FirstCircle

Televisions that can stream platforms like Hulu or Max usually come loaded with technology that collects information on what viewers are watching, and buyers consent to have their viewing tracked when they open their new TV and click through terms of service agreements. Sometimes, data firms can connect those viewing habits to a voter’s phone or laptop via their IP address, promising a trove of information about an individual and the ability to track them across screens.

Other times, firms focus on dividing households into groups based on what they’re watching, how they use their TVs and how many campaign ads they’re seeing, which is a boon to political campaigns eager to target specific groups of voters. Connecting this data to voter files is increasingly a focus — a move that adds individual voting habits into the mix.

Another Boeing whistleblower has stepped forward, a Senate office announced hours before the company’s CEO is set to testify Tuesday in Washington for the first time since the door plug of a 737 Max 9 blew off during an Alaska Airlines flight in January.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s (D-Conn.) office identified the whistleblower as Sam Mohawk, a quality assurance inspector for the planemaker in Renton, Wash. Mohawk alleges Boeing improperly tracked and stored faulty parts, and that those parts were likely installed on airplanes including the 737 Max, which is manufactured at the Renton facility.

“Mohawk has also alleged that he has been told by his supervisors to conceal evidence from the FAA, and that he is being retaliated against as result,” according to a statement from the Senate Homeland Security’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

For most of his career at Spirit AeroSystems, Santiago Paredes worked at the end of the line. It was his job to catch production errors before the fuselage left the factory in Wichita, and Paredes caught a lot of them.

“It’s poor quality. Poor quality of work, just plain and simple,” he says, flipping through photos on his phone of the serious mistakes that he flagged during his dozen years as a quality inspector at Spirit.

Boeing is trying to rebuild its battered reputation for quality after a door plug blowout on a 737 Max in midair last January. The troubled plane-maker is in talks to buy Spirit AeroSystems, a key supplier that makes the fuselage for Boeing in Wichita, Kan.

“They say the correct things like they've always said,” said whistleblower Santiago Paredes. “But I know how they really are.” A clash with management

Paredes says he brought his concerns to his managers repeatedly. But they were more worried about getting fuselages out of the factory faster to keep up with Boeing’s backlog.

“They were upset for me finding defects,” Paredes said. “It was never the people that created the defects fault. It was my fault for finding it.”

It got to the point, Paredes says, that a manager ordered him in writing to essentially undercount the number of mistakes.

“They wanted me to basically falsify the documentation on the amount of defects that were being found,” Paredes said. “They were telling me to lie.”

Trump is a fascist. But the mainstream political press doesn’t want to say it. They want to act like 2024 is just another election year.

With their obsession with horse-race coverage, political reporters tend to judge what Trump says or does by whether his words and actions will help him politically. By doing so, the press is saying that Trump’s racism, corruption, criminality, and insane abuses of power matter only so far as his electability.

There are exceptions: major news organizations, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, have done some important stories about Trump’s dictatorial plans for a second term. But those investigative stories are drowned out by the chorus of horse-race stories — sometimes published on the same days and by the same news organizations behind more substantial coverage.

The media is sleepwalking.

I’ve often wondered how the press, both in Germany and around the world, failed to see Hitler for the monster that he was before he gained power. After Trump, I think I understand.

The bodies of four Israeli hostages were recovered from Gaza. The Israeli government intensified its attacks in the northern and southern parts of the strip, five Israeli soldiers were killed and seven more were injured by friendly fire in Jabalia, and an estimated 800,000 Palestinians have fled Rafah. The Rafah crossing remained closed, and Egypt blamed Israel for blocking aid from entering Gaza. In the West Bank, Israeli settlers looted aid trucks, destroyed food packages, and torched vehicles that they mistakenly believed were delivering aid to Palestinians, injuring drivers, two Israeli officers, and a soldier. “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance,” the U.S. State Department said in a report, which concluded both that Israel likely violated international law using American weapons and that there was no hard evidence that Israel violated international law. The first shipment of aid arrived through a U.S.-made floating pier off the coast of Gaza, which cost about $320 million to build. “One cabinet sends humanitarian aid convoys and the other burns them,” the Israel opposition leader Yair Lapid posted on X, criticizing Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.14 Seventeen American doctors were evacuated from a Rafah hospital, but at least three refused to leave, and another U.S. government official resigned over Biden’s response to the war. “Encourage the voluntary departure of Gaza’s residents … It is ethical! It is rational! It is right! It is the truth!” Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir said at a rally attended by thousands, including several other ministers. After pausing a single shipment of bombs, the United States government announced another $1 billion in military aid to Israel. The International Criminal Court’s prosecutor has requested arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and three Hamas leaders. At a bar in Kyiv, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken performed “Rockin’ in the Free World” by Neil Young a day before announcing $2 billion in foreign aid to Ukraine. “The United States is with you, so much of the world is with you. And they’re fighting, not just for Ukraine but for the free world,” he said from the stage. “What the United States performs for the free world is not rock ’n’ roll, but some other music similar to Russian chanson,” said a Ukrainian lawmaker and former diplomat.

Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, and its foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, died in a helicopter crash, and Robert Fico, the Slovakian prime minister, was hospitalized after being shot multiple times. France declared a state of emergency in New Caledonia after a clash between voting-reform protesters and security forces in which four people were killed and more than 300 were injured. At New York University, pro-Palestine student protesters were required to complete a 49-page disciplinary workbook that included a section inspired by an episode of The Simpsons in which Lisa cheats on a test. “What, if anything, could Lisa have done or thought about to make better decisions?” the workbook asked. Columbia University faculty members passed a no-confidence vote against President Nemat Shafik over her response to student protests, and Sonoma State University’s president, Mike Lee, announced his early retirement after being placed on leave for publicizing an agreement with protesters via email. At their graduation ceremonies, Morehouse College students turned their backs on Biden, and Duke University students walked out on Jerry Seinfeld. Democratic Senator Bob Menendez blamed his wife for bribery charges at his corruption trial, and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito blamed his wife for displaying an upside-down American flag, a symbol associated with the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” movement and the January 6 insurrection, at their home in Virginia days before Biden’s inauguration. “Her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother,” said the Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker of his wife at a commencement speech at Benedictine College before encouraging young women to give up on having careers. Sixteen women accused the magician David Copperfield of sexual assault, and Brett Kavanaugh beat other justices in a three-mile race in Washington, D.C.

Buckingham Palace unveiled King Charles III’s first official portrait since his coronation. “It was a bit of a shock—all that red, dripped here and there and scrubbed on and scrubbed off,” one artist said of the painting, adding, “Is it the blood that has been shed as a result of British colonialism for centuries?” “Yes, you’ve got him,” was Queen Camilla’s response to the work. In Taiwan, MPs brawled after spending more than 10 hours debating legislative reforms; they pulled, shoved, punched, and tackled each other, and one ran off with the bill. Snakes bit a West Virginia politician, delayed a train in Tokyo, crashed a wedding in Arizona, and invaded an Indy 500 track, and an Australian woman chose to share her car with a red-bellied black snake after several removal attempts failed. In Germany, the world’s oldest sloth turned 54. A dog named Luna was awarded a New York City Council citation for killing more than 200 rats, and a cat named Max received a doctorate in “Litter-ature” from Vermont State University. Seven hundred and six Kyles in Kyle, Texas, failed a second attempt to break the world record for the largest same-name gathering, and more than 3,000 people in dinosaur costumes in Drumheller, Alberta, didn’t receive a Guinness World Record; organizers “weren’t entirely prepared for that many people to come.” The New York–Dublin Portal was shut down after an OnlyFans model flashed it. “I thought the people of Dublin deserved to see my two New York, homegrown potatoes,” she said in an Instagram video. In Texas, 50,000 pounds of potatoes were given away after an anonymous donation.

Service charges; resort fees; "surcharge" add-ons: If you've been startled by unexpected fees when you pay your check at a restaurant — or book a hotel room or buy a ticket to a game, you're far from alone. But if you live in California, change is coming. A new state law requiring price transparency is set to take effect in July.

"The law is simple: the price you see is the price you pay," Attorney General Rob Bonta said on Wednesday, as his office issued long-awaited guidance about a law that applies to thousands of businesses in a wide range of sectors.

Restaurant owners like Laurie Thomas, who heads the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, say the changes will bring higher prices and sticker shock, which could then raise a psychological hurdle in customers' dining habits. That, in turn, will hurt restaurants and their workers, she warns.

"If it's in the core price of the menu, there will be a pullback" in patrons' spending, she told NPR shortly before the attorney general released the guidelines. "There are some people, I think, that are hoping that the restaurants will just absorb that cost, because we've seen people say, 'Oh, it's too expensive with the service charge.' "

Restaurant Association head thinks it's perfectly OK to mislead customers into thinking that prices are lower than they actually are, and gouge them after they've consumed/used the product. Because having knowledge of true prices would cause some customers to make informed decisions that might hurt sales. What other product information could be withheld to boost sales? What product misinformation could be provided to get those customers to "yes"?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/11456897

Congressman Adam Smith says ‘totalitarian’ protesters are ‘trying to silence anyone who dares to disagree with them’

Protesters calling for Israel to cease fire in its war with Hamas who have disrupted US public events and infrastructure are practicing “leftwing fascism” or “leftwing totalitarianism”, a senior US House Democrat said, adding that such protesters are “challenging representative democracy” and should be arrested.

“Intimidation is the tactic,” said Adam Smith of Washington state, the ranking Democrat on the House armed services committee. “Intimidation and an effort to silence opposition … I don’t know if there’s such a thing as leftwing fascism. If you want to just call it leftwing totalitarianism, then that’s what it is. It is a direct challenge to representative democracy now.”

A resolution called for ending the ability to vote for U.S. senators. Instead, senators would get appointed by state legislatures, as it generally worked 110 years ago prior to the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913.

“We are devolving into a democracy, because congressmen and senators are elected by the same pool,” was how one GOP delegate put it to the convention. “We do not want to be a democracy.”

Members of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol have warned America for three years to take former President Donald Trump at his word.

Now, as Trump is poised to win the Republican presidential nomination, his criminal trials face delays that could stall them past Election Day, and his rhetoric grows increasingly authoritarian, some of those lawmakers find themselves following their own advice.

In mid-March, Trump said on social media that the committee members should be jailed. In December he vowed to be a dictator on “day one.” In August, he said he would “have no choice” but to lock up his political opponents.

“If he intends to eliminate our constitutional system and start arresting his political enemies, I guess I would be on that list,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose). “One thing I did learn on the committee is to pay attention and listen to what Trump says, because he means it.”

Lofgren added that she doesn’t yet have a plan in place to thwart potential retribution by Trump. But Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), who has long been a burr in Trump’s side, said he’s having “real-time conversations” with his staff about how to make sure he stays safe if Trump follows through on his threats.

“We’re taking this seriously, because we have to,” Schiff said. “We’ve seen this movie before … and how perilous it is to ignore what someone is saying when they say they want to be a dictator.”