first company to offer satnav systems, and since I have a sense of
direction so bad that it verges on a cognitive impairment, this saved my
ass a million times in the 90s and 2000s.

So I was saddened more than I anticipated by the news that Hertz had
filed for bankruptcy, felled by the one-two punch of Uber/Lyft weakening
demand for short-term rentals and then pandemic killing demand altogether.

Except, that's not what killed Hertz. The company was killed by private
equity looting. Ford sold the company to Clayton Dubilier & Rice in 2005
in a $14.8b "leveraged buyout."

https://www.axios.com/hertz-bankruptcy-6f16b3a4-141f-43cd-8f7b-e6a60a01d5dd.html

That's when a plutes take out a loan on a company they don't own yet, in
order to buy the company. That way, the new owners can suck huge sums
out of their acquisition in "special dividends" while saddling the
company with unsustainable debts.

PE colonized most sectors of the US economy, draining it of cash
reserves and capital assets and drowning it with debt. It's why ER
doctors and nurses are being laid off in the middle of a pandemic -
their employers are PE companies, not hospitals.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#looted

It's really hard to overstate how grifty PE is. It is the final stage of
late-stage capitalism, in which ever profitable business that provides a
useful and beloved product or service is bankrupted, and its assets
transferred to the super-rich.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/04/a-mind-forever-voyaging/#prop-bets

Hertz's leveraged buyout was only six months old when the company paid
$1B to its investors, "de-risking" them. A few months later, Hertz went
public with a 95% debt-to-asset ratio (!). Swollen with IPO cash, Hertz
grossly overpaid in acquisitions of Dollar and Thrifty in 2013.

Meanwhile, its private equity looters quietly "exited," leaving the
company drowning in debt and saddled with overvalued acquisitions, its
business model structured around grifty, performatively dull financial
engineering.

Hertz created special purpose corporations that issued debt to buy cars
that were then rented out and leased, while paying "coupons on the
asset-backed securities, hoping to turn profits via the rentals combined
with vehicle resale."

If you're reading that and feeling stupid because it's written in
financial High Elvish, that's exactly how you're supposed to feel.
"Baffle them with bullshit" is the only real financial business-model -
like any con-artist, the billionaire grifter depends on it.

After all, they don't need to build a business that works - just one
that doesn't immediately collapse, remaining upright until the grifter
has blown town and deposited his winnings in an offshore account.

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🧘🏻‍♂️ West Virginia's governor Jim Justice: billionaire, deadbeat

Billionaire Jim Justice is the richest person in West Virginia, and he
is the state's governor - a position he campaigned for by claiming that
his riches proved that he was really good at money management.

But Justice didn't build his coal business - he inherited it (along with
his name) from his daddy, and the business's growth since is largely
attributable to the fact that Justice is a cheater who does not pay his
bills.

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-billionaire-governor-whos-been-sued-dozens-of-times-for-millions-in-unpaid-bills

The Justice companies have been named by in 600 lawsuits for nonpayment
of bills, in dozens of states. The suits were "filed by workers,
vendors, business partners, government agencies." He cheats
tax-collectors, manufacturers, workers - even his own accountants and
lawyers!

Justice loses these cases, but then he refuses to pay again, forcing his
creditors to go back to court over and over again to collect the
judgments they're owed.

Some of those frauds kill people. For example, when he stopped paying
insurance premiums for his workers' health insurance, doctors started
refusing to treat the chronic illnesses and injuries they acquired while
working for his companies.

Justice was a deadbeat long before the coal downturn - he started
getting sued for nonpayment of his bills in the 1990s. And the lawsuits
kept rolling in at an accelerating clip, even after he became governor.

Among those: a settlement with the DoJ to pay $5m in "delinquent mine
safety penalties," which Justice had stiffed the DoJ on for years.

Justice's grift started small, with wage theft from coal-miners, but
he's not above stealing from his fellow plutes, or Uncle Sam.

Justice is such a crook that even other coal barons think he's unfit to
govern. His bid for the governor's mansion was opposed by Bob "Eat Shit
and Die, Bob" Murray, an ambulatory colostomy bag in a skinsuit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5W06xR8EYk

Alas, he did manage to sucker the leadership of the United Mine Workers
of America, who endorsed his gubernatorial campaign -- and whom he later
stiffed. They have withdrawn their endorsement.

If you want to explore the $128,000,000 in legal claims against Justice,
Propublica's Ken Ward, Jr and Alex Mierjeski have you covered:

https://www.propublica.org/article/see-whos-taken-billionaire-gov-jim-justice-to-court-over-unpaid-bills

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🧘🏻‍♂️ Twitter's porn filters are dampening discussions of "cumgate"

Dominic Cummings is the UK prime minister's appointed advisor whose
duties included establishing the quarantine rules he spectacularly
violated AFTER he believed he had been exposed to coronavirus.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/26/pandemic-profiteers/#private-law

The scandal - #cumgate - is *not* trending on Twitter, despite its
dominance of UK politics and the real possibility that it could take
down the current government.

Why not? Because Twitter's porn-filters block the word "cum" from
trending topics.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/may/27/anti-porn-filters-stop-dominic-cummings-trending-on-twitter

People who try to type Cumgate-related hashtags get autocomplete
suggestions like "#cummnings, #dominiccummigs and #sackcummimgs". These
suggestions have been chose often enough that THEY have started to trend.

It's an example of the well-known "Scunthorpe" problem, which references
a time when chatroom filters would block mentions of the English town
because it contains a four-letter epithet.

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🧘🏻‍♂️ Understanding Bayesian reasoning

Notwithstanding the old saw about "lies, damned lies and statistics,"
stats are amazing tools for making analyzing and predicting the outcomes
of complex processes. The field's disrepute springs from its
counterintuitive foundations, which make stats easy to abuse.

But few fields reward careful study more than stats, both as a form of
self-defense from deceptive statistics and as a way to understand the
world better.

Of particular import is the work of Thomas Bayes, whose foundational
statistical conclusions languished for centuries before being revived as
the cornerstone of machine learning techniques.

Bayes's work isn't just for ML, though. It is through Bayes that we can
understand why a covid test that is "90% accurate" can ALSO be wrong 66%
of the time (no, really!).

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/29/banjo-nazis/#uncertainty

In "An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem: Bayes' Theorem for the
curious and bewildered; an excruciatingly gentle introduction," Eliezer
S Yudkowsky devotes 15,000 words to the subject (!).

http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes

If you find that daunting, try Better Explained's "An Intuitive (and
Short) Explanation of Bayes’ Theorem," which I found both informative
and straightforward.

https://betterexplained.com/articles/an-intuitive-and-short-explanation-of-bayes-theorem/

And if you're more of a visual/auditor learner, try the 13.5m video version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBvilAYd5sE

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🧘🏻‍♂️ Ammosexuals point their guns at their crotches

There are so many sayings about the foolishness of prioritizing
inflicting pain on your opponents - "cutting off your nose to spite your
face," "Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the
other person to die," etc.

Today, I learned a new one.

"Pointing an unsafetied pistol at your own penis with your finger on the
trigger to pwn the libs."

I've read through hundreds of comments on Dylan Park's thread in which
he identifies the trend, but I remain totally baffled by it.

https://twitter.com/dyllyp/status/1264993857613164544

However, it might be a useful fact to cite the next time a musketfucker
explains to me that my skepticism about gun ownership in unwarranted
because gun enthusiasts are, by nature, respectful of firearm safety.

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🧘🏻‍♂️ How to pay artists while fighting censorship and Big Tech

Before the pandemic, the music industry was making more money than ever,
exceeding even the incredible revenues of the CD era in which audiences
bought all their favorite music in a new format.

Despite this, musicians were faring worse than ever. It's not hard to
understand why: with the music industry controlled by three major labels
and a half-dozen Big Tech companies, the billions that music lovers
shelled out were being trousered by giant corporations.

What's worse, all the efforts to fix this just entrenched the monopolies
in music production and distribution - for example, the EU's Copyright
Directive, which annihilates any online distribution platform that can't
afford hundreds of millions for copyright filters.

Some musicians' groups hoped it would force tech companies to share
fairly. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth - copyright
filters trap EVERYTHING, irrespective of whether it infringes, but only
Big Content has the direct line to Big Tech to get it unblocked.

Meaning musicians who didn't sign with a label had no hope of
independent distribution. And only the Big Tech companies could afford
to operate under the new rules. It wasn't a tax on Big Tech, it was a
license to dominate the internet...forever.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/22/crisis-for-thee-not-me/#filternet

But there's a better way - a solution that's been tried and proven for
more than a century: blanket licenses, like the ones we use for radio,
concert halls and other venues, and recorded covers.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/05/plan-pay-artists-encourage-competition-and-promote-free-expression

Here's how an internet blanket license would work:

* An online service signs up, paying a fee based on the number of users.
If your service has one user, it will pay 1/2.5b of the sum that
Facebook (with 2.5b users) pays

* An independent collecting society uses statistical sampling to figure
out which music is being played online

* They distribute the money they collect to artists and labels, with a
minimum of 50% of revenues going straight to artists, no matter what
their contracts say

Under this system, artists would always get paid, even if they'd been
shafted in their contract with a Big Three label. And anyone could start
an online music service that would rise or fall based on technical
excellence, not the ability to cut deals with labels.

There are a LOT of details that need to be worked out (with all
stakeholders) here, like how you keep the collecting society honest, how
you measure the accuracy of the statistical sampling system, how you
divide music among multiple creators, etc.

I don't pretend that these are simple questions! But they are MUCH
simpler than the question of "How do you get musicians paid by shifting
a few points from Big Tech's balance-sheet to Big Content's balance-sheet?"

Before the internet came along, blanket licenses ensured that anyone
could open a club, start a radio station, or play music in their
bookstore. But with the internet, the music industry unwisely decided to
replace the principle of blanket licenses with one-off licenses.

The result was auctions that only sold to the highest bidder - with the
result that all the other bidders went out of business, and the high
bidders stopped having to worry about competition, and used that market
power to extract an ever-larger share of entertainment income.

Money talks and bullshit walks. Campaigning for Big Tech to pay the Big
Three more is not the same as getting musicians paid. If we want to pay
musicians, we should establish a rule that says, "When music makes
money, musicians get paid."

NOT: "When music makes money, musicians get paid, provided they were
able to negotiate a favorable contract with a monopolist."

This rule doesn't just get musicians paid, it also puts them on the
right side of free expression, by ending the need for mass surveillance
and trigger-happy automated censorship as backstops for today's
dysfunctional mess.

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🧘🏻‍♂️ The Toronto Star's new owners donated to far-right Tories

The Toronto Star is Canada's largest-circulating newspaper, a venerable
institution that was the inspiration for Superman's Daily Planet.
They're a partisan paper in the British tradition, well understood to be
in the tank for Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party.

Until now.

The paper (and its other holdings, including the Hamilton Spectator and
dozens of other papers) just sold for $52m to a new Manitoba company
called Nordstar Capital LP, which promised a "commitment to progressive
positions and fearless journalism."

https://www.canadalandshow.com/political-donations-made-by-new-torstar-owners/

But as Canadaland revealed, the principles of Nordstar, Jordan Bitove
and Paul Rivett, are long-time, major donors to Canada's Conservative
party, which has drifted into Trumpian far-right, white nationalist
territory.

And among the Tories that Nordstar's principals donated to are those
same far-right/white-nationalists. For example, Rivett backed both
Maxime Bernier and Doug Ford.

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🧘🏻‍♂️ This day in history

#15yrsago Bulk of American calories comes from sweet drinks
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/05/050527111920.htm

#15yrsago Schwarzenegger creates, then fills Potemkin pothole
https://web.archive.org/web/20050602073302/https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/05/27/GOVERNOR.TMP

#15yrsago Schwarzenegger creates, then fills Potemkin pothole
https://boingboing.net/2005/05/27/chicagos-bean-sculpt.html

#10yrsago Canada's copyright minister: superinfringer
http://www.s-z-k.com/industry-minister-admits-to-breaking-copyright-law-to-build-ipod-collection/

#10yrsago Pinkwater's ADVENTURES OF A CAT-WHISKERED GIRL, sequel to
Neddiad and Yggyssey
https://boingboing.net/2010/05/27/pinkwaters-adventure.html

#10yrsago Soviet Hobbit illustrations
https://englishrussia.com/2010/05/27/russian-lord-of-the-rings/

#5yrsago Real estate bubble drives urban blight
https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/why-are-there-so-many-shuttered-storefronts-in-the-west-village


#1yrago Profiles of young Americans who entered voluntary exile rather
than paying their student loans
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/25/they-fled-the-country-to-escape-their-student-debt.html

#1yrago Gabriel Zucman: the Piketty-trained "wealth detective" who
catalogued the secret fortunes of the super-rich and figured out how to
tax them
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-23/the-wealth-detective-who-finds-the-hidden-money-of-the-super-rich

#1yrago AT&T;'s dystopian advertising vision perfectly illustrates the
relationship between surveillance and monopoly
https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/22/18635674/att-location-ad-tracking-data-collection-privacy-nightmare

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🧘🏻‍♂️ Colophon

Today's top sources: Ars Technica (https://arstechnica.com/), Super
Punch (https://superpunch.net/), Naked Capitalism
(https://nakedcapitalism.com/), Milena Popova (https://twitter.com/elmyra).

Currently writing: My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel
about truth and reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 509 words (19999
total).

Currently reading: Adventures of a Dwergish Girl, Daniel Pinkwater

Latest podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 03)
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/05/18/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-03/

Upcoming appearances: 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

"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

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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