[Plura-list] AT&T will lay off thousands more; Cuba is a vaccine powerhouse; Sacklers to use Purdue bankruptcy to escape justice; AI has a GIGO problem

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* AT&T will lay off thousands more: After promising that Trump's $20B
tax-break would create jobs.

* Cuba is a vaccine powerhouse: A vaccine for the Global South.

* Sacklers to use Purdue bankruptcy to escape justice: Crime pays.

* AI has a GIGO problem: Bias-laundering at mass scale.

* This day in history: 2006, 2011, 2016, 2020

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

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🧊 AT&T will lay off thousands more

AT&T shareholders should be very, very grateful to Trump. Not only did
he wave through their idiotic mergers with Time Warner and Directv, his
FCC chair Ajit Pai killed Net Neutrality and then he gave them an *$80
billion* tax break.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/nepxeg/atandt-preps-for-new-layoffs-despite-billions-in-tax-breaks-and-regulatory-favors

At the time, AT&T execs promised that this would be good for America:
they'd invest more in telcoms infrastructure, replacing their
last-millennium copper wires *and* they'd create jobs. You will not be
surprised to learn that neither of these things happened.

By 2019, AT&T had cut 23,000 jobs (they'd promised to *create* 7,000
jobs) and had slashed capital expenditures by a billion dollars.

Don't worry, though: they increased executive compensation substantially
over that same period.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/att-promised-7000-new-jobs-to-get-tax-break-it-cut-23000-jobs-instead/

Bonuses remain high, and AT&T is still cutting: another 3,400 jobs are
being eliminated. These are largely unionized jobs - and it's a pretty
safe bet that some will come back as precarious scab jobs at lower pay
with no benefits.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/30/at-and-t-tax-cut-job-layoffs-store-closed

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🧊 Cuba is a vaccine powerhouse

When Oxford University began work on its covid vaccine, it promised that
the resulting work would be patent-free, with an active tech-transfer
assistance program so that developing nations could manufacture their
own supplies.

That promise was broken. The Gates Foundation pushed the racist lie that
poor people can't make safe vaccines - despite world-leading production
facilities in the Global South - and convinced the university to sell
exclusive rights to Astrazeneca.

https://khn.org/news/rather-than-give-away-its-covid-vaccine-oxford-makes-a-deal-with-drugmaker/

Astrazeneca got the vaccine rights without having to make any promises
not to gouge poor countries for access to the vaccine. Of course they
didn't. Gates's ideology is that markets channel greed to positive ends,
a sentiment echoed by Boris Johnson:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britain-johnson-gr-idUSKBN2BF307

It's a lethal doctrine. 85 of the world's poorest countries are unlikely
to get widespread access to vaccines until 2023: that's two more years
for the virus to mutate into deadlier variations and re-infect people
whose vaccinations have worn off.

https://www.eiu.com/n/85-poor-countries-will-not-have-access-to-coronavirus-vaccines/

Market-based health care is a dead letter. Big Pharma turns publicly
funded research into profits by holding us to ransom. Pfizer is
demanding that poor countries stake their sovereign assets to settle any
claims from their products.

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2021-02-23/held-to-ransom-pfizer-demands-governments-gamble-with-state-assets-to-secure-vaccine-deal

If you have any doubt, consider the counterexample posed by Cuba, a
poor, isolated country that has been starved for 60 years under a US
embargo (partially eased for a few years under Obama, now back in force).

Despite its dire straits, Cuba is a global leader in all forms of
vaccine production. Of the 11 vaccines that all Cubans receive, eight
are produced domestically. The country leads the world in vaccines for
tropical diseases and has entirely eliminated six of them.

It's part of Cuba's incredible health system, which trains docs from all
over the world, including many of America's best students - largely PoCs
- who opt for a free education rather than abandoning medicine as a
luxury good only available to the 1%.

https://www.wired.com/2016/03/students-ditching-america-medical-school-cuba/

Cuba has handled the covid crisis brilliantly, with only 408 deaths
(0.59%, compared to the UK's 2.9%). It has sent 57 medical brigades
abroad, treating 1.26m people in 40 countries.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/03/30/cuba-libre-to-be-covid-libre-five-vaccines-and-counting/

Given all this, it's no surprise that Cuba is also a covid vaccine
powerhouse. Two of the world's 23 covid vaccines in Phase III trials
come from Cuba; three more are in earlier stage trials. They are the
product of a nonprofit, state-owned biotech sector.

Rather than competing with one another and treating their research as
trade secrets, Cuban biotech researchers collaborate. They are able to
build on made-in-Cuba vaccines like the "conjugate vaccine" Quimi-Hib
that is effective against meningitis and pneumonia.

It's this collaboration that has pushed Cuban mortality from all
infectious diseases below 1%. The Phase III trials for Cuba's covid
vaccines - Soberana 2 and Abdala - are scheduled to complete in Jun.

Given the country's excellent, community-based healthcare system, the
rollout will be fast and efficient, completing in Aug 2021, putting Cuba
on track to be one of the first countries in the world to vaccinate its
entire population.

Cuban vaccines represents a powerful antidote to the vaccine apartheid
being practiced by the Big Pharma monopolists of the rich world. For
more on this, check out the This Machine Kills episode:

https://soundcloud.com/thismachinekillspod/52-pharma-profiteers-vaccine-apartheid

One of China's leading vaccine production facilities, Yongzhou Joint
Biotechnology Innovation Centre, was built during the crisis under Cuban
supervision and is ramping production on Pan-Corona, which was designed
to attack covid variants.

Cuban vaccines are in Phase III trials in Iran, and there are talks
underway with the 55 countries in the African Union, as well as Mexico,
Jamaica, Vietnam, Pakistan, and India.

As Helen Yaffe writes for Counterpunch, "Cuba is a leader in biotech
because it has a socialist state with a centrally planned economy, that
invested in science and puts human welfare before profit; with the
absence of capitalism and greed that Boris Johnson celebrates."

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🧊 Sacklers to use Purdue bankruptcy to escape justice

The opioid epidemic is a corporate murder spree that killed more
Americans than the Vietnam war, and its deaths carry on, accelerating
during the pandemic. The enrichment to its principal architects
outstrips the Rockefeller fortune, and they stand to retain that wealth.

The Sacklers owned Purdue Pharma, whose Oxycontin was ground zero of the
epidemic. Purdue pushed deliberate lies about the safety of its product
and aggressively marketed through doctors and distributors, under the
direction of the family patriarch Richard Sackler.

The Sacklers were determined to come through the crisis both rich and
well-loved. They laundered the family reputation with gifts to arts
institutions that saw their names on galleries and museums around the
world. That was the carrot.

The stick was litigiousness - their lawyers threatened me for writing
about them - that let them convert blood money to legal force, burying
Richard Sackler's bizarre deposition, which only came to widespread
attention thanks to John Oliver.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qCKR6wy94U

That was just the tip of the iceberg. Lawyers for the company and the
family used the law to suppress court proceedings that revealed the
deliberate strategy to addict their customers to Oxy:

https://www.propublica.org/article/data-touted-by-oxycontin-maker-to-fight-lawsuits-doesnt-tell-the-whole-story

The courts were so complicit in the Sacklers' campaign to suppress
evidence of their complicity that they became, effectively,
co-conspirators in the opioid crisis:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-courts-secrecy-judges/

The Sacklers didn't invent corporate crime playbook, but their
contributions are significant. For example, their PR ninjas at Dezenhall
Resources - late of Enron - did very will with a victim-blaming strategy
that smeared the dead as reckless junkies.

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-purdue-pharma-media-playbook-how-it-planted-the-opioid-anti-story

Eventually, the survivors of Sacklers' opioids caught up with them.
Purdue was sloughed off into a bankruptcy proceeding, and the Sacklers
themselves began to cry poor, offering what they claimed were their last
$4b to survivors.

But they conspicuously failed to mention the $8-9 billion they'd moved
offshore:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-purduepharma-bankruptcy/sacklers-reaped-up-to-13-billion-from-oxycontin-maker-u-s-states-say-idUSKBN1WJ19V

They pumped $1b through a single bank:

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/461362-ny-ag-uncovers-1-billion-in-sackler-family-wire-transfers-report

(the Sacklers dismissed this story as "nothing newsworthy").

It looks like they'll get to keep that blood money, too, thanks to
another act of solidarity from the US legal system. A bankruptcy judge
is poised to roll the Sacklers' personal liabilities into the bankruptcy
restructuring of Purdue Pharma.

https://prospect.org/justice/sackler-familys-bankruptcy-scheme/

As Libby Lewis explains in The American Prospect, this is a bizarre
metastasis of US bankruptcy law, which, in many cases, has swallowed the
entire criminal justice system.

Under the Purdue/Sackler proposal, the rights of victims will be
transformed into property, owed by the Sacklers, and which the
bankruptcy court claims jurisdiction over. So the bankruptcy court can
decide what that asset is worth and what percentage of that the victims get.

That means that the legal claims of the victims are being
nonconsensually settled without a trial. Worse, the bankruptcy judge
making this settlement isn't even a federal judge with Senate
confirmation, qualified to hear a criminal matter - he's just an
administrative judge.

It's a twisted process. The Sacklers aren't in bankruptcy court, so they
aren't obliged to disclose all those billions stashed offshore. But
they've asked the judge to turn the their legal liabilities into
property that he can dispose of in *Purdue's* bankruptcy.

So Jenny Scully, who gave birth to an opioid-addicted child six years
ago, because her doctors prescribed her dangerous painkillers whose risk
had been downplayed by Purdue and the Sacklers, will have no more recourse.

None of this is in the Bankruptcy Code, but the courts (especially the
Second Circuit, which covers the finance sector in NYC), follow a case
from the asbestos settlement era that created this weird precedent.

The exception has swallowed the rule, and now bankruptcy is the go-to
way for the beneficiaries of corporate crimes - even mass deaths - to
walk away with more wealth than the Rockefellers.


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🧊 AI has a GIGO problem

The computer science maxim "garbage in, garbage out," (GIGO) dates back
at least as far as 1957. It's an iron law of computing: no matter how
powerful your data-processing system is, if you feed it low-quality
data, you'll get low-quality conclusions.

And of course, machine learning (AKA "AI") (ugh) does not repeal GIGO.
Far from it. ML systems that operate on garbage data produce garbage
predictive models, which produce garbage conclusions at vast scale,
coated with a veneer of algorithmic objectivity facewash.

The scale and credibility of ML-derived GIGO presents huge risks to our
society in domains as varied as the credit system, criminal justice,
hiring, education - even whether your kids will be taken away by Child
Protective Services.

To make this all worse, the vast data-sets used to train ML systems are
in scarce supply, which leads multiple ML models to be trained on the
same data, enshrining the defects of that data in all kinds of systems.

One of the most significant training datasets is Imagenet, a collection
of 14m labeled images that jumpstarted the ML revolution in 2012. As
Will Knight writes for Wired, Imagenet's labels came from low-waged,
undersupervised workers.

https://www.wired.com/story/foundations-ai-riddled-errors/

Imagenet is one of the data-sets examined in new research from MIT's
Curtis Northcutt,, who found that Imagenet and other comparable datasets
have a typical error rate of about 6%.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.14749

This small margin of error has big consequences: first, because the
errors aren't evenly distributed, and instead cluster around the kinds
of biases that labelers have (for example, labeling images of woman
medical professionals with "nurse" and men with "doctor").

And second, because the incorrect labels obscure relative performance
differences between models. When one model does better than another, you
can't know if that's because it is a better model, or because it's less
sensitive to incorrect labels.

Image: Seydelmann (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GW300_1.jpg

CC BY-SA:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

Cryteria (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en


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🧊 This day in history

#15yrsago Anti-DRM flashmob hits Paris CD superstore
https://web.archive.org/web/20060425045902/http://tofz.org/?dir=Paris%2Fevents%2FStop-DRM%20mob%20in%20a%20recordshop%20-%2003-2006

#10yrsago Britain’s back-room negotiations to establish a national,
extrajudicial Internet censorship regime
https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/minister-confirms-voluntary-site-blocking-discussions/

#10yrsago Elephantmen: Dr Moreau meets apocalyptic noir science fiction
comic
https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/31/elephantmen-dr-moreau-meets-apocalyptic-noir-science-fiction-comic/

#5yrsago Hungarian ruling party wants to ban all working crypto
https://web.archive.org/web/20160405014411/https://budapestbeacon.com/public-policy/fidesz-wants-make-encryption-software-illegal/33462

#5yrsago Phishers trick Mattel into transferring $3M to a Chinese bank
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mattel-vs-chinese-cyberthieves-its-no-game/

#5yrsago “Reputation management” companies induce randos to perjure
themselves by pretending to be anonymous posters
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160322/10260033981/latest-reputation-management-bogus-defamation-suits-bogus-companies-against-bogus-defendants.shtml

#5yrsago Online casino bankrolls largest-ever, ruinously expensive war
in Eve Online https://www.polygon.com/2016/3/31/11334014/eve-online-war

#5yrsago Bitcoin transactions could consume as much energy as Denmark by
the year 2020
https://www.vice.com/en/article/aek3za/bitcoin-could-consume-as-much-electricity-as-denmark-by-2020

#5yrsago Qatar’s World Cup stadium is being built by modern slaves
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-35931031

#1yrago Monopolists stole your respirator
https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/31/reality-endorses-sanders/#covidien

#1yrago Amazon fires walkout organizer
https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/31/reality-endorses-sanders/#instacart-wholefoods-amazon

#1yrsago Trump admits voter suppression
https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/31/reality-endorses-sanders/#voter-suppression

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🧊 Colophon

Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/).

Currently writing:

* My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and
reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 321 words (121870 total). FIRST
DRAFT COMPLETE

* A cyberpunk noir thriller novel, "Red Team Blues." Yesterday's
progress: 1079 words (45734 total).

Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.

Latest podcast: Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results
https://craphound.com/news/2021/03/28/past-performance-is-not-indicative-of-future-results/

Upcoming appearances:

* All the Teachable Things I Know About Writing, Apr 13,
https://www.changinghands.com/event/april2021/virtual-writing-workshop-cory-doctorow-all-teachable-things-i-know-about-writing

* Interop: Self-Determination vs Dystopia (FITC), Apr 19-21,
https://fitc.ca/presentation/interop/

Recent appearances:

* The Right to Repair Movement, Monopolies, and Solarpunk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmosdDCrL-4

* The surveillance state, digital monopolies, and why we should be
worried (Podsongs)
https://anchor.fm/podsongs/episodes/Cory-Doctorow-on-the-Surveillance-State--digital-monopolies--and-why-we-should-be-worried-eso43k

* Conspiracy Theories (Utopian Horizons):
https://soundcloud.com/utopianhorizons/conspiracy-theory-w-cory-doctorow

Latest book:

* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone
technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political
cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution
and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet
analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a
solution.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59
(print edition:
https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907)
(signed copies:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

* "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

* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime,
gender, and kicking ass. 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.

Upcoming books:

* The Shakedown, with Rebecca Giblin, nonfiction/business/politics,
Beacon Press 2022

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