I haven't read unfogged on my work computer since I started my new job. But that's as far as I've gone in terms of worrying about monitoring.
Somehow I'm guessing the executive-level people are exempt from all that?
What's with Boomers and their egos? Obviously she shouldn't have run for reelection. The whole thing is reminiscent of RBG (who was a good justice unlike Feinstein who has always been a bad senator, but whose decision not to step down had much worse consequences).
I suspect that most of that post is made up.
WADU does exist, and it tracks things like time spent on calls. And, yes, it's going to monitor and record your zoom calls, phone calls, messaging software use etc, because that's a basic compliance requirement, never mind the productivity implications. JP Morgan employees, like employees of other banks, like to conspire to commit massive fraud from time to time, and they often chat about their massive frauds on their company emails. So the SEC wants to see them. It will even want to see your personal phone if it thinks you've been using it to chat about massive fraud.
But the idea of WADU secretly taking photos of the inside of your house and telling your manager if it sees a television is somewhat ridiculous. "My god! You're working in your living room! Have you no self-respect?" And monitoring posture and body language in the office? No.
I suppose that at least we should be grateful that the internet paranoia merchants have moved on from Goldman Sachs to a slightly less, well, Hebraic-sounding bank as their target du jour.
5 seems to be correct -- it's based on this article in Insider, but it's making up the stuff about body language, etc.
4: We have a system in place over here that ensures that when the extremely old lady occupying a central place in our government dies, she is immediately and smoothly replaced by an amiable elderly man with strong environmentalist credentials and a fondness for gardening, and there's nothing any of our demented NatC politicians can do about it.
I'm not any kind of banker, but shouldn't you talk in person when planning crimes?
9: yes! You should! But a lot of the time they don't.
What's with Boomers and their egos?
Good question, but Feinstein was born in 1933 so perhaps a different etiology. I can't believe her staff hasn't forced the issue. It's insane. She plainly wasn't able to do the job long before this health episode, which has clearly left her in even worse shape.
I find the "I'm going to die in office regardless of how incapacitated and damaging I am, screw the policial considerations I care about," thing mystifying and reprehensible, but it's not a solely Boomer thing and it's not new. Heck, DiFi isn't a Boomer by almost a decade.
But Strom Thurmond was definitely not all there for years while he was still serving in the Senate, and I understand Byrd wasn't capable of doing much at the end of his tenure at well. In the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall was, I believe, also pretty incapable for quite a while before he resigned (although he's a funny case because he couldn't have resigned strategically for a very long time time before he eventually did -- he wasn't that old when Carter lost to Reagan, and then it was twelve years to the next Democratic President. In an ideal world, he would have held out another eight months or so despite his incapacity.) I'm sure there are more cases, these are just the ones that come to mind.
I think there should be heavy, heavy political and social pressure to retire by the mid-seventies or so, complicated by strategic considerations for the USSC. But it's a longstanding issue, not something new with RBG and DiFi.
My dad thought judges should retire at 72 because that's where he started to see problems. And he did that himself.
Jim Bunning, more recently. And Thad Cochran.
But the idea of WADU secretly taking photos of the inside of your house and telling your manager if it sees a television is somewhat ridiculous. "My god! You're working in your living room! Have you no self-respect?" And monitoring posture and body language in the office? No.
What if it was a bong?
I get why you're saying it's largely ridiculous, but there's also plenty of evidence that employers sift through resumes on equally frivolous criterion. Deciding how to rank your current employees isn't all that different than deciding how to rank your prospective employees, if it's left in the hands of HR and people detached from the day-to-day managing.
7: It could be made up, or it could be excluded from the article for the same reason the Reddit post was taken down. I sincerely hope you're not attempting to irresponsibly unspeculate.
17: How dare you almost accuse me of irresponsibly speculating? All around the internet, I am known for my spotless record of responsible speculating.
According to my stealth web cam bursts, your posture has been inconsistent with speculation on five of the seven sample flashes we've taken.
16: JP Morgan using intrusive surveillance of its own IT hardware to monitor its current employees and rank them on silly and spurious grounds is absolutely plausible.
JP Morgan using employees' webcams to photograph the insides of their houses without permission so they can see if there is a television set in the room they are working in, because for some reason it doesn't think you should be working in a room with a TV in it, is not plausible. Nor is JP Morgan using HD cameras linked to an AI that can monitor body language.
16: If your bong is clearly labeled "For Tobacco Only", they can't do anything.
2: but are you SURE of that, senior vice president?
If someone on the board has a son with a new surveillance product, and JP Morgan decides to purchase this product and tells IT to download and install it, I don't see why there'd be any barrier for ridiculousness of AI absurdity that the nepot's son chose to wrangle in his laboratory.
Like, I don't necessarily see any evidence that the decision-making skills of JP Morgan does not favor the unbelievably arcane and overly complex data collection in order to shore up stupid rankings. Isn't that the premise of investment banking - we're fundamentally bored and we're spending our time dreaming up increasingly baroque ways of finding profit margins that are untethered from reality?
Dianne Feinstein was irresponsibly gluing her butt to the seat back in 2018. Now it seems like she's just in a fog ("I haven't been gone, I've been here") and isn't considering anything, but people around her are propping her up. Specifically, Pelosi's people, to help their preferred guy succeed her.
Her five-year chief of staff changed jobs just two months ago.
I agree with 5 et al., the reddit post about WADU looks like at least half bullshit, but assuming the Business Insider article is accurate it still looks very bad.
I take for granted that my employer can see my Web browsing, and I don't even worry about it unless I get a scary error message or I follow a link that I should have known better about. Maybe even that is a level of intrusiveness that would have felt creepy 20+ years ago, but it doesn't seem too illogical in spirit, and it's hard not to notice when it's relevant. And I'm aware that emails I send and Teams chat and the like at work can be monitored so I try to be circumspect there, but I assume they rarely or never actually are.
But beyond that? Keystroke and mouse loggers, tracking what apps are open for how long, collated with data from ID swiping and mobile devices? Any part of that seems over the line, let alone all of it.
Aside from not wanting to be monitored like that, it seems pointless. Monitoring for its own sake or because the HR director buyer is getting a kickback from the software vendor rather than any productive purpose. Unless WADU is decades ahead of any software I'm familiar with, it would take hours of work to get any output from it as readable as a spreadsheet. At most a manager might use WADU to get details about a problem they already have a good idea of, but no competent manager would use it before or instead of actual management. (Of course, incompetent managers exist, but that's a problem independent of WADU.)
24: Have we talked about Charlie Javice? https://www.reuters.com/legal/startup-founder-accused-defrauding-jpmorgan-is-indicted-2023-05-18/
"Not so much unbelievably arcane and overly complex data collection" as just good old fake data, but, yes, definitely, "untethered from reality". And JPMorgan fell for it, hook, line, and sinker.
24: Have we talked about Charlie Javice? https://www.reuters.com/legal/startup-founder-accused-defrauding-jpmorgan-is-indicted-2023-05-18/
"Not so much unbelievably arcane and overly complex data collection" as just good old fake data, but, yes, definitely, "untethered from reality". And JPMorgan fell for it, hook, line, and sinker.
To the thing about Strom Thurmond, wasn't there a good deal of pressure for Ted Kennedy to resign when he got brain cancer instead of persisting until he dropped dead? And it was prescient, because Scott Brown succeeding him in a special election put the ACA in jeopardy.
"Isn't that the premise of investment banking - we're fundamentally bored and we're spending our time dreaming up increasingly baroque ways of finding profit margins that are untethered from reality?"
No, not really.
Omg. I think I'm successfully needling ajay. This is so delightful.
THE NEEDLER HAS BECOME THE NEEDLED.
30: Yes, at the core of investment banking is not boredom, but excitement, at the prospect of using our favorite thing in the world, (money) to make even more of our favorite thing in the world (still money).
I thought the money was to cure the boredom? Is it supposed to cure existential dread, then? Wait - is money its own intrinsic reward?
My problem with investment banking is that I would rather see a greater proportion of the gains from economic activity go to the labor involved in the activity. I think that's a problem for them.
I know I am operating outside the realm of how things ever work in reality, but I'm appalled that her staff hasn't told her to resign before they do. This is so gross every time it happens. If it was a Weekend at Bernie's situation, it would at least have an element of comedy. This just looks like elder abuse.
I can't dig up the source, but I saw a screenshot yesterday that both Newsom and Padilla had tried to call and set up a one-on-one meeting with her, respectively, and both failed.
Weekend at Bernie's logic suggests that Senator Sanders should try.
This thread made me think of Konstantin Chernenko and Yuri Andropov, who I remember as being decrepit old men, but they were relatively young compared to the American politicians mentioned here.
I heard it was because Pelosi wants Adam Schiff to replace Feinstein, and Gov. Newsom won't pick Schiff.
36: 90 percent of Congressional staffers are either idealists who worked on the Congressperson's campaign and came along for the ride when they got into office, or power-hungry careerists eager to rub shoulder with power and jealous of lobbyists. Feinstein has been around long enough that she probably doesn't have any of the first type left and the second type would totally pull a "Weekend at Bernie's" in this situation.
Feinstein has one daughter and I'm a bit surprised she hasn't done something, but then again it seems like putting an elder in care involuntarily could be new legal territory when the elder is a Senator. Feinstein's daughter has been a judge herself. Maybe she's already decided it's not possible? Or not worth what it would do to her mother, given that Feinstein has decided she's not running for reelection? I'm not saying I agree with either one, just trying to guess.
Maybe Feinstein's daughter has priced nursing care and realized senate staff is free?
39 is true - Chernenko was only 73 when he died. Andropov was 69. But as Moby says, Russians age fast.
42.1 makes sense if you're limiting to the kind of senior staffers with any power. Junior staffers, by contrast, cycle through relatively quickly from a pool of bright-eyed idealist young people.
Just a little bummed that someone on Twitter thought it was just to name-and-shame all of her staffers without distinction.
29: Whether Ted K had resigned vs waited to die, there would have been a special election for his replacement, after a brief placeholder substitute. Funny story: this law was made in 2004 so that Mitt Romney wouldn't be able to appoint John Kerry's replacement for the rest of his term if Kerry were to win the Presidential election. I think it's actually the best system, except that since each state makes up its own rule, you end up with "the governor appoints the replacement unless the leg heads him off with a rule change" as in Kentucky. (And sadly I think Kentucky's new rule, replace with a person from the same party, is also better than "let's see who's governor at the moment", but again...state by state.)
Unfortunately at this point if Feinstein did resign the Rs have committed to not pass whatever thing is needed to let the Ds replace her on Judiciary*. So for judges the best thing seems to be wheel her in and let a Pelosi ally guide her hand to the right vote on judges. (Ominously Manchin had his first "No" on a Biden judicial appointee this past week.)
I suppose Ds could bypass such an egregious assault on comity and good faith by excluding it from being filibusteral, but Manchin (much less Sinema) would never allow such an attack in their view on, um, comity and good faith get through. World's greatest deliberative body!
I'm not sure exactly what or who he was subtweeting but last night Brian Schatz tweeted:
These people are nuts. They are way worse than you think. And the media covers for them by asking normal public policy questions as if they aren't uniquely dangerous. The way to report on this congress is to put that in context, not pretend this is just some rabble rousing.
And Boy howdy, is he correct. (I have a whole boring guest post on The Discourse prompted by the mostly fucked up media response to the Durham "Report" and the debt ceiling.
I read the most insanely infuriating take on the debt ceiling this morning, but it's my own fault for getting the dumb NYT daily inbox thing written by some smarmy churn-bot asshat. I can't even pretend it was part of the actual NYT.
46: Kennedy was diagnosed in May 2008, so that special election could have been in November, or soon after.
I don't know, but if his legs got all old-looking, I hope he got longer shorts.
So I wrote that pseudonymous water blog for all that time, remember?
This last year, I did a kinda big collaborative data project, looking at the race and gender of water district directors and water rights holders. (Here) Over the course of the year, it became clear that we couldn't put it in our official work product. But we were allowed to enter into a data challenge. Which we did, and it was available online for ten days before my management realized that entering the data challenge meant publishing it online. During those ten days others downloaded it, including the people hosting it at that link.
Someone at work mentioned it on LinkedIn and the next day, my work GIS account was frozen and I had an email saying that I may have subjected the department and ourselves to civil liability (for violating privacy (by compiling the names of elected officials and using an R plug-in to guess their race)) and that I was forbidden to work on it more, or discuss it inside or outside work, or post it anywhere. I am being investigated and waiting the results of the investigation. I am not very worried; all of our direct bosses fully knew of and support the project and are happy to say so.
Anyway, because of this they looked at my internet usage and now the whole executive team knows that I wrote that blog. I am sure it wasn't sophisticated surveillance. More that they just thought to look for the first time (I presume, maybe they've known all along.) So this is the funniest reversal for me. I always thought I would get in trouble for the blog itself. But now I am in trouble from something else and possibly the blog is protecting me (if they are worried to make a fuss about someone with an outlet and a following). Who knows?
Anyway, I feel done with that blog anyway and ready to do some real name blogging again on other things. Heebie, I need to look at your city blog, because that's what interests me right now. But I am in limbo at work and readying my union rep and looking for other work although I wouldn't feel safe going to anywhere in my same agency, so no forestry, fire, parks, conservancies, conservation. Or just try to drag this out three years and retire March 2026. Or tomorrow.
Wow, 52, is quite the story. Fingers crossed that you figure out a good place to go from here.
52: Yowza.
Yes! Let's be city blog buddies! Do you remember the url, or do you want me to email it to you?
Yeah, we'll see. I am somewhat confident that I won't get fired. Perhaps my worst case fallback is that I continue at my job, being sidelined. I've worried that they'll check my internet usage and hours, but my annual reviews are good and the union rep doesn't seem worried about that as much. At least one of my collaborators got scolded and bounced to a promotion elsewhere, which is how it is supposed to happen in stories with righteous endings.
I sent it to a yahoo address which I think is your real name. It appears we chatted in 2011 on that email address, so FINGERS CROSSED!
Wow. Sorry to hear, Megan, but good for unions keeping you from the worst of it.
I paid the full union dues all these years because I knew I'd need the union for this one day.
58: thanks!! I'm very proud of it.
This thread made me think of Konstantin Chernenko and Yuri Andropov,
Someone made a partially complete music video to go with "The ABCs of Dead Russian Leaders".
I'm pretty sure there is test-taking surveillance software that claims to do the things the JP Morgan software does. There's definitely software that takes pictures of people's rooms and backgrounds and then reports people as potential cheaters if certain things are found. There are various controversies over this stuff.
The posture/body language stuff sounds like a marketing team pitching the surveillance-curious. I guess it's a relief that some of the worst things that technology is supposed to be getting used for are features that probably don't work well if they exist.
The posture/body language stuff sounds like a marketing team pitching the surveillance-curious. I guess it's a relief that some of the worst things that technology is supposed to be getting used for are features that probably don't work well if they exist.
Yeah, I'm skeptical about some of the claims in the OP not because I don't think JP Morgan would want to do them but because I don't think AI technology is that good yet.
Proctorio doesn't claim to read body language (and it is an abomination)
52: !!
Which rule does it putatively break to estimate the ethnic backgrounds of rightsholders? And good luck.
26: I expect this sort of thing will be most useful to bad bosses when they make unfollowable rules, only actually look at the records of people they have a beef with on stupid grounds, and have an arglebargle of "tunable" software in the middle to make everything "objective". Then after a few of those cases workers police themselves; eventually the workers can get almost nothing done because of this. Granted I probably got this image from _Snow Crash_.
Mint the coin with Trump's face. No R can vote against it.
iirc the final chapter of "Parkinson's Law" is aboutvhow to encourage retirement, and it suggests a gradually intensifying programme of international business trips until the aged employee either retires or dies. Send Feinstein to Japan, then Egypt, then Alaska, then Florida, then Norway, then Sicily, then South Korea, then back to DC That'll sort her out one way or another.
The problem is that while she's still alive and in office we need here there in DC to cast votes.
The combination of the Feinstein situation, the general gerontocracy problem, and the lifetime unaccountable judge problem, is just so depressing. I thought we were supposed to have a political system that doesn't require death for succession.
I don't know what her acuity situation really was in 2018, but I wouldn't be shocked to learn that she was aware enough to feel that getting reelected as a repudiation of Trumpism was a worthwhile capstone of her career.
69 Teo is right in 70, but the bigger issue is that no one can send DF anywhere at all.
That's some high grade speculation about Pelosi's daughter's mission, but of course every source in the story also has an agenda, and it is the habit of journalism to speculate about the motives of people who aren't sources, but off no clues at all about the motives of its unnamed sources.
getting reelected as a repudiation of Trumpism
No one in California, even with nothing left in their brain but ego, would ever think of a US Senate election as a repudiation of Trumpism. The runner-up advancing to the general was Kevin de Leon, and if it had been a Republican she would have won by a similar or greater margin.
Also, although Rep Lee would get a boost from being appointed to the Senate, it seems pretty farfetched to say that this would destroy Rep Schiff's prospects. There are studies about this and iirc the incumbency advantage of appointees is somewhat less than electeds. Maybe he doesn't relish the prospect of running against a Black woman, but he's already doing that, and he already has a pitch to his backers about why he's the right guy for the next 6 years.
(Does appointment of Lee harm Porter more? Minivet?)
73 You were there and I wasn't, but my supposition is that Sen. F was running against Trump, and a whole lot of the people who voted for her were voting against Trump. Did she talk about de Leon in any sort of sustained way? Wasn't it all about Trump for her?
She was talking about Trump, yes, as that was a better vote-getter; doesn't mean her losing would have helped Trump, practically or symbolically, in anyone's eyes.
The red counties ended up voting for de Leon, not because of his politics but because she was the face of the Democratic Party. (1.35 million fewer people cast a Senate ballot than a gubernatorial ballot, so likely the clued-in Republicans just skipped it.)
74: It certainly wouldn't destroy Schiff's prospects, but it would be a blow and make everything more uncertain (Newsom hasn't endorsed anyone for Senate yet, for example). Pelosi didn't get where she is by hoping for the best.
Could you ask these people to stop emailing me? I'm not going to give money in a California Senate race and with all of the local issues we have, I resent being asked.
So I guess you're right that I phrased things overstrongly in 73. Yes, a number fo low-info Democratic voters might have thought voting for Feinstein was voting against Trump. No one who follows politics to even a small degree, let's say.
I confess that the only thing I remember about the 2018 CA Senate race was disappointment that Feinstein was still running. I didn't pay any attention to the campaigns and don't remember who I voted for. Probably Feinstein because there was no point in voting for De Leon, who hasn't turned out to be someone I'd wasnt to see run again.
OT: I know we aren't very interested in Ukraine but they have sort of just invaded Russia a bit, which seems to have caught everyone rather by surprise...
Sounds like a guest post just screaming to be written!
82 there are a few exceptions to that ajay. And I'm very much one. I've been thinking of what it how interesting it would have been if the B&T were still active during the war.
Pretty sure Moscow officially considers all Ukrainians to be Russian separatists.
Out of curiosity I ran Prigozhin's latest statement from Telegram on this incident through online translation. The most picturesque phrase in it was "Instead of assuring the security of the state, some are sawing grandmas (pilyat babki), others are playing around." It seems "grandmas" here is slang for money and he's talking about kickbacks.
Sorry, meant to close the [b] after grandmas.
Aren't we kind of just waiting for Putin to die or be overthrown?
Still seems unlikely, and if it happens, there are plenty of siloviki with similar (or worse) outlooks.
I don't think there's a way to get a stable Russia with a Liberal west-friendly leader. That has essentially never happened in history, Gorbachev aside. We have the normal 3 options:
1. Strong Russia led by expansionist xenophobic antisemitic autocrat
2. Weak Russia led by embittered revanchist xenophobic antisemitic autocrat
3. Time of Troubles 2: 2 Timely 2 Troubling