Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates profited the most during the pandemic. Trump's Labor Secretary is Reaching Cartoonish Levels of Supervillainry – BillMoyers.com. Trump’s Labor Secretary is Reaching Cartoonish Levels of Supervillainry A board on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange shows the Standard & Poor's numbers, Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2013.
The U.S. government has filed civil charges against Standard & Poor's Ratings Services for improperly giving high ratings to toxic mortgage bonds before the financial crisis. (AP Photo/Richard Drew) Jonathan Haidt Explains How Social Media Drives Polarization. Purdue Pharma, others could deduct opioid settlements from taxes. The data shows that substance use disorder is still widespread, but innovations in treatment, prescribing and awareness are helping.
USA TODAY. It’s true: millions in dark money has been spent to tilt courts right. After the Supreme Court agreed this term to hear a Second Amendment case brought by an NRA affiliate, several Senate Democrats cried foul.
To influence the court’s composition, Whitehouse said, a combined $34 million in "dark money" went toward both blocking President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland and confirming President Donald Trump’s two Supreme Court picks, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. In a follow-up to the legal brief, Whitehouse in a Sept. 6 Washington Post op-ed described the money as follows: "One unnamed donor gave $17 million to the (Leonard) Leo-affiliated Judicial Crisis Network to block the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland and to support Gorsuch; then a donor — perhaps the same one — gave another $17 million to prop up Kavanaugh.
" It can be difficult to trace the path of anonymous political spending with precision, and we wanted to know the factual basis for Whitehouse’s claim. The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Part 1. PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing.
Buy it here. 'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism. We’re living through the most profound transformation in our information environment since Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of printing in circa 1439.
And the problem with living through a revolution is that it’s impossible to take the long view of what’s happening. Hindsight is the only exact science in this business, and in that long run we’re all dead. The Great Battle of Fire and Light — Wait But Why. Note: This is the second post in the series.
The first one is here. There is a great deal of human nature in people. – Mark Twain. Broccoli Is Dying. Corn Is Toxic. Long Live Microbiomes! Editor’s Note (9/3/2019): This post has been substantially rewritten to change or eliminate claims and sourcing that did not meet Scientific American’s editorial standards.
The revised post can be found here. As food writer Mark Bittman recently remarked, since food is defined as “a substance that provides nutrition and promotes growth” and poison is “a substance that promotes illness,” then “much of what is produced by industrial agriculture is, quite literally, not food but poison.” American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation. A couple of years before he was convicted of securities fraud, Martin Shkreli was the chief executive of a pharmaceutical company that acquired the rights to Daraprim, a lifesaving antiparasitic drug.
Previously the drug cost $13.50 a pill, but in Shkreli’s hands, the price quickly increased by a factor of 56, to $750 a pill. At a health care conference, Shkreli told the audience that he should have raised the price even higher. Amazon is the invisible backbone behind ICE’s immigration crackdown. In June, when the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) began separating migrant children from their parents, several tech companies came under fire for providing the agency with the software that helped them do it.
At the center of the criticism was data mining company Palantir, which designed the Investigative Case Management system. The ICM is a critical component of ICE’s deportation operations—it integrates a vast ecosystem of public and private data to track down immigrants and, in many cases, deport them. Little is known about how the software actually works or how extensively ICE uses it. But within the first nine months of the Trump administration, ICE arrests increased 42% compared with the same period in the previous year. There's A Reason Why You Still Love The Music From Your Teen Years. It's probably the latter.
Proposal Looks To Loosen Radio Ownership Rules click 2x. (1) The Evolution Of CPU Processing Power Part 3: The Origin Of Modern Operating Systems. Climate Undermined by Lobbying. For all the evidence that the benefits of reducing greenhouse gases outweigh the costs of regulation, disturbingly few domestic climate change policies have been enacted around the world so far. So say UC Santa Barbara professor and economist Kyle Meng, and co-author Ashwin Rode, a former UCSB Ph.D. student now at the University of Chicago, in a paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The Map of Physics.
The Map of Mathematics. Autocratic/Autocracy RULE OF ONE. People in higher social class have an exaggerated belief that they are better than others. How to get cryonically frozen in 12 foolproof steps. Ajit Pai Promised New Jobs and 'Better, Cheaper' Internet. His ISP Pals Have a Different Plan. The Prescription Drug Landscape, Explored.
Overview Americans spend more on prescription medications each year than the citizens of any other country. Measuring drug spending remains a challenge, however, because of limited public data on how much the various payers and supply chain intermediaries pay for prescription drugs. Several public and private organizations have recently published U.S. drug spending estimates using different methodologies. These estimates differ, but an analysis from The Pew Charitable Trusts indicates that spending on prescription drugs has increased in recent years.
The federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) estimates that total retail prescription drug spending rose 26.8 percent between 2012 and 2016—a faster rate of growth than all other categories of personal health care expenditures. The complex drug supply and payment chain involves transactions among drug manufacturers, wholesalers, pharmacies, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), and health plans. Amazon Will Pay Whopping $0 In Federal Taxes On $11.2 Billion Profits. The War Against Solar Energy. Delayed, not saved: Foxconn's Wisconsin "factory" announcement is a bid to help Trump save face. The 1% Won't Owe Social Security Tax After April 2019 click 2x. Without question, Social Security is this country's most important social program. It can rightly be called a financial rock for millions of elderly Americans, with the benefits provided accounting for more than half of all monthly income for 62% of retired workers and the program single-handedly keeping 15.3 million of those aged beneficiaries above the federal poverty line.
But it's also a heavily criticized program for the way it collects revenue. Image source: Getty Images. Social Security's primary sources of funding, explained Last year, Social Security generated $996.6 billion in income from its three sources of funding: $873.6 billion was collected from the 12.4% payroll tax on earned income up to $127,200 (in 2017).$85.1 billion was generated as interest income from the nearly $2.9 trillion currently held in Trust's asset reserves.$37.9 billion was derived from the taxation of Social Security benefits for those beneficiaries earning above select thresholds.
How a kingfisher, an owl, & a penguin helped redesign Japan's Shinkansen. The Simplest Explanation Of Global Warming Ever. Earth energy budget diagram, with incoming and outgoing radiation (values are shown in W/m^2). The Trump Tax Cut: Even Worse Than You’ve Heard. Dem pollster blames Gingrich for current partisan strife. Medicaid work requirements: Where do they stand after the blue wave? Canada Revenue Agency is tough on regular taxpayers but goes easy on those with offshore accounts, audit finds.
The tax man goes easy on wealthy Canadians with offshore bank accounts while being harsh on regular taxpayers, according to a damning report made public by the federal auditor general Tuesday. This Delaware building is home to thousands of large companies. Could consciousness all come down to the way things vibrate? Is America an oligarchy dominated by billionaires? Trump participated in ‘dubious’ tax schemes in the 1990s, explosive NYT report says. NEW YORK — The New York Times reported Tuesday that President Donald Trump received at least $413 million from his father over the decades, much of that through dubious tax dodges, including outright fraud.
Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not. To afford basic necessities, the federal government estimates that Vanessa’s family would need to bring in $29,420 a year. Billionaires v teachers: the Koch brothers' plan to starve public education. Arizona has become the hotbed for an experiment rightwing activists hope will redefine America’s schools – an experiment that has pitched the conservative billionaires the Koch brothers and Donald Trump’s controversial education secretary, Betsy DeVos, against teachers’ unions, teachers and parents.
Trump remaking courts /judiciary Click 2x. Nearly half of tenants who make complaint face 'revenge eviction' Nearly half of all tenants who make a formal complaint about their housing suffer a “revenge eviction” by private landlords, according to research by Citizens Advice. Paid leave. Two Koch Insiders Are Creating a New Office Inside the FCC - TYT Network. Federal Communication Commission Chairman Ajit Pai at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), February, 2018. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images. Devos money buys influence click 2x. The Flourishing Business of Fake YouTube Views click 2x.
DeVos reinstated for-profit college accreditor despite staff objections, report shows. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos earlier this year reinstated an accreditor of for-profit colleges despite findings by her agency’s career staff that the organization failed to meet federal standards, an internal document shows. The report, released by the Education Department on Friday in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, shows that career department analysts had serious concerns about restoring the federal recognition of the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools just a month before DeVos issued an order reinstating the accreditor’s federal status.
Story Continued Below Career analysts wrote in the report that ACICS failed to meet 57 of the 93 criteria that accreditors are required to meet under federal law. All kinds tech companies working with ICE. Corporate Welfare Database - Corporate Welfare Watch. Inside Job (global financial crisis 2007) click 2x. The Bible and the belt: Inside a camp for gay youth. Underpaid and exhausted: the human cost of your Kindle. Project Blitz: The legislative assault by Christian nationalists to reshape America. The Opioid That Made a Fortune for Maker - and Its Prescribers click 2x. Tariffs on Canadian paper 'detrimental' to troubled US newspaper industry.
The NRA is Holding the Smoking Gun that Connects Trump to Russia. Mad Magazine's clout may have faded, but its ethos matters more than ever before. ‘Volcanic Ash’ Isn’t Actually Ash – Starts With A Bang!