US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9352

On November 29 2017 09:44 Danglars wrote:
We need a conclusion with Manafort & Flynn charged right before the 2018 election. Those fireworks would be extreme.

Republican efforts to overhaul the U.S. tax code gained momentum Tuesday when two key Senate Republicans expressed optimism about supporting the bill and a congressional committee advanced the measure for a vote on the Senate floor later this week.

Republican progress toward overhauling the nation’s tax code came while President Donald Trump squabbled with Democrats over spending legislation needed to prevent a government shutdown next month. The Senate Budget Committee approved the tax measure, 12-11, along party lines.

Mr. Trump in a twitter post on Tuesday morning dismissed striking a deal with congressional Democratic leaders Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California and Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York. Both lawmakers then skipped a meeting in the afternoon with Republican congressional leaders and the GOP president to discuss the impasse.

Uber had a team of employees dedicated to spying on rival companies and “impeding” legal investigations into the company, a former employee testified in federal court Tuesday.

The dramatic public testimony, on the eve of jury selection for the hotly anticipated civil trial over allegations that Uber stole trade secrets from Google’s self-driving car spinoff Waymo, came after it was revealed that Uber had withheld evidence, leading Judge William Alsup to delay the the trial indefinitely.

Earlier this year, the attorney for Richard Jacobs, a former Uber employee, had sent a letter to Uber’s in-house counsel with his allegations about the special group. But Uber had not provided the letter to Waymo as part of legal discovery before the start of the trial. On November 22, federal prosecutors, who are conducting a separate investigation, alerted the judge to the existence of the letter.

“If even half of what’s in that letter is true, it would be a huge injustice to force Waymo to go to trial” as scheduled, Judge Alsup said.

Jacobs was a manager of global intelligence at Uber from March 2016 until April 2017. After he left the company, his attorney sent a 37-page letter to Uber’s in-house attorney detailing his concerns about potentially criminal or unethical activities within Uber’s “strategic services group” and “marketplace analytics” teams.

Uber and Jacobs reached a $4.5m settlement, which included a non-disparagement clause and a one-year consulting gig for Jacobs to help Uber “root out bad behavior”, Jacobs said.

Marketplace analytics “exists expressly for the purpose of acquiring trade secrets, code base and competitive intelligence”, the letter states, though Jacobs said under questioning that the letter’s language was “hyperbolic”.

But, he said, the group did engage in scouring code repository GitHub to find “spilled data” from rival firms, and engaged in efforts to obtain information about drivers for rival ride-hailing companies overseas.

“I did not believe it was patently illegal,” Jacobs said. “I had questions about the ethics of it. Because of my personal ethics, it felt overly aggressive and invasive.”

Jacobs also described a team within Uber that worked to “impede, obstruct or influence” investigations into the company due to various lawsuits. Companies are required to preserve and produce documents that could be evidence in litigation or criminal investigations. The practices described by Jacobs would allow the company to engage in questionable behavior without creating a paper trail.

One tactic was the use of “non-attributable devices” to communicate, Jacobs testified. Uber had a third-party contractor purchase laptop computers and mobile wifi devices, which employees could use to communicate without leaving traces on Uber’s servers. The team also urged employees to use the ephemeral and encrypted messaging app Wickr, he said.

Jacob said that such practices were encouraged by Craig Clark, who was the legal director for security and law enforcement at Uber until last week. Clark was one of two employees fired by Uber over his role in concealing a security breach affecting 57 million customers and drivers for over a year. The other was Joe Sullivan, the former chief security officer, whom Jacob said also used the ephemeral messaging app.

The letter also included allegations that Jacobs repudiated on the stand, saying that he had only reviewed it for 20 minutes before his attorney sent it. Among those was the allegation that “Uber used the marketplace analytics team to steal trade secrets at least from Waymo in the United States,” which Jacobs said he did not “stand by”.

Jacobs said the team was primarily used overseas, but that it had operated domestically to “research protest and threat groups targeting Uber”.

Jacobs also alleged in his letter that Uber had hired an employee, Ed Russo, to develop its intelligence program by recruiting human sources within competitive firms. Jacobs said that he was at a presentation where Russo discussed using “ex-CIA field operatives skilled in counter surveillance” to ensure the secrecy of chief executive Travis Kalanick’s meetings with a potential acquisition target.

Russo, a senior risk and threat analyst at Uber who was described as a “former government employee”, also testified at the hearing Tuesday and denied many of Jacobs’ allegations.

“It’s never been my role to engage in the theft of trade secrets. We never recruited sources from within competitive organizations,” Russo testified. Russo said that the anecdote about Kalanick’s secret meetings was actually drawn from a August 2016 article by Bloomberg, and that he had never mentioned ex-CIA field operatives.

Uber did not respond to questions from the Guardian about the specifics of Jacobs’ allegations.

“None of the testimony today changes the merits of the case,” Uber spokeswoman Chelsea Kohler said in a statement. “Jacobs himself said on the stand today that he was not aware of any Waymo trade secrets being stolen.”

In a statement, a spokeswoman for Waymo called the new evidence “significant and troubling” and welcomed the trial delay as an “opportunity to fully investigate this new, highly relevant information”.

Waymo sued Uber in February, alleging that the ride-hail company’s acquisition of self-driving startup Otto was actually a scheme to acquire secrets stolen from Waymo by its former employees. Judge Alsup referred the case to the US attorney’s office in May – a recommendation that federal prosecutors begin a criminal investigation.

In recent months, they say, Mr. Trump has used closed-door conversations to question the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate…

One senator who listened as the president revived his doubts about Mr. Obama’s birth certificate chuckled on Tuesday as recalled the conversation. The president, he said, has had a hard time letting go of his claim that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States. The senator asked not to be named to discuss private conversations.

On November 29 2017 08:12 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

The tech world is too busy chasing unicorns and ICO's to worry about trivialities like profitability and corporate governance.

Occasionally it will work out, often it will not.

Two years ago, Margaret O'Neill brought her 5-year-old daughter to Children's Hospital Colorado because the band of tissue that connected her tongue to the floor of her mouth was too tight. The condition, called being literally "tongue-tied," made it hard for the girl to make "th" sounds.

It's a common problem with a simple fix: an outpatient procedure to snip the tissue.

During a preoperative visit, the surgeon offered to throw in a surprising perk. Should we pierce her ears while she is under?

O'Neill's first thought was that her daughter seemed a bit young to have her ears pierced. Her second: Why was a surgeon offering to do this? Wasn't that something done for free at the mall with the purchase of a starter set of earrings?

"That's so funny," O'Neill recalled saying. "I didn't think you did ear piercings."

The surgeon, Peggy Kelley, told her it could be a nice thing for a child, O'Neill said. All she had to do is bring earrings on the day of the operation. O'Neill agreed, assuming it would be free.

Her daughter emerged from surgery with her tongue newly freed and a pair of small gold stars in her ears.

Only months later did O'Neill discover the cost for this extracurricular work: $1,877.86 for "operating room services" related to the ear piercing — a fee her insurer was unwilling to pay.

At first, O'Neill assumed the bill was a mistake. Her daughter hadn't needed her ears pierced, and O'Neill would never have agreed to it if she had known the cost. She complained in phone calls and in writing.

The hospital wouldn't budge. In fact, O'Neill said it dug in, telling her to pay up or it would send the bill to collections. The situation was "absurd," she said.

"There are a lot of things we'd pay extra for a doctor to do," she said. "This is not one of them."

Kelley and the hospital declined to comment to ProPublica about the ear piercing.

Surgical ear piercings are rare, according to Health Care Cost Institute, a nonprofit that maintains a database of commercial health insurance claims. The institute could only find a few dozen possible cases a year in its vast cache of billing data. But O'Neill's case is a vivid example of health care waste known as overuse.

Into this category fall things like unnecessary tests, higher-than-needed levels of care or surgeries that have proven ineffective.

Wasteful use of medical care has "become so normalized that I don't think people in the system see it," said Dr. Vikas Saini, president of the Lown Institute, a Boston think tank focused on making health care more effective, affordable and just. "We need more serious studies of what these practices are."

Experts estimate the U.S. health care system wastes $765 billion annually — about a quarter of all the money that is spent. Of that, an estimated $210 billion goes to unnecessary or needlessly expensive care, according to a 2012 report by the National Academy of Medicine.

ProPublica has been documenting the ways waste is baked into the system. Hospitals throw away new supplies, and nursing homes discard still-potent medication. Drugmakers combine cheap ingredients to create expensive specialty pills, and arbitrary drug expiration dates force hospitals and pharmacies to toss valuable drugs.

We also reported how drug companies make oversize eyedrops and vials of cancer drugs, forcing patients to pay for medication they are unable to use. In response, a group of U.S. senators introduced a bill this month to reduce what they called "colossal and completely preventable waste."

But any discussion of waste needs to look how health care dollars are thrown away on procedures and care that patients don't need — and how hard it is to stop it.

Just ask Christina Arenas.

Arenas, 34, has a history of noncancerous cysts in her breasts, so last summer when her gynecologist found some lumps in her breast and sent her for an ultrasound to rule out cancer, she wasn't worried.

But on the day of scan, the sonographer started the ultrasound, then stopped to consult a radiologist. They told her she needed a mammogram before the ultrasound could be done.

Arenas, an attorney who is married to a doctor, told them she didn't want a mammogram. She didn't want to be exposed to the radiation or pay for the procedure. But sitting on the table in a hospital gown, she didn't have much leverage to negotiate.

So, she agreed to a mammogram, followed by an ultrasound. The findings: no cancer. As Arenas suspected, she had cysts, fluid-filled sacs that are common in women her age.

The radiologist told her to come back in two weeks so they could drain the cysts with a needle, guided by yet another ultrasound. But when she returned she got two ultrasounds: One before the procedure and another as part of it.

The radiologist then sent the fluid from the cysts to pathology to test it for cancer. That test confirmed — again — that there wasn't any cancer. Her insurance whittled the bills down to $2,361, most of which she had to pay herself because of her insurance plan.

Arenas didn't like paying for something she didn't think she needed and resented the loss of control. "It was just kind of, 'Take it or leave it.' The whole thing. You had no choice as to your own care."

Arenas, sure she had been given care she didn't need, discussed it with one of her husband's friends who is a gynecologist. She learned the process could have been more simple and affordable.

Arenas complained to The George Washington Medical Faculty Associates, the large Washington, D.C., doctor group that provided her treatment. Her request to have the bill reduced was denied. Then bill collectors got involved, so she demanded a refund and threatened legal action.

On November 29 2017 13:28 Plansix wrote:
Piece of shit conservative blogger funded by god knows who to spread their bile across college campuses. Clearly he couldn't handle a little free speech being thrown back at him.