Florida Unsafe for Business as COVID19 Deaths Spiral Out of Control

Nobody can own, run or use a business when they’re dead.

That’s the very simple concept that seems to be underneath Florida’s official plan to stall or even shrink its economy by making it unsafe to live or work.

Newsweek reports this as…

According to a COVID tracker created by The New York Times, Florida is currently recording a seven-day average of 122.1 deaths in the state from the virus, a figure larger than 32 other states combined. Florida’s figure is also more than double that of the second most affected state, Texas…

Florida is so bad at basic safety necessary to do business there are 32 other states COMBINED that are better.

Imagine a headline that food poisoning cases in Florida are worse than 32 other states combined, and the governor has announced that he’s keeping poisoned fruit on shelves.

Would you really do business, have anything to do with the fruit there?

The Florida business environment, no joke, is so bad it can seriously injure or kill you.

Stay clear.

It’s made worse because the Florida government has taken an official position of trying to forcibly expose children to disease by banning even simple prevention measures:

Florida is also reporting the highest number of children currently hospitalized from COVID of any state in the country, with 172 currently being treated in medical facilities, according to data shared by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

There’s no exaggeration here. The governor of Florida literally tried to ban safety and security experts from providing safety and security to children during a time of desperate need.

…several school districts have announced that they will not comply with the rule in line with advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Non-compliance sounds odd in this context.

It would be like saying washing and cooking your food is a form of non-compliance with this dirty politician who is known to wipe without toilet paper and fail to wash his hands before giving you a grapefruit.

Common sense is non-compliance?

The Florida governor’s rules are meant to force citizens to accept an absurdly unsafe market, one where trust is completely absent. How is such thinking not a death sentence for business?

Over 200 people died yesterday in Florida from COVID19.

Every day a new jumbo-jet sized group of people are dead in Florida from COVID19; it’s like reading daily that a major airline has a jet crash in Miami and kills all its passengers.

Would anyone who owns or operates a business seriously want to be banned from protecting their family from using basic safety measures in this context?

And who wants to pay into such a beleaguered overcrowded expensive healthcare system, struggling under preventable cases, just to watch a slow painful yet easily preventable death of their children?

Source: NYT

Nothing about Florida’s careless death spiral is good for business. Nothing.

Perhaps dark comedy on rational thinking puts it best:

In a sketch by the British comedy duo Mitchell and Webb, a government minister charged with ending a recession asks his analysts if they’ve considered “killing all the poor.” “I’m not saying do it—I’m just saying run it through the computer and see if it would work,” he tells them. (After they say it won’t, he proposes “blue-skying” an even more senseless alternative: “Raise V.A.T. and kill all the poor.”)

Lessons of Afghanistan: If you doubt Palantir, you’re probably right.

The buried lede in the story about Palantir’s role in Afghanistan is this sentence:

I knew his face. I doubted the computer. I was right.

If you doubt Palantir, you’re probably right.

In other words, the American company shamelessly built an overpriced and unaccountable “justice” system that tries to paint the world with an overly simplistic good/evil dichotomy.

How was the farmer on the tractor misrecognized as the cell leader in the purple hat in the first place? After the air strike was called off, and the man was spared execution, the PGSS operators rolled back the videotape to review what had happened. To see what they could learn.

“It was his hat,” Kevin explains. “There’s a window of time, around dawn, as the sun comes up,” he explains, where colors are “read differently” by the imaging system than how it sees them during the day. In this window of time, the farmer’s hat was misidentified as purple, setting off a series of linkages that were based on information that was erroneous to begin with.

But what if the S2 shop had killed the farmer in the purple hat in error? And what if, out of fear of backlash over yet another civilian casualty, the data that showed otherwise was deleted so that it would never become known? This invites the question: Who has control over Palantir’s Save or Delete buttons?

“Not me,” says Kevin. “That’s an S2 function.”

Kafka had warned everyone about this kind of thinking with his dystopia “The Trial“.

A computer mistaking the color of a hat due to lighting changes, in a secretive proprietary system… is an obvious recipe for expensive garbage just like it’s 1915 again.

If WWI seems forever ago and you prefer a 1968 reference, Afghanistan failures basically prove how Palantir is a god-awful failure (pun intended, they claim to offer “god mode”), much like the IGLOO WHITE disaster of the Vietnam War.

The problem with knowing history is you’re condemned to watch people repeat the worst mistakes.

This story about Palantir reminds me of another one from long ago:

In the early hours of September 26, 1983, the Soviet Union’s early-warning system detected the launch of intercontinental ballistic missiles from the United States. Stanislav Petrov, a forty-four-year-old duty officer, saw the warning. […] He reasoned that the probability of an attack on any given night was low—comparable, perhaps, to the probability of an equipment malfunction. Simultaneously, in judging the quality of the alert, he noticed that it was in some ways unconvincing. (Only five missiles had been detected—surely a first strike would be all-out?) He decided not to report the alert, and saved the world.

So does ignoring Palantir mean saving the world, or at least one “starfish“?

Maybe.

I’ve written and presented about these fancy and expensive tools spitting critical errors many times; who really knows how many people have been killed unjustly by failing to question the machine.

In 2016 I gave a talk showing how a system billed as “90% accurate” could be broken 100% of the time by doing simple color shifts, just like how it is has been described above breaking Palantir.

Since then I’ve continued to do it repeatedly… and what concerns me is how Palantir is completely closed and proprietary so independent experts can’t demonstrate how it’s a bunch of expensive junk (makes life and death decisions no better, or even worse) designed to put excessive power into the hands of a few men.


Update December 2022: the US Army is politely calling Palantir’s lock-in technology stack a pile of garbage (“unpopular“).

At the foundation of [our popular] strategy is standards and things that we can provide out to industry that enable their black boxes to plug in. And so it gets rid of a lot of the — ultimately all of the — vendor lock issues that we may have in parts of the architecture today.

German City Bans “legally highly problematic” Zoom

Data protection experts say despite high-profile promises from Zoom management to stop doing all the wrong things, the company still violates GDPR due to its handling of personal data.

More specifically, Ulrich Kühn, acting Hamburg Commissioner for DataProtection and Freedom of Information, published this sharp analysis (translated from German):

Public entities are particularly bound to comply with the law. It is more than regrettable such a formal step has to be taken. In the FHH all employees have access to a proven video conferencing tool that is unproblematic with regard to third-country transfers.

Dataport, as the central service provider, also provides additional video conferencing systems in its own data centers. These are used successfully in other states such as Schleswig-Holstein.

It is therefore incomprehensible why the Senate Chancellery insists on an additional and legally highly problematic system.

“Incomprehensible” why people choose Zoom? I suppose that’s like trying to comprehend why people would resort to violence over cabbage patch dolls.

His point boils down to some simple facts and basic reasoning. Why bother breaking the law to use Zoom when far better legally compliant (safer) options exist?

It probably has something to do with Chinese military intelligence… sorry, I meant Zoom knowing that the market has a predictable tendency to be vulnerable to herd thinking and low cognitive ability versus factual reasoning.