The Center for Disease Control (CDC) has published guidance for families on how to approach the coming fall holidays—and if the federal agency had its way, kids would suffer through a very un-fun Halloween.
“Many traditional Halloween activities can be high-risk for spreading viruses,” warns the CDC in information released on Monday. “There are several safer, alternative ways to participate in Halloween.”
The very safest activities, according to the CDC, are carving pumpkins with members of your own household, having scary-movie night, or throwing a “virtual Halloween costume contest.” (How fun.) Small, outdoor gatherings are classified as moderately risky, and the quintessential Halloween activity—door-to-door trick-or-treating—is considered “higher” risk:
Avoid these higher risk activities to help prevent the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19:
Participating in traditional trick-or-treating where treats are handed to children who go door to door
Having trunk-or-treat where treats are handed out from trunks of cars lined up in large parking lots
Attending crowded costume parties held indoors
Going to an indoor haunted house where people may be crowded together and screaming
Going on hayrides or tractor rides with people who are not in your household
Using alcohol or drugs, which can cloud judgement and increase risky behaviors
Traveling to a rural fall festival that is not in your community if you live in an area with community spread of COVID-19
Crowded, indoor costume parties and haunted houses are certainly higher risk activities, though other factors can reduce the danger—if the COVID-19 levels in the community are low, attendees are being tested, etc. Trick-or-treating, though, takes place outdoors. Can’t people just wear masks and hand out candy from their porches? Kids could approach in small groups, even incorporating mask-wearing into their own costumes wherever possible. This hardly seems more dangerous than attending a mass protest or a large public memorial for a beloved Supreme Court justice, but don’t expect the CDC to inveigh against any of those things.
Keep in mind that the agency just admitted on Friday that COVID-19 is primarily a respiratory disease spread through airborne particles rather than something you can pick up from touching a compromised surface. Most medical experts, and even vaguely informed citizens, have been aware of this for months. Who knows—maybe six months from now, long after the candy has gone stale, the CDC will revise its Halloween guidance, too.
Earlier this month, Los Angeles announced it would ban trick-or-treating entirely, but then relented and said the activity would merely be discouraged. Similarly, the CDC guidance is merely that: guidance. Hopefully, government health authorities will recognize the diminishing returns of sacrificing every beloved childhood tradition on the altar of extreme coronavirus risk-aversion, and instead give families tips about how they can trick-or-treat in relative safety, if they so choose.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2RPbLdV
via IFTTT
Belarus, whose autocratic president has barely acknowledged the coronavirus pandemic, let alone imposed a lockdown in response to it, nevertheless has seen fewer COVID-19 deaths per capita than most European countries. A recent BMJ article suggests several possible explanations, including the country’s unpopularity as a vacation destination, high levels of testing in the early months of the epidemic, a large hospital capacity that made isolating COVID-19 patients easier, few nursing homes, and widespread voluntary precautions such as social distancing and mask wearing. While those hypotheses seem plausible, they do not necessarily explain trends in other Eastern European countries that, like Belarus, have seen relatively few COVID-19 deaths.
According to Worldometer’s tallies, the current COVID-19 death rate in Belarus is 84 per 1 million people, less than one-tenth the rate in Belgium, about one-eighth the rate in Spain, and about one-seventh the rate in the U.K. But several other Central and Eastern European countries have similarly low rates, including Serbia (85 per million), Ukraine (83), Hungary (72), Slovenia (68) Croatia (62), Poland (61), the Czech Republic (49), and Estonia (48). Unlike Belarus, all of those countries imposed broad social and economic restrictions last spring in an attempt to reduce virus transmission.
Trends in newly identified COVID-19 cases vary widely among these countries:
• In Belarus, the seven-day average peaked in mid-May and has since fallen by 77 percent.
• In Serbia, there was an early peak in April, followed by a decline until early June, then an ascent to a new, higher peak in late July. Since then the seven-day average has fallen by 83 percent.
• Ukraine is seeing more daily new cases than ever before, following a rise that began in late July.
• In Hungary, daily new cases have risen more than 20-fold since late August.
• Slovenia has seen a sharp rise since mid-August, although not nearly as big as Hungary’s.
• Croatia saw a similar upward trend until late August, when the average reached record levels. Daily new cases have fallen since then.
• In Poland, the seven-day average rose in July and August, fell in early September, and is now rising again, reaching record highs in the last few days.
• The Czech Republic saw a sharp rise in daily new cases to record levels this month, followed by a sharp drop in the last few days.
• In Estonia, daily new cases peaked in early April, fell into the single digits by early May, and have been climbing more or less steadily since late August.
COVID-19 death trends in these countries also vary widely. In Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, and Poland, the seven-day average of daily deaths peaked in April. In Belarus and Serbia, that happened in early July. Deaths reached record highs in Ukraine and Croatia last week.
Several Eastern European countries have seen substantially more COVID-19 deaths per capita, including Bulgaria (110 per million residents), Bosnia and Herzegovina (237), and Romania (234). But so far they are still doing substantially better than wealthier Western European countries such as France, the U.K., Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands.
A preprint paper published in May argued that lower COVID-19 mortality in Eastern Europe might be explained by later introduction of the virus. “Countries in Europe which observed the earliest COVID-19 circulation suffered the worst consequences in terms of health outcomes, specifically mortality,” Albanian public health researcher Alban Ylli and four co-authors wrote. “The drastic social isolation measures, undertaken especially in Eastern European countries, where community circulation started after March 11th, may have been timely. This may explain their significantly lower COVID-related mortality compared with the Western European countries.”
In an essay published last Friday on The Conversation, University of Cambridge sociologist Olga Löblová and two co-authors worry that recent trends suggest Eastern Europe’s luck is running out: “Central and eastern Europe managed the first wave of COVID-19 in the spring well—to general surprise—but governments have since struggled. They have found it politically difficult to reintroduce restrictions after months of letting their populations live normally.”
That hypothesis is consistent with the declines in daily new cases that some of these countries saw in the spring and the increases some have seen this summer. But it seems inconsistent with the experience in Belarus, which never had a lockdown but still has a relatively low fatality rate and has not seen recent increases in cases and deaths like those in Hungary, Ukraine, Croatia, and the Czech Republic. It also seems inconsistent with the findings of a recent study that looked at COVID-19 trends in 23 countries and 25 U.S. states that had seen more than 1,000 deaths from the disease by late July. UCLA economist Andrew Atkeson and his two co-authors found little evidence that variations in government policy account for the course of the epidemic in different places.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3mMuncL
via IFTTT
Nonprofit homelessness advocates have spent the COVID-19 pandemic trying to house homeless people in hotels rather than crowded shelters where the coronavirus can easily spread. Time and again, these advocates have run into opposition from NIMBY neighbors and city officials.
The latest example comes from Bakersfield, California. On Tuesday, Los Angeles Times columnist Erika Smith published a story detailing how a local hospital scuttled plans to lodge homeless residents in a nearby motel because it was too close to their employee parking lot.
Bakersfield’s local homeless nonprofit, the Bakersfield-Kern Regional Homeless Collaborative (BKRHC), had planned to rent out 21 rooms in the city’s Rosedale Inn for several months at the cost of $383,966. Funding was to be provided by the state’s Project Roomkey, a largely federally funded program that pays for putting up homeless people in hotel rooms and providing services to them while they’re there.
The Times reports that previous attempts to house some of Bakersfield’s homeless residents in hotels had fallen through because of opposition from nearby homeowners. BKRHC’s director, Anna Laven, had hoped that the Rosedale Inn, which was not near any residential neighborhood, would be a less controversial location.
But while it wasn’t next to any housing, the roadside motel was near the Bakersfield Heart Hospital, whose employee parking lot is located a short distance from the Rosedale Inn.
Using the inn as temporary housing for the homeless required the city’s Board of Zoning Adjustment to issue a conditional use permit to the BKRHC. In an August 10 letter, the hospital’s lawyers argued against the plan.
Granting BKRHC’s permit “would significantly add to the problems which already emanate from the Rosedale Inn which includes but [is] not limited to, illicit drug use, vagrancy, theft, and vandalism of hospital property, theft and vandalism of cars parked on hospital property and an increased exposure of patients and staff of the hospital to COVID-19 and other adverse consequences,” reads the letter.
The letter from hospital attorneys also asserted that the homeless themselves would be made worse off by being housed in the Rosedale Inn, given the reported crime and drug use that happens there.
That letter didn’t manage to convince the city’s zoning board, which voted to grant BKRHC a conditional use permit. However, the hospital appealed the decision to the Bakersfield City Council, which proved more receptive to its concerns. It rejected BKRHC’s permit application, leaving the organization without much hope of finding another motel to serve as a site for its Project Roomkey initiative.
This is hardly the first time that a plan to put up homeless people in hotels during COVID-19 has been shot down as a result of neighborhood opposition.
New York City’s decision to lodge 300 homeless men in a hotel on the city’s wealthy Upper West Side neighborhood met with such fierce opposition from existing residents that the city eventually agreed to relocate the men.
Back in April, the mayor of Florence, Kentucky pressured a hotel to back out of an agreement it had made with two local nonprofits to rent out 40 rooms to serve as temporary housing the area’s homeless population.
Whether they represent wealthy, urban, and liberal communities, or poorer, rural, conservative ones, few local politicians seem to like the idea of having homeless people live indoors nearby. Zoning codes requiring additional approval for temporary housing arrangements often enable this rank NIMBYism.
Worse still this NIMBYism serves only to interfere with voluntary arrangements made by nonprofits serving the homeless, the hotel owners willing to house them, and the homeless themselves who are eager to avoid bunking in dangerous shelters.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2G0ao9O
via IFTTT
Americans Panic-Bought Guns And Ammo; What About Armored Vehicles? Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/22/2020 – 18:25
Readers may recall, back in 2018, we noted how the armored car business in Mexico was flourishing, thanks to cartel wars erupting across the country.
We even said, “As global automakers now realize that there is money to be made in bulletproofing a car, it is only a matter of time before these cars hit the streets of the United States.”
This leaves us with today: America has transformed into a chaotic mess. Social unrest and violent crime plague major US metro areas. Hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing cities for suburban life.
There’s also been panic-buying of guns, ammo, and bulletproof vests since the virus pandemic began in March. Another round of buying was observed when social unrest was sparked across the country following George Floyd protests in Minnesota in late May.
With no end to the unrest and violence, nevertheless, an upcoming presidential election that is undoubtedly going to lead to chaos no matter who wins, the next trend in security could be wealthy folks buying low-key armored vehicles.
Canadian firm Inkas are offering armored vehicles indistinguishable from an ordinary Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Range Rover, Cadillac, and or Lincoln.
The Toronto-based company even sells a “military-style, ultra-high-end SUV that puts any Hummer, Jeep, or G-Wagen to shame,” said Bussiness Insider.
“The Sentry Civilian boasts a private jet-like cabin complete with leather captain’s chairs, an entertainment system, and a long list of optional luxury features. But you’d never know that looking at the vehicle’s exterior — on the outside, the SUV gets bullet-resistant glass, run-flat tires, and an armored passenger compartment.”
Here’s an inside view of the Sentry Civilian, a blend of security and luxury.
The civilian use of armored vehicles made national attention earlier this year when InfoWars founder Alex Jones rolled up to an anti-gun control rally in Richmond with a ‘battle tank.’
So the big question we ask since Americans have panic bought pretty much everything under the sun – will they start buying low-key armored vehicles as the country becomes more dangerous?
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3kJEM79 Tyler Durden
Senior editor, Ash Bennington, welcomes back Tony Greer, editor of the Morning Navigator, to discuss the ongoing inflation trade. Tony expounds on his bullish posture toward oil and some of the technical indicators he uses to analyze different securities. He also reviews some of the current policy stances that emerged from last week’s FOMC meeting, explaining how he leverages these policy shifts to seek out price inflation across different asset classes. Real Vision reporter Haley Draznin monitors the continued volatility in the markets and addresses the potential risks investors are paying close attention to in the coming weeks including another stimulus relief bill out of Congress, a new spending bill, and surging coronavirus cases in the U.S. and abroad.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2RMAYFW Tyler Durden
President Donald Trump recently instructed federal agencies to end training related to “White Privilege” or “Critical Race Theory,” calling them “anti-American propaganda.”
“These types of ‘trainings’ not only run counter to the fundamental beliefs for which our Nation has stood since its inception, but they also engender division and resentment within the Federal workforce,” Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought wrote in a memo to federal employees, according to Fox News.
Meanwhile, colleges across the country are seeing a growing trend of racial sensitivity classes and trainings, and Campus Reform has rounded up some of the most extreme examples.
Columbia University hosted a five-week “deconstructing whiteness” lecture series for white-identified students in July. The goal was to “engage in exploration of their white identities and build community and accountability around deconstructing whiteness and white privilege to facilitate the development of an antiracist lens.” In an email reportedly sent to students, the university’s law school said the workshop “will not be a support group for white students. Nor will it be comfortable or easy.”
In the West Point Military Academy’s “Behavioral Science and Leadership” seminar, cadets are required to read “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction.” The school website said the school’s leadership course is an “introduction to the concepts of race, gender, and sexuality in the American political system” with a focus on the “inherent inequalities found.”
All freshmen at the University of Pittsburgh will be required to take the one-credit course. One goal outlined in the syllabus is to provide an overview of the Reconstruction Amendments and “the agenda of Radical Republicans.” Other lessons included focusing on challenging a student’s past education in regards to American history and “ritual practices that teach anti-Black and pro-White sentiment…”
Houghton College in Houghton, New York announced a course to “explore the complex role of American Protestant Christianity in the construction of historic and contemporary notions of race and U.S. systems of racial hierarchy.” In the course to be launched in spring 2021, students will be asked to “interrogate the role of race and faith in the formation of your values…” One of the course outcomes is to be able to assemble a framework and vocabulary that “connects theories about race, racism, white supremacy, theology, resistance and anti-racism to justice-seeking liberatory movements and praxes for social transformation.”
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign hosted various weekly online workshops to “explore the ways that white supremacy manifests in our lives, our communities, and our work” at the School of Music. The workshop description stated that it was intended for “students who hold white privilege” but all students were welcome. Participants were required to read the book Me and White Supremacy by Layla Saad.
A University of Arizona course is set to explore “the various sources of white power and privilege.” The six sessions are designed for people who are interested in “unpacking the ways we are constantly bombarded with messages that uphold white superiority and racial hierarchy” and “how racial violence works in conjunction with other forms of structural racism.”
In this three-credit course at American University in Washington, D.C., students will develop “strategies for antiracist engagements.” Students will examine “the social, legal, and media constructions of white racial identities in relation to issues of racial justice.”
The course at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts focuses on “cultural politics, political geographies, and historical development of racial capitalism.” According to the school’s website, the course will do this “through and against a history of racial capitalism that privileges the U.S. nation-state in particular.”
This one-credit course at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania will “address religious theories justifying racial domination.” In particular, the class will highlight and discuss practices foundational to the process of “whiteness-making.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2FUIlZf Tyler Durden
Matt Gaetz Calls On Florida AG To Investigate Mike Bloomberg ‘For Potentially Engaging In Bribery And Vote Buying” Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/22/2020 – 17:45
Update (1815ET): Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has called on the state’s Attorney General to investigate Bloomberg for “Potentially Engaging In Bribery And Vote Buying.”
#BREAKING: I’m calling on the Florida Attorney General to launch an investigation into @MikeBloomberg for potentially engaging in bribery and vote buying in the state of Florida. pic.twitter.com/2pAjZlAwSh
Former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg – who has committed at least $100 million in Florida towards electing Joe Biden, has raised another $16 million to pay the court fines and fees of nearly 32,000 Black and Hispanic felons so that they can vote in the November election.
The money will go towards a program organized by the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. By state law, former prisoners who are already registered to vote in Florida are barred from participating in the election if they have outstanding legal debts to the state, according to the Washington Post.
Bloomberg has raised money from both individuals and foundations, according to his advisers. The billionaire views the donations as a more cost-effective way of adding Democratic voters in Florida than investing money to persuade non-felons to change their vote, according to a memo.
“We have identified a significant vote share that requires a nominal investment,” it reads. “The data shows that in Florida, Black voters are a unique universe unlike any other voting bloc, where the Democratic support rate tends to be 90%-95%.“
The memo also notes that Biden is currently polling worse among Cuban American voters than Hillary Clinton did in 2016, while other Hispanic groups are in favor of Biden by a margin of 3 to 1.
Florida voters passed a statewide constitutional amendment in 2018 that gave former felons, except those convicted of murder or felony sexual offenses, the opportunity to vote in upcoming elections. The Republican-controlled legislature subsequently passed, and the Republican governor signed, a law that conditioned their return to the voting rolls on the payment of all fees, fines and restitution that were part of their sentence.
The Republican effort is expected to limit the political benefit to Democrats of the constitutional change, which passed by ballot initiative with 65 percent support. A study by the University of Florida found that nearly 775,000 former felons still owed money related to their convictions and would be barred from the voting booth by the law. The vast majority are too poor to pay their outstanding debts, according to evidence presented in court documents challenging the law. –Washington Post
Beyond Bloomberg, several philanthropic groups have poured money into paying off debts owed by felons – including a nonprofit founded by LeBron James. Bloomberg’s effort, meanwhile, is “narrowly focused only on Black and Hispanic voters” whose debts are less than $1,500.
“Mike wanted to get this done for two reasons,” a Bloomberg adviser told the Post. “One, because it’s the right thing to do for the democracy. And two, because it immediately activates tens of thousands of voters who are predisposed to vote for Joe Biden.”
The Bloomberg memo pointed out that the 31,790 targeted voters, including 25,548 who are Black, are nearly equivalent to the margin by which Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis won election in 2018, and about three times as big as the margin that elected Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) that same year.
It said Florida voters have largely already made up their minds about the November election, leaving “only a small margin of voters that are targets for persuasion.” –Washington Post
“We know to win Florida we will need to persuade, motivate and add new votes to the Biden column,” reads the document. “This means we need to explore all avenues for finding the needed votes when so many votes are already determined.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/303k2zE Tyler Durden
Nonprofit homelessness advocates have spent the COVID-19 pandemic trying to house homeless people in hotels rather than crowded shelters where the coronavirus can easily spread. Time and again, these advocates have run into opposition from NIMBY neighbors and city officials.
The latest example comes from Bakersfield, California. On Tuesday, Los Angeles Times columnist Erika Smith published a story detailing how a local hospital scuttled plans to lodge homeless residents in a nearby motel because it was too close to their employee parking lot.
Bakersfield’s local homeless nonprofit, the Bakersfield-Kern Regional Homeless Collaborative (BKRHC), had planned to rent out 21 rooms in the city’s Rosedale Inn for several months at the cost of $383,966. Funding was to be provided by the state’s Project Roomkey, a largely federally funded program that pays for putting up homeless people in hotel rooms and providing services to them while they’re there.
The Times reports that previous attempts to house some of Bakersfield’s homeless residents in hotels had fallen through because of opposition from nearby homeowners. BKRHC’s director, Anna Laven, had hoped that the Rosedale Inn, which was not near any residential neighborhood, would be a less controversial location.
But while it wasn’t next to any housing, the roadside motel was near the Bakersfield Heart Hospital, whose employee parking lot is located a short distance from the Rosedale Inn.
Using the inn as temporary housing for the homeless required the city’s Board of Zoning Adjustment to issue a conditional use permit to the BKRHC. In an August 10 letter, the hospital’s lawyers argued against the plan.
Granting BKRHC’s permit “would significantly add to the problems which already emanate from the Rosedale Inn which includes but [is] not limited to, illicit drug use, vagrancy, theft, and vandalism of hospital property, theft and vandalism of cars parked on hospital property and an increased exposure of patients and staff of the hospital to COVID-19 and other adverse consequences,” reads the letter.
The letter from hospital attorneys also asserted that the homeless themselves would be made worse off by being housed in the Rosedale Inn, given the reported crime and drug use that happens there.
That letter didn’t manage to convince the city’s zoning board, which voted to grant BKRHC a conditional use permit. However, the hospital appealed the decision to the Bakersfield City Council, which proved more receptive to its concerns. It rejected BKRHC’s permit application, leaving the organization without much hope of finding another motel to serve as a site for its Project Roomkey initiative.
This is hardly the first time that a plan to put up homeless people in hotels during COVID-19 has been shot down as a result of neighborhood opposition.
New York City’s decision to lodge 300 homeless men in a hotel on the city’s wealthy Upper West Side neighborhood met with such fierce opposition from existing residents that the city eventually agreed to relocate the men.
Back in April, the mayor of Florence, Kentucky pressured a hotel to back out of an agreement it had made with two local nonprofits to rent out 40 rooms to serve as temporary housing the area’s homeless population.
Whether they represent wealthy, urban, and liberal communities, or poorer, rural, conservative ones, few local politicians seem to like the idea of having homeless people live indoors nearby. Zoning codes requiring additional approval for temporary housing arrangements often enable this rank NIMBYism.
Worse still this NIMBYism serves only to interfere with voluntary arrangements made by nonprofits serving the homeless, the hotel owners willing to house them, and the homeless themselves who are eager to avoid bunking in dangerous shelters.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2G0ao9O
via IFTTT
It has long been feared that Google, which controls almost 90% of U.S. Internet search traffic, could sway an election by altering the search results it shows users.
New data indicate that may be happening, as conservative news sites including Breitbart, the Daily Caller, and the Federalist have seen their Google search listings dramatically reduced.
The data come from the search consultancy Sistrix, which tracks a million different Google search keywords and keeps track of how highly different sites rank across all the search terms.
The tracker shows that Google search visibility for Breitbart first plunged in 2017, before falling to approximately zero in July 2019:
Googling the name “Breitbart” still pulls up the website, but it is nearly eliminated from any searches that don’t explicitly name it. For example, Googling the names of Breitbart’s reporters sometimes forces users to click through page after page of less-relevant results before hitting a Breitbart link. In the case of Joel Pollak, the first Breitbart link appears on the bottom of page 7 of Google search results. In comparison, a search on the small Google competitor DuckDuckGo gives multiple links to Pollak’s Breitbart work on the first page.
Breitbart saw that stark reduction in search, even as little else in the news outlet’s reporting model changed. Other conservative news sites, such as the Daily Caller, also were de-ranked at similar times.
Both Breitbart and the Daily Caller have confirmed that their Google traffic fell dramatically as their search rankings fell.
Internal Google files have hinted at such action. In 2018, the Daily Caller reported on a leaked exchange the day after President Trump’s 2016 election win. In it, employees debated whether Breitbart and the Daily Caller should be buried.
“This was an election of false equivalencies, and Google, sadly, had a hand in it,” Google engineer Scott Byer wrote, according to the documents obtained by the Daily Caller.
“How many times did you see … items from opinion blogs (Breitbart, Daily Caller) elevated next to legitimate news organizations? That’s something that can and should be fixed.” Byer wrote.
He added, “I think we have a responsibility to expose the quality and truthfulness of sources.”
In the leaked exchange, other Googlers pushed back, saying that it shouldn’t be Google’s role to rank sources’ legitimacy — and that hiding sites would only add to distrust.
Google did not respond to a request for comment about the data presented here.
An expert in search engine optimization pointed RealClearPolitics to a public Google document from 2019 outlining how the company now employs humans to go through webpages and rate them based on “Expertise/Authoritativeness/Trustworthiness.” “Google has acknowledged they use human search quality raters who help evaluate search results,” said Chris Rodgers, CEO and founder of Colorado SEO Pros.
Google does not directly use such ratings to rank sites, but “based on those ratings Google will then tweak their algorithm and use machine learning to help dial in the desired results,” Rodgers explained.
The Google guidelines instruct raters to give the “lowest” ranking to any news-related “content that contradicts well-established expert consensus.” And how does one determine “expert consensus”? The Google guidelines repeatedly advise raters to consult Wikipedia, which it mentions 56 times:
“See if there is a Wikipedia article or news article from a well-known news site. Wikipedia can be a good source of information about companies, organizations, and content creators.”
The document cites the Christian Science Monitor as an example.
“Notice the highlighted section in the Wikipedia article about The Christian Science Monitor newspaper, which tells us that the newspaper has won seven Pulitzer Prize awards,” the document tells raters. “From this information, we can infer that the csmonitor.com website has a positive reputation.”
The reliance on Wikipedia could partly explain the de-rankings, as the crowdsourced encyclopedia calls Breitbart “far right” and alleges that the Daily Caller “frequently published false stories.” But Wikipedia’s co-founder, Larry Sanger, recently wrote an essay about how “Wikipedia is badly biased.”
In addition to the human ratings used to test algorithms, Google also has human-maintained blacklists — but they are supposed to be very limited. In congressional testimony this summer, Rep. Matt Gaetz asked Google CEO Sundar Pichai if the search engine manually de-ranked websites. Gaetz cited Breitbart, the Daily Caller, as well as WesternJournal.com and Spectator.org, two other conservative news sites that Sistrix data show have been nearly removed from Google searches.
Pichai responded that his company only removes sites if they are deemed to be “interfering in elections” or conveying “violent extremism.”
It remains unclear why the conservative sites were de-ranked. “Only Google can truly know why these sites have seen ranking losses,” SEO expert Rodgers said.
Jeremy Rivera, of JeremyRiveraSEO.com, told RealClearPolitics that there are several possible reasons for de-ranking. Both Breitbart and the Daily Caller have “low-quality” sites linking to them, he said, and they host many ads, which create slow page-load times. “Page-load speed is a direct ranking factor,” he said.
Several news outlets, on both the left and right, have avoided the near-total blackout experienced by Breitbart and the Daily Caller, but saw their search listings reduced significantly. Among them is The Federalist, which saw search listings fall dramatically this spring after coming under fire for running articles that critics said downplayed the danger of COVID-19.
Some left-leaning news sites were docked too.
Other major sites, such as the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and CNN, have not seen dramatic changes in rankings, according to Sistrix data.
Some observers say the trends show innovation at work, as companies try to present users with the highest-quality information. “These are inherently subjective questions,” said Berin Szóka of TechFreedom, noting that the First Amendment gives “complete discretion of private media companies, which includes Google. … They have the same right to decide what content to carry that Breitbart and Fox do.”
Others worry that the near-blacklisting of conservative outlets could tip election outcomes this year. A 2015 peer-reviewed study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated that a search engine could sway more than 10% of undecided voters in an election simply by altering what results are shown.
“Such manipulations are difficult to detect, and most people are relatively powerless when trying to resist sources of influence they cannot see,” the authors warn. “When people are unaware they are being manipulated, they tend to believe they have adopted their new thinking voluntarily.”
The paper further suggests that Google’s 87% market share is a concern. While competitors are growing in popularity, their market share numbers remain low: Microsoft’s Bing has 7.2% of the pie, and DuckDuckGo has 1.75%.
“Because the majority of people in most democracies use a search engine provided by just one company… election-related search rankings could pose a significant threat to the democratic system of government,” the paper concludes.
* * *
After publication, a Google spokesperson responded:
“There is no validity whatsoever to these allegations of political bias. Our systems do not take political ideology into account, and we go to extraordinary lengths to build our products for everyone in an apolitical way. Anyone can easily cherry-pick a range of conservative, progressive or non-political sites that have seen traffic changes over time. The improvements we make to Search undergo a rigorous testing process and are done to provide helpful information for the billions of queries we get every day.”
The spokesperson has not responded to specific follow-up questions about whether any progressive news site had seen as stark a fall as Breitbart or the Daily Caller, or whether Google’s quality ratings (which are part of their testing process) might be ideologically skewed due to reliance on Wikipedia.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/33Qry1F Tyler Durden
$138 Billion Bridgewater Set Up 50 “Tent Offices” In The Woods Outside Of Its HQ For Its Traders Tyler Durden
Tue, 09/22/2020 – 17:05
In keeping with a bizarre string of decisions (or lack of decisionmaking, as we pointed out) that could be at the heart of Bridgewater’s awful -18.6% YTD performance so far this year, would it surprise you if we told you the fund manager was setting up office tents in the middle of the woods for its employees?
Well, apparently, that’s exactly what the company did. The $138 billion hedge fund now has tents set up in the woods across from its Westport, Conn. headquarters so that its traders can “continue to work from their desks” while also “breathing fresh air,” according to the NY Post.
The tents were set up in May and can accommodate about 50 of Bridgewater’s 1,500 staff members. They were set up because indoor safety protocols for Covid were deemed to be too stressful. The result, according to Nir Bar Dea, cohead of Bridgewater’s investment engine? Chirping birds that can disrupt calls and at least one falling tree.
“We’re sitting outside—that’s never been a part of our plans,” Bar Dea, who has likely already been fired for talking to the press, told Fortune. Bridgewater is going to keep the setup through October or “until the weather gets too cold to comfortably work outdoors,” Bar Dea continued.
Perhaps Bridgewater should stop doing its best Bear Grylls impressions and start focusing more on its returns. We noted just days ago that it has been an ugly year, performance-wise, for Ray Dalio.
In addition to the fund’s worst losses in a decade, there is a “sprawling list of troubles” being dealt with internally, according to Bloomberg. These trouble include internal computer models misreading the market (also known as the New York Fed model), $3.5 billion in redemptions during the first 7 months of the year and Dalio losing an arbitration fight with ex-staffers.
He also has ongoing feuds with his co-chief executive and has laid off “dozens” of employees, according to the report.
And what changes has Dalio made to adjust, aside from tents in the woods? Apparently none.
“We are operating in the same way we have always operated,” he told Bloomberg TV. Dalio says the firm still has 45 commitments from investors, many around $1 billion.
The firm’s key issue, according to insiders, was that it adopted a risk off strategy in March while the market was tanking, and then failed to put risk back on despite the Federal Reserve guaranteeing it would backstop the market with unlimited QE.
Former employees say that the fanfare surrounding Dalio has also “distracted him from the firm”. Dalio doesn’t want to adjust his computer models to add new data that’s standard at other firms, including tracking oil tankers.
Bridgewater has cut dozens of jobs amidst the chaos and its number of investors has dropped from 350 to about 300. Clients that remain on the roster tout the firm’s 10.4% annualized gain since 1991 – and its “unparalleled customer service”.
Given his fund’s performance this year, we can’t help but think: Maybe Dalio needs a little more time in solitude in the woods himself, perhaps to do some “deep thinking”…
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2HnVNFQ Tyler Durden
