Asian Lives Matter - the fire rises!

Channelling Tom Hardy here, but the dysfunction and civil rebellion that has started is not a million miles away from Bane and his merry crew...

It didn't take long for my previous post on an 84 year old blind Thai man being beaten to death for other incidents of young-black-on-elderly-Asian violence to happen. In fact, it's spreading:

• Mr Yahya Muslim of Oakland has been assaulting a series of elderly Asians in the city. He came to prominence after a security video caught someone with his description smashing a 91-year-old man to the ground from behind, on January 31
• Graffiti artists have tagged a Japanese immigrant memorial in San Jose's Japantown, making a clear statement about territory;
• and, unsurprisingly, Oakland's Asian community organizes patrols to combat the violence.

The single most telling sign for me is that Bay Area Big Tech companies are sending mails around about this phenomenon. I've had confirmation of three separate companies mailing their Asian employee clubs/groups about the attacks, expressing their shock and horror and offering emotional support. Mind you, they seem to be very careful not to talk about the perpetrators...

One claim I have seen recently, now that people are talking about it, is that it has been triggered by Donald J Trump talking about the "Kung Flu". Setting aside the miniscule likelihood that a 20 year old black thug in San Francisco has even listened to a Trump speech, let's remember Yik Oi Huang who was brutally beaten in SFO in January 2019, over a year before the pandemic - and suffered for a year before dying in early 2020. These are not Trump-driven anti-Chinese supremacists. These are callous racist thugs. Lay the blame for their behaviour at the feet of their parents - if they still care.

The most spectacular feet of mental agility I've seen, though, was from Los Angeles Times writer and Pulitzer Prize winner Viet T Nguyen:

Horrendous crimes against Asian Americans have happened recently, and it is right that Asian Americans have spoken out against them. But we can be against anti-Asian violence and not resort to knee-jerk calls for more policing, which is inextricable from the policing of Black

— Viet Thanh Nguyen (@viet_t_nguyen) February 12, 2021

and Brown communities. Asian Americans need to locate anti-Asian violence as part of a pattern of white supremacy [my emphasis] which also targets Black and Brown and Indigenous people. Even if perpetrators of violence are people of color, the solution is not to fallback on racist assumptions

— Viet Thanh Nguyen (@viet_t_nguyen) February 12, 2021

All I can say is that it must take a very expensive education to mess up one's brain that badly. Black people are beating up on the Asian elderly community, and your reflex - as a Vietnamese American - is to blame white supremacy?

I repeat my previous assertion. Unless these attacks are stopped - and it doesn't look like the police are able to stop them - the Asian community is going to turn to organizations which can make it happen. Asian shops are going to stop serving young black people, or make them feel so unwelcome that they leave, further increasing tensions. The almost-inevitable result is going to be a black 20-year old found lying in an alley in Chinatown with severe beating injuries, but it will turn out that no-one around saw anything. I thought we had got past this, but apparently history repeats.

Update: Feb 16th 2021 - a 30 year old was robbed of her expensive camera in Chinatown, Oakland. A liquor store owner saw what was happenening, ran out and fired his gun at the robber - and was promptly arrested and charged with felony assault with a firearm.

The [police] chief's message was that Oakland should come together as a community, but that people should not put one another in harm's way.

Sorry Chief, but there's a section of the black community which has already decided to put the Asian community in harm's way. And when you arrest a Chinese store owner for trying to stop a robbery - where the robber escapes - you send a very clear (unintentional) message to the Asian community about their ability to rely on the police to protect them.

Unionism in Silicon Valley - called it

Back in January I made the following prediction:

What do I think? Twitter, Facebook and Google offices in the USA are going to be hit with unionization efforts in the next 12 months, initially as a trial in the most favorable locations but if they succeed then this will be ramped up quickly nationwide. This will be framed as a push to align the companies to approved socially just policies - which their boards mostly favor already - but will be used to leapfrog the activist employees into union-endorsed and -funded positions of influence.

Sure enough, a bunch of Google staff walked out of work today, nominally to protest at ex-Android head Andy Rubin getting a cool $90M in severance after being accused of dubious behaviour with someone in a hotel room, which he denies:

Rubin said in a two-part tweet: “The New York Times story contains numerous inaccuracies about my employment at Google and wild exaggerations about my compensation. Specifically, I never coerced a woman to have sex in a hotel room. These false allegations are part of a smear campaign to disparage me during a divorce and custody battle. Also, I am deeply troubled that anonymous Google executives are commenting about my personnel file and misrepresenting the facts.”

For the record, Rubin sounds a bit sleazy even if you apply a high degree of scepticism to the exact circumstances of the event.

Let's look at the "official" walkout Twitter account, and wonder who's actually driving this organisation:

We, Google employees and contractors, will walkout on November 1 at 11:10am to demand these five real changes. #googlewalkout pic.twitter.com/amgTxK3IYw

— Google Walkout For Real Change (@GoogleWalkout) November 1, 2018

For posterity, the "demands" are:

1. An end to Forced Arbitration in cases of harassment and discrimination for all current and future employees.
2. A commitment to end pay and opportunity inequity.
3. A publicly disclosed sexual harassment transparency report.
4. A clear, uniform, globally inclusive process for reporting sexual misconduct safely and anonymously.
5. Elevate the Chief Diversity Officer to answer directly to the CEO and make recommendations directly to the Board of Directors. Appoint an Employee Rep to the Board.

Points 1-4 seem pretty reasonable - but what does point 5 have to do with the rest of the list? And who would this "Employee Rep" be - a unionisation activist, perchance? $10 says I'm right. This is a classic tactic: take a reasonable area of complaint and use it as a Trojan Horse to sneak in the early stages of unionisation to the company.

Google allegedly employs very smart people. If only they exercised their critical faculties half as well as their intellects, they might be asking uncomfortable questions of the protest organisers about where point 5 came from and who the organisers have in mind to take on "employee rep" duties. I guarantee you that it's not Rob Pike or Jeff Dean.

Called it: "Fearless Girl" was compensatory signalling

Back in April I expressed scepticism about the motivation behind the "Fearless Girl" statue placed in front of the Wall Street Bull by asset manager State Street:

I suspect that nothing other than their marketing department's desperate desire for publicity and their CEO's self-image were the main factors behind the project: since only 5 of their 28-strong leadership team are female, two of whom are in the traditional female bastions of HR and Compliance, one suspects that this is compensatory signalling.

Oh look:

State Street Corp., the $2.6 trillion asset manager that installed the Fearless Girl statue on Wall Street, agreed to settle U.S. allegations that it discriminated against hundreds of female executives by paying them less than male colleagues.

You'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh. Heck, I have a heart of stone and nearly split my sides when I read about this.

This is interesting though:

State Street also recently launched its SPDR Gender Diversity exchange-traded fund, which focuses on firms that have greater gender diversity in senior leadership.

It will be fascinating to see how this does against comparable benchmarks over the next five years. It certainly doesn't seem to be the case that female leadership is necessarily a good thing for a company, and women in key board level positions have been associated with some fairly prominent failures.

Oh FFS Apple

It's another lock screen security breach on the iPhone, this time in iOS 7:

The exploit can be initiated by swiping upwards on the device's lock screen to access the Control Center and open the Clock app. Once the clock app is open, holding the phone's sleep button will cause the "Slide to Power Off" option to appear. Tapping on cancel at this juncture and then double clicking on the home button will open the phone's multitasking screen, providing access to the camera and the photos on the device. The key to the trick, however, is to access the camera app from the lock screen first, causing it to appear in the recently used apps list.

This is far from the first lock screen exploit. Have Apple given up entirely on security testing? They know this is a ripe vector of exploits, and they let this through the gates. As I noted back in February for a previous lockscreen exploit:

What the flaw indicates, however, is that Apple is pressuring phone development and skimping on testing and security. This is not going to be an isolated problem.

Don't cross Mrs. Justice Thirlwall

Life with a minimum of 15 years for Philpott. Ouch. Her full sentencing remarks bear reading.

Their wages and their benefits went into your account, you controlled how money was spent. Your suggestion that this was a joint account and this was a normal family arrangement was frankly ridiculous. These two young women were not even permitted to have a front door key.
[...]
It has been said on your behalf that you were a good father. Lisa Willis said so as did others. They said you loved your children. I cannot give that description to a man who acted as you did.
[...]
I accept you have lost 6 children. I very much regret that everything about you suggests that your grief has very often been simulated for the public gaze.
[...]
To reach that period I must identify the determinate sentence you would have served had I not imposed a life sentence. The determinate sentence would have been one of 30 years' imprisonment. I am required by parliament to halve that to reflect that were this a determinate sentence you would serve only half

Crikey. I'm guessing that no legal eagle is going to touch an appeal here with a 10 foot pole. I mean, where would you even start?

Incidentally, I don't get the objections to the sentence and claims that it's too short. I didn't know minimum terms for manslaughter sentences ran anywhere near that high.

Mick Philpott, when your own sister yells "Die, Mick, die" you know you have a public sympathy problem.

2012 predictions evaluated

Looking back at my predictions for 2012, how did I do?

Eurozone: Eurozone governments engage in a sequence of progressively more desperate kicking-the-can-down-the-road exercises. A replacement source of funding fails to appear. The tension between the Germans resisting inflation and the rest of the Eurozone demanding economic relief. The ECB is inexorably pushed towards turning on the printing presses. Greece, Ireland and Portugal turn on the screws demanding more help with the threat of default. French and German banks turn out to be shockingly undercapitalised, to the surprise of no-one who was paying any attention.

6/10: there's certainly been nothing in the way of solutions here, and Greece has been leading the screw-turning.

North Korea: Kim Jong Un has an attack of common sense that may or may not result from being hung from a lamp post by a length of rope. North Korea opens the shambles of its nuclear enrichment program to international inspection in exchange for desperately needed aid. The humanitarian crisis turns out to be even worse than expected, with deaths of tens of thousands from cold and famine before the West and South Korea can organise aid shipments. China is less than helpful.

1/10: talk about hopeless optimism. China, at least, has been less than helpful.

UK economy: Growth peters out to practically nothing, perhaps dipping in and out of negative territory. Huhne gets squeezed by popular pressure resulting from ever-rising energy bills as the Conservatives keep him in the firing line. More effort is finally made on new gas plants, probably some more test drills for shale gas, and the planning permission and local challenges for nuclear plant additions grind on. Inflation stays above the 2% target as groceries in general and goods from China in particular rise in price.

9/10: UK economy barely grown over 2 years, inflation stayed above 2%. Grumbling about energy bills but no action yet, Huhne is still around. We are dashing for gas and building new plant.

UK politics: Con-Lib coalition effectively falls apart on several issues (e.g. energy). Labour fails to capitalise on this. Grumbling in the Labour party about Miliband and some early manoeuvering by potential challengers.

5/10: Coalition having problems, but gay marriage appears to be one of the key issues. Not much grumbling about Miliband, perhaps they've forgotten he exists.

Olympics: Substantially poorer showing for the UK than 2008, except in sailing and cycling. Boris makes at least four major gaffes during the Games, making him the only real entertainment. Fewer visitors than expected results in a significant financial loss for the UK.

2/10: Glad to be proven wrong in most of this. We still ate a pretty solid financial loss though.

USA: SOPA passes albeit in a modified and mostly annoying rather than harmful form. Congress and the Senate continue to be bought and sold. Obama starts feeling the pressure from within the Democratic party but just edges the election against a Romney/Bachmann ticket.

6/10: SOPA died, unexpectedly but thankfully. Plenty of buying and selling in politics persisted. Obama had an easier ride than I expected, and Romney's running mate was Ryan rather than Bachman.

China: A slow-motion implosion, rising popular anger at financial losses mostly held in check by increasingly brutal actions from the PLA. China makes an increasing effort to diversify out of US Treasury holdings but is stymied by lack of a reasonable alternative given events in Europe.

4/10: financial problems are clearly bubbling under the lid, but the PLA and Party are keeping the lid on; their continuing actions to tighten Internet access show what they're really worried about. Looks like Africa is one of the areas China is trying to expand into.

Middle East: Iran continues to posture, Iraq's new government breaks apart and reforms a couple of times. Afghanistan is still a mess, Pakistan becomes an even more dangerous snake pit.

7/10: generally nailed, apart from Iraq government breakage. If anything, I understated the problems in Pakistan.

Climate: 2012 weather proves to be a combination of too hot, too cold, too windy, too wet and too dry. Much like 2011.

7/10: drought up to April, unseasonably warm March, then a deluge for the next 8 months.

Random: Britney's engagement doesn't last 2012. It may barely survive 2011.

3/10: Despite persistent rumours about a breakup it looks like Britney and Jason will end 2012 together. Whodathunk?

50/100 overall, slightly better than the UK Met Office. Wonder what 2013 will bring?

Michael Meacher - mendacious scumbag. Again.

What's wrong with this headline: Starbucks pays £8.6m tax on £3bn sales? If you have no idea, you too might be the Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton:

Michael Meacher, the Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton, who has campaigned against companies that use tax avoidance techniques, said: "HMRC should be having a look at this, especially since they keep saying there should be a crackdown. This has been going on for years and there are many companies involved.
"The fact they have paid 0.3% tax on their turnover is utterly scandalous. If they didn't think they could get away with it, they wouldn't dare do it."

I realise that you may be too pig-ignorant to be able check the details, Mr. Meacher, but you will find that corporate taxes are levied on profit, not turnover. VAT is rated on sales, but most Starbucks products seem to be zero-rated so that's irrelevant (Update: Mr. Wadsworth points out that although the food products are zero-rated, most of them become VATable when catered, so Starbucks is indeed pouring VAT money into the Treasury). So, if by "getting away with it" you mean "comply fully with UK law and pay all due taxes" then yes, they do...

So Starbucks is fraudulently jiggling its accounts and is funnelling all the unpaid tax into the pockets of its executives? Apparently, "no", and "no":

There is no suggestion Starbucks has broken the law and the company's worldwide tax rate was 31% last year, compared with an average of 18.5% for multinationals. However, it paid an average of 13% on overseas income, one of the lowest rates in the consumer goods sector.

So it's paying most of its tax where it's based. Fair enough.

There's also the not insignificant point, mysteriously omitted from the Guardian, that a hefty slice of that turnover will be going in employee wages (on which income tax, employer and employee NI are levied) and business rates. Which, for some reason, is not counted as "tax" by Mr. Meacher's reckoning.

It seems that my previous characterisation of Mr. Meacher as a mendacious git was spot on...

Apple Maps - some work required

It was with no great surprise that I read this morning of certain deficiencies in iOS 6's Maps application that had become apparent. It seems that the data sources are not all they might be. I enjoyed thumbing through some side-by-side examples of the Apple Maps vs Google Maps. So who's to blame?

TomTom, which also licenses data to a range of other mobile manufacturers, defended its involvement.
A spokesman told the BBC that its maps provided only a "foundation" to the service.
"The user experience is determined by adding additional features to the map application such as visual imagery," a spokesman said.

Right: TomTom data is focused on navigating cars, not people. If you're using your iOS 6 device to guide your driving, all should be well. If you're on foot, less so.

The contrast with the demo images on Apple's site is amusing. At the iPhone 5 / iOS 6 launch everyone was wowed by the 3D images of San Francisco, but didn't note the following:

• 3D display eats battery life like you wouldn't believe;
• 3D display is only useful for large cities where the taller buildings form useful landmarks;
• "San Francisco" and "the world" are very different in size and complexity.

The lack of public transportation data has already been panned by big city dwellers, though I suspect this is not a general user concern. The individual mapping inaccuracies may be correctable, with time and a lot of human effort (and who's going to be motivated to do this? I guess we will be finding out how dedicated Apple fans are). The bad quality satellite images are more interesting; who the hell signed off on all the cloud-covered imagery of Scotland? There's plenty of good-quality modern satellite and aircraft imagery; see Google Maps, or Bing Maps, or Google Earth. Is Apple short of cash to purchase the modern and high quality imagery? If not, are they short of datacenter capacity to store and serve the data, or processing power to merge the various images into relatively seamless tiles?

Steve Jobs must be rotating at 10,000 rpm in his grave. The lack of attention to detail and quality are painful, and not at all what we normally associate with Apple. As far as I can see, Apple have really screwed the pooch here. People are going to back to Google Maps (once they launch an iOS Maps application, if they're so minded - if not, it's the regular website) until Apple seriously improves its data.

Perhaps this is how Apple is protecting its limited Maps serving capacity: make Apple Maps poor enough that not too many people use it...

RBS meltdown - Edinburgh, not Mumbai

All is revealed: in his letter to the Treasury Select Committee, Stephen Hester admits that the batch payments screw-up happened in the Edinburgh office:

The initial reviews we have carried out indicate that the problem was created when maintenance on systems, which are managed and operated by our team in Edinburgh, caused an error in our batch scheduler. This error caused the automated batch processing to fail on the night of Tuesday 19 June.

India is in the clear. All the frantic briefing by the RBS UK IT managers has been in vain - the finger points squarely at Edinburgh.

Credit to Hester, he's declining his bonus this year before anyone raises the issue. You can bet he's not pleased though. I'd be pretty annoyed if some clowns in the IT department had just cost me £2.4 million. I'd bet he's going to send a troubleshooter to that office, equipped with a sharp axe and a very high quota for necks. In a sense, this is possibly the best outcome for RBS because at least Hester is motivated to find out whose actual fault this was:

I will ensure a full and detailed investigation into the causes of the problem, overseen by independent experts and reporting to the Board Risk Committee and then the improvements we will make subsequently.
...
We will publish relevant findings from this investigation in due course.

If I were a mid-level or senior manager in IT at RBS Edinburgh, I'd be doing some CV polishing right about now. The published findings should make very interesting reading and be a near-required citation for papers in risk engineering and business-critical systems conferences.

I'm not sure about the Mail's characterisation of this letter as "grovelling". It seems pretty solid and workman-like to me, high on content and low on spin. In fact, I'd say it confirms Hester as a pretty good head of RBS and the Government should look at slipping him some additional compensation in a year or two once the fuss has died down. Heaven knows I don't envy him his job.

Update: Dominic Connor at The Reg has top tips for surviving the oncoming storm, aimed at RBS IT grunts. Helpfully, though, he addresses management as well:

If you're a senior exec at RBS
You're only reading this because someone printed it out for you and other media are quoting us. That's because your IT staff trust random tech journalists that they’ve never met with the truth more than they trust you.

Genius. Read The Whole Thing.

Losing Face(book)

That squeal from the general direction of Wall Street this morning? It was likely the Facebook underwriters being taken roughly from behind. Facebook closed at $34.03, slightly further than the 10% drop I proposed on Friday.

Why the lack of faith in Facebook's business model? Tekpersona's J. C. Kendall analyses the business profile of the social model and fails to be impressed:

Resolved: The Facebook IPO was necessary for shareholders to cash out before you find out exactly what I am about to tell you.

It's entirely believable that the shareholders were happy for the underwriters to get it in the shorts as long as they could exit their shareholdings at north of $38. What's surprising is that the underwriters were sufficiently poorly informed that the shareholders could get away with this. Had the underwriters been reading Mr. Kendall's article, their attitude towards a $38 launch price might have been different:

It is 100 times more likely, that I will come across an ad on Google or Bing and clicked through to conversion long before I ever end up on Facebook, to find a Brand page, find a product, and look for a conversion link or ad that makes Facebook money. Sure it happens, because Facebook does make money from Ads. The problem is, that almost no vendors (except those selling information about how to make money on Facebook) will ever turn a measurable profit.

While the singular of 'anecdote' is even further from 'data' than its plural, I have never clicked on a Facebook advert or 'followed' a business's Facebook page. I have, by contrast, followed businesses on G+ and clicked on ads in Google search results (and been happy with the resulting purchase). I think Kendall nails it.

Where now for Facebook (and Zynga?) There's another 6 months until many employees can sell their shares, and 8 days or so until short selling FB shares is permitted. Facebook will still make many millionaires, but one has to wonder about California's forecast of $2bn in Facebook IPO-related tax revenue.

Watching the Greg Smith story with interest

Friday's Reuters bulletin that Greg Smith from Goldman Sachs has landed a book deal confirms my earlier prediction about Smith's likely future. I should hope that by now he's got the first draft banged out and is working his way through the editorial process - time is money. My finger-in-the-air estimate is that they'll announce a release date and maybe serialise a chapter in the second half of April. Time is money.

For anyone who hasn't already read Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis, I strongly recommend doing so before Smith's new book is released. It will be instructive to compare Salomon Brothers in the 80's with Goldman Sachs in the Noughties. Smith and Lewis have a surprising amount in common - joining the firm more or less straight from university, belonging to a London branch of a USA-based bank, and eventually resigning rather than being fired or head-hunted away. Both GS and Salomon were going through turbulent times in the media when their employee left, and it's notable that Liar's Poker was acknowledged by many as being instrumental in the downfall of Salomon's CEO Gutfreund - Gutfreund himself confessed as much to Lewis when they eventually met, as Lewis notes in "The Big Short". One can only speculate as to whether Smith will be enjoying such a lunch with Lloyd Blankfein in 20 years time.

I remain sceptical that Smith can write as well as Lewis, whose books and articles I would rate rather highly. Still, let's see what the chap can come up with.

GS on a muppet hunt

Sure enough, following Greg Smith's very public resignation last week, it seems that Goldman Sachs is trying to contain the damage by hunting for emails that mention 'muppet'.

Well, I suppose their IT and Compliance teams don't have anything better to do...

In fact, it's probably not a bad idea; better that they have found, disciplined and perhaps fired the people concerned before a Congressional / Senate / AG investigation does it for them. If they're quick, they might be able to fit it into the current round of redundancies.

Hope the Greeks are taking notes

It seems that Argentina is introducing exchange controls in apparent anticipation of a default. No doubt Papandreou is flying over observers...

A mistake, Nicko?

Nicko Sarkozy says that letting Greece into the Eurozone was "a mistake", putting in a strong bid for the "No shit, Sherlock" award of 2011. But let us take this and follow it along. So in 2001 Greece wasn't ready to migrate to the Euro. Now, ten years later, Greece has turned into an economic basket case with massive civil unrest, a tanking economy and horrific debt. But given all this, Nicko still thinks that keeping Greece in the Eurozone is the right plan?

I don't know what Sarkozy is smoking, but I bet it has a street value over $500/gramme.

So about those SocGen numbers...

SocGen are taking substantial write downs on their Greek sovereign debt holdings in Q2; a little under 20% on 2.6bn euro of holdings, taking out 30%+ of their net profits for the quarter.

I would just like to say I told you so and I wonder what other non-marked-to-market skeletons linger in the SocGen closet. This isn't investment advice, but I wouldn't touch SocGen with a faeces-stained stick. Thank goodness that Berlusconi is making a reassuring statement on the Italian banks, I don't know what we'd do without him.

We now return you to your scheduled programming (specifically, 24 Hours in A+E).