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upstart writes:

Federal gig worker proposal tanks Uber, Lyft and DoorDash stocks:

The stock prices of Uber, Lyft and DoorDash slid on Tuesday after the Department of Labor announced proposed changes to how workers should be classified. The prospective guidance is intended to "combat employee misclassification," the federal agency said in a statement.

Soon after, Uber's share price dropped by more than 10% to $24.61, while Lyft's tanked more than 12% to $11.22 and DoorDash's fell more than 5% to $44.98 at the time of writing.

The rule could make it easier for contractors to gain full employment status if they are "economically dependent" on a company. However, the scope of the proposal itself would be limited to areas such as minimum wage enforcement.

Uber, Lyft and DoorDash depend extensively upon gig workers, who haul people and meals around on their behalf but do not receive many hard-won benefits of employment — such as employer contributions toward their Social Security and Medicare taxes. Despite pressure from labor organizers and some lawmakers, some tech firms have fought to continue classifying their workers as independent contractors, arguing the status benefits their businesses, other local businesses and workers themselves.

Ride-hail and meal-delivery companies say that changing how gig workers are classified would threaten their businesses, yet these firms — Uber, Lyft and DoorDash — have also posted hefty net losses under the status quo.

Attempts to alter gig worker classification in the U.S. include a recently rejected ballot measure in Massachusetts, which could have explicitly defined such workers as independent contractors.

In California, an effort to secure benefits for gig workers — AB-5 — passed in 2019. A year later, app-based gig workers in California were excluded from the law via Proposition 22, which itself was deemed unconstitutional in the state in 2021. However, app-based gig companies have appealed that ruling and continue to operate in California under the guidance of Prop 22. (Every day is a winding road.)

[...] The Labor Department's proposal is subject to a public comment period, which runs from from October 13 to November 28.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Los Angeles Sheriff's Department Goes Completely Rogue, Blocks Inspector General's Access To Files, Facilities:

Los Angeles Sheriff's Department Goes Completely Rogue, Blocks Inspector General's Access To Files, Facilities

The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department has been problematic pretty much ever since its inception. Its prior iteration — headed up by Sheriff Lee Baca — was an abhorrent mess. The LASD was (and still is!) home to gangs formed by deputies — cliques that encouraged members to violate rights and abuse those incarcerated in the county jail. Baca's department became infamous for its internal corruption, something manifested by its obstruction of federal investigations and rogue jailhouse informant program.

Enter Sheriff Alex Villanueva. Elected after promising to clean up the troubled department, Villanueva soon showed he was more interested in shielding his officers from public scrutiny and ignoring the internal rot that had turned the agency into a menace to Los Angeles society.

The new sheriff created a handpicked "Public Integrity Unit," an entity whose name seemed to indicate Villanueva would be cleaning up the department. Shortly thereafter it became apparent the unit was far more interested in targeting the department's critics in the Los Angeles government.

Villanueva only amped things from there. He threatened county leaders with defamation suits for continuing to (accurately) portraying the department as infested with cliques of rogue deputies. He also sent his officers out to raid the homes of two prominent critics involved in civilian oversight of the department under the pretense the LASD was investigating fraudulent acquisition of county contracts.

With members of the county's civilian oversight sufficiently cowed by legal threats, non-compliance, and seizure of their electronic devices, the sheriff has moved on to shutting down the internal remnants of LASD accountability, as Alene Tchekmedyian reports for the Los Angeles Times.

This astounding display of power follows Villanueva's (unfounded) assertions that IG Huntsman is a "Holocaust denier" and his still-unproven claim that the Inspector General has committed crimes of his own, such as "stealing" confidential files on LASD officials from the department. The Inspector General has responded his access was limited to his office's investigations and was lawfully obtained.

This suggests the LASD is doing nothing more than concocting criminal charges to bypass internal and external oversight — an impression that isn't helped by the LASD's failure to move forward with charges against the Inspector General, despite making these claims for more than three years.

Original Submission

Micron’s Record-Setting 1.5TB microSD Card Stores 4 Months of Video

Kioxia Has ‘Working Prototypes’ of the World’s First 2TB microSD Card

Kioxia says that it was able to finally make the SD Association’s standard a reality thanks to what it describes as “proprietary manufacturing technology.” The new cards are built by stacking sixteen, one terabit dies of 3D flash memory at a maximum thickness of 0.8mm at the die mounting area.

[...] Kioxia says it has created a working prototype and is ready to move it to mass production, but it doesn’t plan to do so until 2023.

I didn't notice the 1.5 TB announcement, but it doesn't look like it is available for purchase yet. I looked up microsd after seeing that the Razer Edge lists support for 2 TB microSD cards. It's not unheard of for the vendor to list the SDXC maximum as what a device supports, but it seemed like the right time.

Tulsi Gabbard Continues to Cause Problems Within the Democrat Party After Leaving It
By Brandon Morse | 3:45 PM on October 13, 2022

Former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard haunts the Democrat Party and it would appear that her exit is causing issues to arise within the voter base. Not only does her shadow follow Kamala Harris, but it’s also now starting to threaten AOC who recently was shouted down at her own town hall for not following Gabbard’s example with the Ukraine war.

It would appear that Gabbard’s effect on the party is only growing despite the DNC’s best efforts to unperson her. Let’s talk about it more in my latest video.

Be sure to like the video and subscribe!

https://redstate.com/brandon_morse/2022/10/13/tulsi-gabbard-continues-to-cause-problems-within-the-democrat-party-after-leaving-it-n642730

Direct link to video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCQbpU52nvM

Wake, not woke.

EDIT: I should have linked to the story about Tulsi leaving the party. https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2022-10-11/tulsi-gabbard-leaves-democratic-party-elitist-cabal

ODROID-H3 and ODROID-H3+ SBC’s feature Intel Celeron N5105, Pentium N6005 processor

Both new SBCs support up to 64GB RAM, significantly faster Intel UHD graphics, an M.2 PCIe Gen 3 socket, and keep the same port assignment with two 2.5GbE ports, two SATA ports, as well as two USB 3.0 and two US 2.0 ports.

[...] Both boards can be purchased now with the ODROID-H3 SBC going for $129 and the ODROID-H3+ model selling for $165.

The previous J4105 and J4115 CPUs that ODROID-H2(+) used had only 12 graphics execution units. N5105 has 24 EUs, N6005 has 32 EUs.

I want to see 8-core Alder Lake-N hit the market first but these could be an attractive option for some users.

quietus writes:

We've talked a bit, in the past, about the possibility of a nuclear bomb signal/demonstration by Russia, in its conflict with Ukraine and the West. The thought there has always been about a demonstration explosion, probably with a low-yield weapon, on or off the battlefield, or a nuclear power plant 'incident'.

Now, Global Times, a mouthpiece for the more right-wing within China's CCP, has described an alternative scenario. That scenario is provocatively titled Note to the US - a nuclear war can be won by rivals

The scenario looks simple: detonating one or multiple nuclear bombs in the stratosphere, creating an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), that would cause nationwide electrical grid anomalies, cascading systems failures, and ultimately unravel the fabric of American society. (Or, more likely, European society -- but then the Global Times is rather obsessed with the US, and counts the EU among future third-world nations anyway.)

Even non-state and rogue state actors could defeat the US with only a small number of EMP weapons, is noted, and one of the advantages of such an attack is that attribution is rather hard to do:

At least 15 nations can access low earth orbit, and many have access to geosynchronous orbit. The real nature of every object launched cannot be known with certainty. Nuclear weapons can also be concealed in and called down from the clutter of the super-synchronous graveyard orbit for surprise use.

And thus the MAD aspect is removed from nuclear weapons, argues Global Times: it's hard to bomb the real culprit back to the Stone Age, if you don't know who to blame in the first place. To end with some good news: luckily,

... the electrical infrastructure designs of Russia and others have spared no expense in applying Cold War civil defense lessons. Command economies, long range planning, hardened grids, and stability of centralized leadership further aid their societies in surviving any potential EMP attack. Given their histories and traditions, those cultures are probably more adept at continued functionality in the absence of amenities and infrastructure than the US.

Pfewww.

Original Submission

Republicans suffered from a significantly higher COVID-19 excess death rate during the pandemic than Democrats, according to a new study.

For much of the early phase of the pandemic, voters from the two parties endured a somewhat comparable excess death rate, with Republicans sustaining about 22% higher excess deaths. However, when the pandemic shifted into the vaccine phase, a much more drastic dichotomy between the two parties emerged, with Republicans sustaining 76% more excess deaths than Democrats, the study found.

"Overall, the excess death rate for Republicans was 5.4 percentage points (pp), or 76%, higher than the excess death rate for Democrats," the study said. "The gap in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats is concentrated in counties with low vaccination rates and only materializes after vaccines became widely available."

The excess death rate gap between Republicans and Democrats jumped from 1.6 percentage points to 10.4 percentage points after vaccines became available, according to the study.

"This sharp contrast in the excess death rate gap before and after vaccines were available suggests that vaccine take-up likely played an important role," the NBER study explained. "Data on vaccine take-up by party is limited and unavailable in our dataset, but there is evidence of differences in vaccination attitudes and reported uptake based on political party affiliation."

The NBER study noted it was able to obtain voting data from Florida and Ohio but that it was not able to receive information on a person’s vaccination status.

Other studies and polling found that Democrats were more likely to receive a COVID-19 vaccine or undergo more stringent pandemic prevention measures than Democrats. For example, a recent Morning Consult poll found that only 64% of Republicans were vaccinated or planned to get vaccinated compared to 87% of Democrats.

In Florida, 69.3% of residents are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, while 59.6% of Ohioans are fully vaccinated against the virus, according to Our World In Data. The national average is 68.4% fully vaccinated for COVID-19.

upstart writes:

Justice Department demands Trump return more classified documents:

Trump still has classified documents in his possession and must return them, the Justice Department demands.

In numerous court filings, prosecutors indicated they had concerns that classified records were possibly still missing. For instance, the Justice Department described the need to determine if other classified records still hadn't been collected, and pointed to the empty envelopes with classified banners that were seized in the August Mar-a-Lago search. ...

Late last week, the Biden administration was tight-lipped on whether Trump had turned over all of the records.

"With respect to the second issue concerning whether former President Trump has surrendered all presidential records, we respectfully refer you to the Department of Justice in light of its ongoing investigation," the National Archives told the House Oversight Committee, which had raised the question.

ASRock Unveils Blazing M.2 PCIe Gen 5 SSD Cooler With Active Fan Heatsink, Compatible With Z790, X670E & B650 Motherboards

ASRock has revealed its Blazing M.2 PCIe Gen 5 SSD [cooler] which is an active fan heatsink for X670E, Z790 & B650 motherboards.

ASRock has developed five styles for the new SSD cooling system, and it is stated that the airflow, measured in cubic feet per minute (cfm), will be 4.92. The new Blazing M.2 PCIe Gen 5 SSD cooling fan attachments will be compatible with X670E, B650 and B650E, and Z790 motherboards, and the company has provided a list of compatible models and which type of cooler variant will work with each.

Earlier this year, in March, Phison reminded manufacturers and users of the elevated temperatures that PCIe Gen 5 M.2 NVMe SSD devices would produce. Not only would the new PCIe SSDs offer speeds topping 14GBps, but Phison reported that the M.2 SSD controller limits had been factory set to 125°C. Phison explained that as the drive is filled with data, the temperatures increase. However, the NAND flash memory, which can only accept up to 80°C, will cause the SSD to go into a critical state and shut down the system, causing losses of information and depreciation of the system.

Previously: Gen 7 SSDs

Well, we've had bittorrent in our home for - a long, long time. Search for a movie or something, start it downloading, and come back tomorrow to watch the movie. Nothing exciting, just file sharing.

With the upgrade to fiber, we expected to see amazing download and upload speeds. Mehhh - instead speeds were mostly still measured in k per second, sometimes reaching 1 or 2 M/s. Somewhat awesome to most members of the household, but, FFS, we now have fast internet! Where's my 100 meg?

I diddled around with it for awhile yesterday. Yes, of course we run BT on a VPN. Yes, of course I've gone through BT settings, and optimized according to guides available on the internet. Multiple times, actually.

Finally stumbled over the fact that I must REQUEST port forwarding from the VPN. Oh. Well. How do I do that? Check VPN settings, and right there all the time, is a setting, "Request Port Forwarding". Now, why didn't I give any thought to that setting? Click the box, and find that I'm limited to just a few servers. My "favorite" VPN server doesn't offer port forwarding. That's alright though, I don't really have a favorite, I always choose the fastest.

So, reconnect to a server with port forwarding, I'm assigned a port for port forwarding, and I go back into Bittorrent settings. I assign the listening port to match what VPN has assigned me, and BOOM!

Download speed jumped to 15M , and upload speed to 12M.

Speeds fluctuate, of course, depending on a whole lot of things, mostly the health of the torrent, and however the algorithms decide to connect seeds and peers. I've seen speeds dip to zero while I was watching, and I've seen the above mentioned speeds. It's entirely possible that Bittorrent actualy consumes all of my bandwidth from time to time. I suppose I should go back into settings, and cap speeds at 20 or 30 meg - but I'll just leave it at infinite for awhile, and see what happens.

THIS is what I was expecting when I subscribed to fiber internet. It only took me a couple weeks to figure out how to make it work.

EDIT

OK, bittorrent can be made almost unusable, with the use of fake downloaders. I've always seen them. At the bottom of the list of connected clients page, you'll see a bunch of bitstorm clients. They don't actually download or upload anything, they just keep your client busy with pointless connections. That, and bitlord. Both clients are ancient, no one with a lick of sense uses them to actually torrent.

Several searches, and I finally found a link pointing at https://github.com/c0re100/qBittorrent-Enhanced-Edition

Features:
Auto Ban Xunlei, QQ, Baidu, Xfplay, DLBT and Offline downloader

Auto Ban Unknown Peer from China Option (Default: OFF)

Auto Update Public Trackers List (Default: OFF)

Auto Ban BitTorrent Media Player Peer Option (Default: OFF)

Peer whitelist/blacklist

It works as advertised. All those bitstorm clients are gone, and I'm left with lists of clients actually performing the tasks that bittorrent was meant to do.

I highly recommend this client, if you torrent.