Links - 27th June 2019 (1)

I Testified Before Congress About Hate Crimes and the Alt-Right. Here’s What Happened. - "Several of them essentially conceded that the FBI's hate crime statistics do not, in fact, provide reliable evidence of a significant spike in hate crimes. Bro—who was credible, well-informed, and extremely friendly—pushed back on one representative's suggestion that perhaps local municipalities should be compelled by the federal government to report hate crime data. In general, the panelists seemed to understand that not all white nationalist activity can be properly considered something for the authorities to handle, given First Amendment protections for hateful speech. In my remarks, I tried to get across the point that the alt-right is a small fringe group, and that white nationalists are responsible for a relatively small number of murders relative to the overall violent crime rate."

Missing Pregnant Chicago Teen Marlen Ochoa-Uriostegui Found Slain, Her Baby Ripped From Her Womb - "The mystery over the fate of a 19-year-old pregnant Chicago teen missing for the past three weeks took a dark turn on Wednesday when authorities announced she’d been found slain, with her baby cut out of her womb, and stuffed into a garbage can in the yard of a woman who’d allegedly offered her free baby clothes online. The baby of Marlen Ochoa-Uriostegui is said to be in critical condition at a local hospital after being passed off as the 46-year-old woman's child late last month, immediately after the teenager was reported missing at nine months pregnant"

Using Amino Acids to Identify Pornographic Images

How the EU hurts the world’s poorest - "Thanks to the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, which heavily subsidises EU farmers, Africa’s markets are flooded with their cheap excess produce. If you go to any African market, you can buy all kinds of European produce sold at very, very cheap prices. This is driving African farmers out of the market. At the same time, the EU imposes strict limitations on what African countries can export to the European market. In particular, African farmers cannot export value-added goods. So if a farmer in Ghana is producing cocoa, or a farmer in Kenya is producing coffee, they can perhaps get less than a dollar for their product as they have to export it raw. Only a fraction of the money you pay for a jar of coffee goes to an African farmer. The value-added goods, such as processed coffee, are then produced in Europe. Germany, especially, has been doing a lot of harm... The UK and the EU use their influence selectively to impose economic and diplomatic sanctions on African countries. We should follow a consistent policy. We impose sanctions on African countries but we are happy to trade with other human-rights abusers like Saudi Arabia. One danger is that these sanctions are driving African countries closer and closer into the arms of the Chinese. This is a real own goal. Sanctions are a blunt instrument. The leaders responsible for human-rights abuses are protected. They still have access to the best lifestyles money can buy. Their money is stashed away in British and other foreign banks. Sanctions don’t touch them at all. Instead, they hit the poorest hardest... Each time I visit Africa, I see conditions getting worse. I never see any sign of British foreign aid doing much. Instead, I see big houses and nice cars, which all belong to local foreign-aid managers and government workers... Foreign aid was supposed to achieve two objectives: reduce poverty and buy influence. It has done neither. Since independence some five decades ago, the West has given African countries around £600 billion in aid, according to the World Bank. But parts of the continent are getting poorer, hungrier and angrier. Seven of the UN’s 15 peacekeeping missions are in Africa. According to the World Bank, by 2030 nine in 10 of the poorest people in the world will live in Africa.At the same time, Africa is virtually becoming a neo-colony of the NGOs. Hundreds of thousands of NGOs have taken over the role of states. NGOs provide basic needs like education, health, water, food and security. When it comes to buying influence, African leaders are very happy to receive Western aid money for their own personal and political reasons. But they are not paying attention to the UK or the West anymore. Foreign aid is widely seen as a Western conspiracy to keep Africa poor.Instead, African countries are working with China... I’m aware that if anyone else raises these issues they will be accused of being racist. But nobody can accuse me, an African, of being racist against my own people! Instead of throwing good money after bad, what I want is for Africa to be given the opportunity to trade itself out of poverty."

Verified Twitter Journalist Threatens to Contact Man’s Employer Because He Did the ‘OK’ Hand Sign - "Finnish Twitter user Iisak Selin responded to a tweet by journalist David MacDougall with a photo of himself using the hand gesture.MacDougall responded by tweeting, “Hi Iisak – Do you have a job? I wonder what your employers think of you making a sign that has been co-opted by white supremacists and racists? Would be interesting to find out. Or maybe a future employer is interested…”... I wonder when MacDougall and his ilk will stop abusing their platforms to threaten to doxx people simply because they don’t like their politics and do some actual journalism."
Of course, if you are upset at the media you're undermining democracy

Why we misread Suu Kyi and her refusal to demonise the Burmese Army - "It is somewhat understood that she is not fully in charge of the country’s administration, given the outsized constitutional powers available to the military, but it seems almost inexplicable why she wouldn’t stand atop a rostrum and use the very large microphone the world has handed her, to decry the generals. Instead of calling them murderers and rapists, she chooses to work with them, appoint some of them to important positions and generally behave as though she was among friends when she is with men in uniform... In her moral universe, courage is the freedom from fear, which she defines as the freedom from hostility, or the freedom from the need to hate. It is a courage that makes it possible to sit next to someone, instead of standing up to them... This idea, of not holding any one irredeemable, is central to the Buddhist conception of metta, the unbounded, unconditional loving-kindness for all fellow beings. Metta demands a breadth of compassion that is able to separate a person from their deeds. To see a murderer only as a murderer is to make forgiveness impossible. Without forgiveness, there can be no compassion, and the person remains outside the circle of metta. It is a profound conviction in the inherent goodness of people and a commitment to the power of love as an agent of social change. The politics of metta may appear at first glance as too high-minded and divorced from the gruesome realities on the ground but, in fact, Suu Kyi's willingness to deal with the army without any baggage allows the space for practical, hard-nosed politics. Suu Kyi has sought to appoint former generals to positions that help her to navigate the trenchant obstructions built into parliamentary processes and use their talent and networks to take forward policy changes"

Saeed Noori sentenced to life in prison - "A mother whose car was used by her ISIS sympathiser son to mow down pedestrians in Melbourne collapsed in court as he was sentenced to life in prison... Noori came to Australia from Afghanistan as a refugee in 2004, becoming an Australian citizen two years later.Justice Hollingworth noted Noori's mental health issues, including schizophrenia, which were compounded by years of heavy drug use and a gambling addiction."What happened was not due to a drug-induced psychosis. There is nothing specific in the days leading up that seems to have triggered your particular actions that day," she told Noori."The offending was entirely unprovoked, and displayed a callous disregard for the sanctity of human life."Justice Hollingworth said Noori was motivated by beliefs that he was being spied on by ASIO, telling police the Australian government was racist."
At least it's not "mental illness"

How can I delete Yahoo emails by year, like for the whole (past) year? - Quora - "If you are in the new yahoo mail interface, in the search box, hit any key and you'll see a drop down appear.At the lower right is an Advanced Search link. Click that.In the window that pops up, change the date drop down to Custom Date and two new fields will appear. Fill them in with the date range, then click search mail.Select all the mail you want and hit delete as you normally would.You can also just type in to the search box:after:”2017/01/01″ before:”2018/01/01″For example, to search for all mail received in 2017."
Aka How to display Yahoo emails by date instead of scrolling infinitely

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Thursday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "I spoke to Ashkan Sultani about this. He's the former Chief Technologist of the Federal Trade Commission. And here's what he said.
'I think Facebook has consistently aggressively violated consumer privacy. And I believe at least in the US, it's a calculated decision. It's akin to double parking, being comfortable with the fines of a parking ticket because you know you'd make more on say the package delivery. I think the company is prioritize growth at any cost’"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Thursday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "‘This document was, a lot of it was about this rather fantastic scifi type thing of urban transportation. Uber's selling itself as the future of urban transportation.’
‘Well, when you're trying to sell a roughly $10 billion loss making business for a total value of $80 billion, you need a story. And that story involves many strands, which are indeed sci fi and one of them is clearly autonomous driving, which is many years in the future for all sorts of societal, financial and technical reasons.’
‘I take it Richard, you wouldn't be buying the shares.’
‘Well, I think that if you take a look at the Lyft IPO, which has just gone out about a month ago, it's down about 25%, since IPO. And I think that the reality is you also need to realize that for investors, they're looking at this artificial scarcity. Uber and Lyft are only floating about 10% of its shares. So were the entirety of the company to be floated, could the market absorb the kind of volume of money that required entirely funding an $80 million IPO?’...
‘There were skeptics around Facebook, there were skeptics around Google and Amazon and both, and all three of those have proven to be wildly successful, and rewarded those who bought the shares. But you didn't think Uber fits that description?’
‘Well, Uber has many issues in its past, which are still haunting it today. There were major protests in 10 US cities and London yesterday about driver pay. It relies on labor arbitrage. And, and it needs to source a constant stream of drivers to keep its business going.’...
‘You think they’re just wildly optimistic about the potential for ride sharing and Uber Eats to grow at the scale they're talking about’
‘Yes, I think there's one classic error that's made in in looking at companies like Uber, which is extrapolating the behavior of a small cohort of relatively wealthy users to the entire market. And assuming that you can replace a 100 year tradition of car ownership and usage with ride sharing, and it could end up proving to be the top of a very frothy tech market when you see the reaction to Uber’s shares’"

Uber’s IPO prospectus for dummies: This jargon-free translation says i - "An account by the name of “horsesatemymoney” provided this analysis:
Abbreviated version of prospectus
We don’t make money
We probably will never make money
Our current business relies on shareholders to fund cheap cab rides in the hope that regulators will let us become a monopoly and charge whatever we want but the regulators are not playing along
We have therefore spent more money expanding into other low margin highly competitive activities like food delivery or trucking despite there being lots of specialist logistics firms so not obvious how we are going to make any money there either
We hope in the future there will be driverless cars and that we can then make money because no drivers but other people are developing them too
We have annoyed lots of regulators so we have lots of disputes and problems with regulators
We don’t pay much tax and have done lots of aggressive tax planning and so we have lots of disputes and problems with tax authorities
We don’t employ anyone (or we say we don’t) but we have lots of de facto employees and so we have lots of disputes and problems with drivers and employment tribunals
We don’t actually own many assets because we managed to get our drivers to provide their own cars
We have an app but other cab companies also have apps
Current investors want to get out and so we hope you will buy some shares anyway because you have heard of us also we need more money to fund the businesses that don’t make money
We are expanding into more business lines that don’t make money and we need more money to fund those
We are really big and you have heard of us plus we say we are a tech disruptor so don’t worry that we make no money it will all be great because you will be an Uber investor"