memfree

Yannick Le Gall, a journalist from France 3, the regional television state channel, who was positioned opposite the steps, said: “We were in front of Lady Gaga’s set, and by the time the music started, the staircase was empty.”

When the singer instead appeared on a giant screen in front of the stands, “spectators booed and regretted having paid €180 to see nothing,” Mr Gall added.

I'm hoping Lina Khan keeps up her good work (and that Harris keeps Khan as the FTC head). | archive

Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Edward Markey (D-MA) sent a letter [PDF] to the US regulator's boss Lina Khan on Friday after the pair conducted an investigation into General Motors, Honda, and Hyundai.

Honda buried the disclosures about its business relationship with Verisk, which did not appear on the first page, and were not likely to be seen by many consumers.

GM and Hyundai allegedly neglected to mention selling data to Verisk at all.

If GM car owners wanted notifications about things like attempted break-ins and vehicle component health, they needed to sign up for the manufacturer's Smart Driver program, and doing so would quietly opt them into allowing their info to be sold on.

"The lengthy disclosures presented by GM before the opt-in did not disclose to consumers that as part of enrolling in Smart Driver, their driving data would be shared with data brokers and resold to insurance companies," the senators alleged, adding GM "disclosed customer location data to two other companies, which it refused to name."

Hyundai apparently enrolled its drivers into a similar Drive Score program without even asking, if they enabled the internet connection on the vehicle.

The Venezuelan opposition dismissed the CNE's announcement as fraudulent and promised to challenge the result.

Over the past 10 years, 7.8 million people have fled Venezuela because of the economic and political crisis into which the country was plunged under the Maduro Administration.

Polls conducted in the run-up to the election suggest that exodus could now increase, with one poll suggesting a third of the population would emigrate.

• US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was among those expressing his scepticism after the result was announced by the National Electoral Council, a body which is dominated by government loyalists.

• The UK Foreign Office also expressed concern over the results

• The Chilean president, Gabriel Boric, also said he found the result "hard to believe".

• Uruguay's president said of the Maduro government: "They were going to 'win' regardless of the actual results."

In a congratulatory message, President Vladimir Putin told Mr Maduro: "Remember, you are always a welcome guest on Russian soil."

Laundry drying on the line got a visitor! For some reason, I can't get a thumbnail so here's pic #2:

I'm not saying this doctor's suggestion is the only or best solution, but it is nice to see the issue get noticed. Excerpts from the Op/Ed:

This 30-year-old patient told me that she had struggled with her weight for years. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, she had finally lost weight by eating more proteins and vegetables. Her food budget was supplemented by federal food programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program as well as the stimulus money she received during the pandemic.

In recent years, however, as her career grew, so did her income, making her ineligible to qualify for federal assistance programs, such as SNAP. At the same time, the pandemic stimulus money disappeared. As a result of both factors, her supplementary incomes and support for food withered.

While screening for food insecurity is now a routine part of what we do in primary care, fixing the problem is impossible without also addressing the upstream causes. This patient’s food insecurity stemmed from not only the “cliff effect” of losing her supplemental benefits when her earnings pushed her out of a certain income bracket but also from the rising cost of food prices, including high-protein foods such as eggs and beef, given the rise of bird flu. The incidence of viruses able to spread from one species to another (called “viral spillover”) in the face of climate change is predicted to become more and more common in the coming years — all of which place a higher price tag on food.

I know that writing a prescription for weight-loss drugs is far easier for me and my colleagues than trying to address the real cost of rising food prices and food insecurity.

State and federal policy makers must begin by urgently addressing and mitigating the “cliff effect” for those who are making a livable wage.

After adding operatic vocals to Gojira's rendition of "Ah! Ça Ira," a song popular during the French Revolution, she went on to sing a portion of Georges Bizet's Carmen.

From NME:

The heavy metallers performed ‘Ah, Ça Ira!’ (which translates to ‘It’ll be fine’), a song that was popular during the French revolution, during a segment titled ‘Liberté’ (in reference to France’s famed motto ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’) that celebrated one of the most famous events in French history, as well as the nation’s emphasis on freedom.

Gojira appeared on the side of a castle surrounded by fire and bursts of red streamers to represent blood, with Viotti later appearing on a moving prop boat. Their performance followed a portion dedicated to Les Miserables and came just after a beheaded Marie Antoinette was shown singing.

Traditional lyrics translated at wikipedia (linked above) Gojira's lyrics translated via redditors:

Oh. It'll be okay, be okay, be okay,
Hang the aristocrats from on high!
Oh. It'll be okay, be okay, be okay,
The aristocrats, we'll hang 'em all.
Despotism will breathe its last,
Liberty will take the day,
Oh. It'll be okay, be okay, be okay,
We don't have any more nobles or priests,
Oh. It'll be okay, be okay, be okay,
Equality will reign everywhere,
The Austrian slave will follow him,
To the Devil will they fly.
Oh. It'll be okay, be okay, be okay,
To the Devil will they fly.

Khan has been at the forefront of the Biden administration's push to use U.S. antitrust law to boost competition and address high prices and low wages. Khan, who oversaw the FTC's ban on noncompete agreements, has drawn the ire of corporate groups, but won fans including Donald Trump's running mate, JD Vance, for her skepticism towards big business.

Now, big money Democratic donors this week publicly said Khan should not be part of a potential Harris administration.

Prominent Democratic senators have spoken out in support of Khan, including senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Warren said on Friday that Khan should continue her work, calling it "a big reason the economy is growing strong as we saw with yesterday's GDP data."

-- or as Matt Stoller puts it in his 'BIG' (regarding one of the two, Hoffman):

Ok, so it’s pretty stunning for an oligarch like Hoffman, with a net worth of a couple billion dollars, to publicly make such a demand. So why is he doing it? One reason is that there’s a lot of money involved. As the Lever reported, Hoffman is on the board of Microsoft, which is right now being sued and investigated by the FTC. It’s a pretty good gig, if you get to fire the law enforcer investigating your misdeeds.

and thinks it likely that:

he’s going to supply the financing for Harris’ campaign if she does what she’s told.

In other words, democracy really is on the ballot, but not in the way people imagine. An oligarch has explicitly and openly taken over policy because it conflicts with his small faction’s control of American society. And so far, most political leaders are silent.

The only upside here is that Hoffman is being very public, aggressive, and explicit about his demands. And he’s going to corner Harris until she kisses the ring, or refuses to do so. From his perspective, he’s not donating $10 million, he’s making a purchase. Or so he thinks. Now it’s up to Harris to make the choice.

Given the shutdown/attack today, which targeted stations far from the capital, this, ah... did not go well.

Excerpts from article:

Security measures in Paris have been turbocharged by a new type of AI, as the city enables controversial algorithms to crawl CCTV footage of transport stations looking for threats.

After training its algorithms on both open source and synthetic data, Wintics’ systems have been adapted to, for example, count the number of people in a crowd or the number of people falling to the floor—alerting operators once the number exceeds a certain threshold.

Houllier argues that his algorithms are a privacy-friendly alternative to controversial facial recognition systems used by past global sporting events, such as the 2022 Qatar World Cup. “Here we are trying to find another way,” he says. To him, letting the algorithms crawl CCTV footage is a way to ensure the event is safe without jeopardizing personal freedoms. “We are not analyzing any personal data. We are just looking at shapes, no face, no license plate recognition, no behavioral analytics.”

Levain is concerned the AI surveillance systems will remain in France long after the athletes leave. To her, these algorithms enable the police and security services to impose surveillance on wider stretches of the city. “This technology will reproduce the stereotypes of the police,” she says. “We know that they discriminate. We know that they always go in the same area. They always go and harass the same people. And this technology, as with every surveillance technology, will help them do that.”

Linked article is about Pennsylvania, but note that Cornell recently announced these lanternflies have invaded the New York grape-growing region of the Finger Lakes: https://cals.cornell.edu/news/2024/07/spotted-lanternfly-found-finger-lakes-region

Also, they are up in Connecticut now: https://www.ctpublic.org/news/2024-07-25/spotted-lanternfly-connecticut-grapes-crops

Researchers from Pennsylvania State University’s College of Agricultural Sciences used an economic assessment software program to estimate potential damage and said in the worst-case scenario the damage could climb to half a billion dollars annually.

“I mean, look, it made it to Pennsylvania from China in one shot,” Walsh said. Lanternflies invaded the U.S. attached to a stone shipment sent to a local landscaping company.

“The reality is that some of those assumptions have not played out as predicted. Far and away, lanternflies are not the fire and brimstone, doom and gloom situation that they were originally feared to be,” Walsh said. “Except for grapes — it’s been worse than expected for grapes.”

While extremely disruptive to the wine and grape industry, the spotted lanternfly is not as damaging to hardwood trees used for timber as previously thought, according to 2023 research from Penn State’s Entomology Department.

According to Penn State researchers, the heaviest hit vineyards lost up to 90% of their grapevines.

Grape growers can’t just immediately replace a grapevine either. Creato said it takes up to three years for grapevines to bear fruit and five to seven years to be ready for wine.

Walsh said there is a trend of lanternflies arriving in an area, growing in numbers rapidly for a few years, and then declining for another few years. “But in that sigh of relief, the question is then, ‘Why?’” he said.

“It’s a complex bug that still has lots of secrets that we’re slowly working out,” Walsh said. “Everyday citizens reporting back information and doing the ‘lanternfly stomp’ as they went about their daily travels absolutely had a positive effect in slowing the spread.”

At issue in the case is the Web and App Activity toggle in Android device’s settings. Turning the toggle off prevents future web and app activity being saved to a user’s Google account.

The class plaintiffs, a suit first filed in 2020, claim that Google collected their personalized data even though they turned the toggle off. They claim the toggle gives users the false impression that they can “opt out” of sharing all data with Google and third-party developers, and accused Google of invasion of privacy.

Santacana said that none of the data that Google collected could be tied back to a user and that the defendants had failed to include a single example of the data being tracked back to a user, being used for personalized advertisements or being used to build marketing profiles.

Seeborg, a Barack Obama appointee, told Santacana that he thought the language in Google’s privacy policy could possibly mislead a reasonable consumer into believing that toggling the function off stops collection of all data.

Santacana replied that it’s not Google’s fault if a user doesn’t interpret the policies correctly.

David Boies, counsel for the class plaintiffs, told Seeborg that he didn’t believe that Google doesn’t collect personal information, and that even the non-personal information could identify a person’s mobile device and be linked to a specific individual.

Boies read Seeborg copies of Google employees’ internal emails, in which multiple employees expressed that they felt the privacy policy was fooling users into thinking that personal information wasn’t being collected. In the emails, the Google employees also said they were collecting and using personal information.

Seeborg took the matter under submission.

A tiny native rodent that was on the brink of extinction on the mainland has bounced back in the most unlikely of places — an island infested with death adders and tiger snakes.

The rat's survival on the South Australian island, which it was introduced to more than three decades ago, has been the result of one of Australia's worst invasive weeds, the African boxthorn.

Co-author of the study, Flinders University associate professor Vera Weisbecker, said invasive weeds were damaging to Australia's biodiversity so it was good news a threatened mammal was thriving in that habitat.

However the researchers cautioned against perceptions that invasive weeds weren't as bad as they seemed.

"We completely agree that it is a damaging weed that needs to be controlled," Ms Kraehe said.

"If it continues to spread, it may displace too much of the native vegetation and lead to a collapse of the island's ecosystem, ultimately affecting the greater stick-nest rats themselves," Dr Hill said.

From BBC:

• A series of fires has hit French high-speed rail lines, hours before the Paris Olympics opening ceremony
• Rail company SNCF says it's a "massive attack aimed at paralysing the network"; France's transport minister condemns the "co-ordinated malicious acts"
• Some 800,000 customers will be affected with disruption expected all weekend, the rail firm says
• Eurostar tells customers to postpone trips if they can, as it faces ongoing disruption

See also:

• https://apnews.com/live/olympics-opening-ceremony-2024-updates
• https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/vandals-target-frances-high-speed-rail-network-olympics-get-underway-2024-07-26/
• https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-26/france-s-high-speed-rail-network-disrupted-by-arson/104148714