Tag: failedstate

Most expensive subway

7x more expensive than anywhere else. time for some union-busting.

An accountant discovered the discrepancy while reviewing the budget for new train platforms under Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan.

The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 6km tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify 700 jobs that needed to be done. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there.

Amber alerts for cops

cops now want to be treated like little children. the correct response is of course to disable these annoying & useless amber alerts.

Warning people about violent suspects in their area is somewhat useful — a severe weather alert but for crime. But there’s no reason for a system like this to prioritize crimes against police officers. Adding mere threats to the mix just adds a bunch of junk info of nearly no use to the citizens on the receiving end of these alerts. At best, people will clear them from their screen as quickly as they do interloping Amber Alerts. At worst, they’ll decide to play Batman and put themselves and officers at risk by attempting to Do Something.

Carl Icahn Raid

Icahn eventually succeeded in gaining control of the Trump Taj Mahal casino. In 2014, a bankruptcy-court judge expressed concern that Icahn Enterprises would just close the place, and insisted that company executives testify that they had no plans to shut the casino down. Initially, Icahn promised to invest $100M in the ailing facility. But he ended up embroiled in yet another bitter union fight, and refused to yield on demands from casino employees for better pay and health benefits. Eventually, Icahn shuttered the casino. The casino’s demise put 3000 people out of work. In March, 2017, Icahn found a buyer: Hard Rock International. 1 day earlier this summer, former employees queued up alongside treasure hunters and curious passersby on the boardwalk outside the beleaguered casino. A liquidator had arranged a fire sale of the items inside. People carted home used bed linens and scuffed armchairs and statuary of fake gold. They looked for souvenirs bearing the Trump name, but there weren’t any.

Electoral College Sabotage

The timing of the CIA’s leak wasn’t random. It was an opening salvo by the CIA to actively influence the Electoral College and stop Donald Trump from becoming President. The CIA is trying to topple Trump. Why? Self preservation. The real reason is that Trump was working with Peter Thiel to corporatize the intelligence gathering of the United States around companies, like Palantir, that can adopt and employ technology much faster and with more efficacy. Trump is planning to turn the CIA and the NSA into peripheral collection systems.

a good night story for you

Mega Merger Consultants

why there’s far less competition than there should be:

Economists are leveraging their academic prestige with secret reports justifying corporate concentration. Their predictions are often wrong and consumers pay the price. While the impact of this wave of mergers is much debated, prominent economists suggest that it is 1 important reason why, even as corporate profits hit records, economic growth is slow, wages are stagnant, business formation is halting, and productivity is lagging. “Only the monopoly-power story can convincingly account” for high business profits and low corporate investment.

NYC Trash

spot on

2018-06-04:

Local 124, the union at Sanitation Salvage, also represents workers at several other Bronx companies owned by the Squitieris, including Metropolitan Transfer Station and D&J Ambulette. It turns out that Local 124 often gives to the same politicians as the Squitieris — and often on the same day. On 5 separate occasions between 2006 and 2010, Local 124 donated to the same Bronx political causes on the exact same days as the Squitieris and their companies. 1 of those same-day matching donations was to Bronx Borough President Diaz, and 2 of them were to Klein. “The Squitieris run the Bronx”. In 2016, the de Blasio administration came out in support of a plan for overhauling the private trash industry. New York would be carved up into zones, companies would make bids to collect the garbage in a given zone, and then the city would pick the winners. In this system, backers have argued, the city could make winning a bid contingent on meeting strict benchmarks for things like safety training, wages, hours or recycling rates.

A New Terror-Alert System

Just before 8 on Monday morning, New Yorkers got a message on their mobile phones: “WANTED: Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28-yr-old male. See media for pic. Call 9-1-1 if seen.” The news came through the same emergency-alert system, with its disorienting buzz, that government agencies use to send news of a flood, and so it suggested some uncanny Pynchonian transference, in which terrorism had become as mundane and as universally affecting as the atmosphere. By 11:30, the alert had made a “significant contribution,” as Mayor Bill de Blasio put it at a lunchtime news conference, to the capture of Rahami, who was found sleeping in the doorway of a bar in his home town of Linden, New Jersey. The alert had an “extraordinary effect.” His new police commissioner, James O’Neill, called it the “future.”

in reality, the message was incredibly dumb & vague, due to unreasonable implementation of this system. plain text, no photos. we can do way better.