Education secretary (and Ponzi-scheme billionaire heiress, anti-public-education crusader, and sister of notorious war criminal Eric Prince) Betsy DeVos just killed the recent Department of Education/Consumer Financial Protection Bureau guidelines that banned dirty bill-collectors from going after people with delinquent student bans.
The guidelines were enacted after the Government Accountability Office found that the Department of Education’s outsourced debt-collectors were cheating borrowers and engaging in other corrupt, negligent and criminal practices.
DeVos sent a memo to the Department today that abolished the Federal Student Aid’s duty to “consider servicers’ past behavior when awarding contracts, including whether the company had misled or provided wrong information to borrowers or engaged in abusive consumer service.”
DeVos’s memo didn’t explain why she was allowing crooked debt-collectors to shake down citizens on the government’s behalf, except to say that the existing guidelines lacked “consistent objectives.”
On Sunday night, viral video footage of a 69-year-old Chinese doctor being violently removed from an overbooked United Airlines flight after refusing to give up his seat ignited worldwide outrage.
The footage is gut-wrenching: Several officers forcefully pull him out of his seat.
His head hits a neighboring passenger’s armrest, and he is dragged down the aisle as blood pours from his face. The man’s screams can be heard in the smartphone footage. Zhang Zishi knew he had to do something when he came across the video.
So Zishi, an 18-year-old Chinese student in the United Kingdom, created a We The People petition demanding the federal government launch an investigation into the United Airlines incident that took place on Sunday night. Read more. (4/11/2017 3:10 PM)
With one second left until total shutdown, K-2SO chose to mentally simulate an impossible scenario in which Cassian Andor escaped alive. The simulation pleased him.
Professor Walter F. Murphy, a Korean war hero and McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence (emeritus) at Princeton, was delayed while flying because he’s on a “terrorist watch list.” The check-in clerk told him that he was probably added because he gave a speech that was critical of the president (who dodged his military service).
Ashwin Parameswaran’s “People Make Poor Monitors for Computers” is a fascinating look at (and indictment of) the way we design automation systems with human fallbacks. Our highly automated, highly reliable systems – the avionics in planes, for example – are designed with to respond well to all the circumstances the designers can imagine, and use human beings as a last line of defense, there to take control when all else fails. But human beings are neurologically wired to stop noticing things that stay the same for a long time. We suck at vigilance. So when complex, stable systems catastrophically fail, so do we. Parameswaran quotes several sources with examples from air-wrecks, the financial meltdown, and other circumstances where human beings and computers accidentally conspired together to do something stupider than either would have done on their own.
