August 22, 2023

Citizens ordered to trim proposed rate hikes for home insurance policies

The state-backed insurer asked regulators to OK a proposal that included increasing rates by 12% for homeowners with the most common type of policies.

Regulators have ordered the state-backed Citizens Property Insurance Corp. to revamp — and trim — proposed rate increases.

Florida Insurance Commissioner Michael Yaworsky signed an order Friday that took issue with parts of a Citizens rate proposal that included increasing rates by 12% for homeowners with the most common type of policies.

The order, posted on the state Office of Insurance Regulation website, directed Citizens to “calculate new, reduced, overall average statewide rate increases for the rate filings” covered by the order.

“We are reviewing the final order and will submit a revised set of recommendations, as requested, based upon OIR’s findings and directives,” Michael Peltier, a Citizens spokesman, said in an email Monday.

Amid explosive growth in its number of policies, Citizens this year asked the Office of Insurance Regulation for approval of an overall 13.3% rate increase, with 12% hikes for “multi-peril” policies on primary residences.

A 12% increase would be the maximum allowed this year for those policies under a state law that limits how much Citizens can raise premiums.

https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida/2023/08/21/citizens-insurance-proposed-rate-increase-home-policy/

August 22, 2023

The Worker Bidding War Is Over. Companies Are Cutting Pay for New Hires.

After years of salary increases, businesses across the economy say they’re reducing starting salaries for recruits

Pay for new hires is starting to shrivel after years of hefty salary bumps, requiring workers to reset what financial gains to expect from switching to a new job.

Wages, especially for people who changed jobs, climbed in recent years as companies competed for workers to fill pandemic-induced labor shortages. Now, as the job market cools and businesses become more cautious in their hiring, many companies are paying new recruits less than they did just months ago—in some cases, much less.

Among postings for more than 20,000 job titles on ZipRecruiter’s site this year, the average pay for a majority of roles has declined from last year. Some of the steepest drops have been in technology, transportation and other sectors that experienced frenzied hiring sprees in 2021 and early 2022.

Chanteal Brayboy, 25 years old, has been seeking user-experience design roles since last summer, ever since finishing a design boot camp. At the time, layoffs had just begun to churn through the tech economy.

She’s since applied for more than 2,000 roles, and only gotten calls for a couple interviews. The posted salaries for the jobs she’s interested in, she says, have fallen around $10,000 from those advertised a year ago.

https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/the-worker-bidding-war-is-over-companies-are-cutting-pay-for-new-hires-1cab0fe?st=4nyd851qd5ddamu&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

August 20, 2023

How Ron DeSantis Joined the 'Ruling Class' -- and Turned Against It

Over the years, Mr. DeSantis embraced and exploited his Ivy League credentials. Now he is reframing his experiences at Yale and Harvard to wage a vengeful political war.

Early last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis nestled into his chair onstage in Naples, Fla., to explain to an audience of the would-be conservative elite his journey through the reigning liberal one they hoped to destroy. His host was Larry P. Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College, a small Christian school in southern Michigan that has become an academic hub of the Trump-era right. His subject was Yale University, where Mr. DeSantis was educated and where, as he tells it, he first met the enemy.

“I’m a public school kid,” Mr. DeSantis told the audience, unspooling a story that he has shared in recent years with aides, friendly interviewers, donors, voters and readers of his memoir, “The Courage to Be Free.” “My mom was a nurse, my dad worked for a TV ratings company, installing the metering devices back then. And I show up in jean shorts and a T-shirt.” The outfit “did not go over well with the Andover and Groton kids” — sometimes it is Andover and Groton, sometimes it is Andover and Exeter, sometimes all three — who mocked his lack of polish.

Worse than Yale’s snobbery was its politics: College was “the first time that I saw unadulterated leftism,” he told the Republican Jewish Coalition this March. “We’re basically being told the Soviet Union was the victim in the Cold War.” Teachers and students alike “rejected God, and they hated our country,” he assured the audience in Naples. “When I get people that submit résumés,” he said, “quite frankly, if I got one from Yale I would be negatively disposed.”

Then there are the parts of the story he doesn’t tell: How his new baseball teammates at Yale — mostly fellow athletic recruits from the South and West who likewise viewed themselves as Yale outsiders — were among those who teased him about his clothes, and how he would nevertheless adopt their insular culture as his own. How he joined one of Yale’s storied “secret societies,” those breeding grounds of future senators and presidents, but left other members with the impression that he would have preferred to be tapped by a more prestigious one. How he shared with friends his dream of going to Harvard Law School — not law school, Harvard Law School — and successfully applied there, stacking one elite credential neatly onto another, and co-founded a tutoring firm that touted “the only LSAT prep courses designed exclusively by Harvard Law School graduates.” How his Yale connections helped him out-raise rivals as a first-time candidate for Congress, and how he featured his Ivy credentials — “a political scarlet letter as far as a G.O.P. primary went,” Mr. DeSantis likes to say — on his campaign websites, sometimes down to the precise degree of honors earned. And how that C.V. helped sell him to an Ivy-obsessed President Donald J. Trump, whose 2018 endorsement helped propel Mr. DeSantis to the governor’s office in Florida, where his Yale baseball jersey is displayed prominently on the wall next to his desk.

Mr. DeSantis, 44, is not the first Republican politician of his generation to rail against his own Ivy League degrees while milking them for access and campaign cash. But now, as he seeks the Republican presidential nomination, he is molding his entire campaign and political persona around a vengeful war against what he calls the country’s “ruling class”: an incompetent, unaccountable elite of bureaucrats, journalists, educators and other supposed “experts” whose pernicious and unearned authority the governor has vowed to vanquish.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/20/us/politics/ron-desantis-education.html?unlocked_article_code=gvWfX1VRieb19zL_RdR5bulda76K22bJsnHgPyI_sa1O9f-d52dWYAiHhhJHMhuLH51QidRS_0N0AIDVgoSnKBf7poVNJWMR6Li5e7TPmyqwy8_mCfPlTtC3yTqlVdwd5MLeF1Ps1mHypQMX9bgpOjjAyxDsypgh_7MftSzR9e6jdBe-2dLxodmWrLkQxfSQfD9y-THg0bnQRu-NoGJc_AXzK5Tt6JQs-8BiqCW0tCd3g1IZJoYpkuAcq2ABL_vdTPq-tjZPA6iK4gk04ov577olb93VROzVteBsvVIwvGSAI76KISYMEyAMXzXgt7nzGQIP2MNzvKUmP-AeQDENr32uiO4&smid=url-share

DuhSantis is an ungrateful little prick with a big chip on his shoulder.

August 18, 2023

Justice Department seeks 33 years in prison for ex-Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio in Jan. 6 case

Source: AP News

The Justice Department is seeking 33 years in prison for Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys leader convicted of seditious conspiracy in one of the most serious cases to emerge from the attack on the U.S. Capitol

The Justice Department is seeking 33 years in prison for Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys leader convicted of seditious conspiracy in one of the most serious cases to emerge from attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to court documents.

The sentence, if imposed, would be by far the longest punishment that has been handed down in the massive prosecution of the riot on Jan. 6, 2021. Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy in a separate case, has received the longest sentence to date — 18 years.

Tarrio, who once served as national chairman of the far-right extremist group, and three lieutenants were convicted by a Washington jury in May of conspiring to block the transfer of presidential power in the hopes of keeping Donald Trump in the White House after the Republican president lost the 2020 election.

Tarrio, who was not at the Capitol riot itself, was a top target of what has become the largest Justice Department investigation in American history. He led the neo-fascist group — known for street fights with left-wing activists — when Trump infamously told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during his first debate with Democrat Joe Biden.

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/enrique-tarrio-capitol-riot-proud-boys-sentencing-aa8fd5e8acbc5d173e6e462974014bc7

August 18, 2023

Scripps Oceanography retires seagoing research platform after 61 years

FLIP aided better understanding of the ocean, including how sound travels in it, and could move from a horizontal position to vertical while at sea

When Bruce Appelgate was in fourth grade, he read a book featuring world explorers. Among them was the FLoating Instrument Platform, or FLIP.

Little did Appelgate know that one day, not only would he be on FLIP, he would be head of ship operations at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla as part of his career.

“(FLIP) captured my attention,” said Appelgate, who is now associate director of Scripps Oceanography. “So many people I talk to learned about FLIP in grade school (and it) inspired them in later life. The legacy of FLIP is that it inspired so many people at Scripps to continue to think big and take risks.”

FLIP also helped facilitate understanding of the ocean, including how sound travels in it, during the post-World War II era of heightened ocean study.

On Aug. 3, however, FLIP was retired after 61 years. It was towed to a dismantling and recycling facility, six years after its last research voyage and three years after officials determined that the costs to renovate it could not be justified, according to Scripps.

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/science/story/2023-08-15/la-jollas-scripps-oceanography-retires-seagoing-research-platform-after-61-years

August 17, 2023

Anyone else sick of that Jardiance diabetes drug commercial?

GAH! It's as annoying as the Lume commercials.

And it's on ALL the time!

August 17, 2023

Marijuana is getting out of hand. The federal government must step in.

The legal U.S. marijuana industry has grown into a behemoth, raking in roughly $30 billion in 2022. By comparison, Americans in the same year spent $7 billion on ice cream, $20 billion on chocolate and $28 billion on craft beer.

Yet, unlike any of those other sinful delights, marijuana has not been regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. This reality should bewilder any reasonable consumer. And it needs to change.

The federal government’s stance on marijuana is the least responsible one possible. In 10 years, it has moved from imposing a total ban on recreational use to enabling the drug to become widely available across most states with zero national safety standards. This has allowed the cannabis industry enormous leeway to market its products as remedies for all sort of ailments, often without good evidence, and to cultivate ever more potent — and dangerous — formulations.

The consequences should surprise no one: New variants of cannabis are continually popping up with little regulation to ensure safety. More and more Americans are developing addiction to the drug, with an estimated 16 million suffering from cannabis use disorder in 2021. Hospitalizations from marijuana use are also steadily rising, especially among kids.

https://wapo.st/3QFbTfF

August 17, 2023

Inside the Russian effort to build 6,000 attack drones with Iran's help

Leaked documents show that Moscow is progressing toward its goal of mass-producing UAVs it could use to pummel Ukrainian cities

The engineers at a once-bustling industrial hub deep inside Russia were busy planning. The team had been secretly tasked with building a production line that would operate around-the-clock churning out self-detonating drones, weapons that President Vladimir Putin’s forces could use to bombard Ukrainian cities.

A retired official of Russia’s Federal Security Service was put in charge of security for the program. The passports of highly skilled employees were seized so they could not leave the country. In correspondence and other documents, engineers used coded language: Drones were “boats,” their explosives were “bumpers,” and Iran — the country covertly providing technical assistance — was “Ireland” or “Belarus.”

This was Russia’s billion-dollar weapons deal with Iran coming to life in November, 500 miles east of Moscow in the Tatarstan region. Its aim is to domestically build 6,000 drones by summer 2025 — enough to reverse the Russian army’s chronic shortages of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, on the front line. If it succeeds, the sprawling new drone factory could help Russia preserve its dwindling supply of precision munitions, thwart Ukraine’s effort to retake occupied territory and dramatically advance Moscow’s position in the drone arms race that is remaking modern warfare.

Although Western officials have revealed the existence of the facility and Moscow’s partnership with Tehran, documents leaked from the program and obtained by The Washington Post provide new information about the effort by two self-proclaimed enemies of the United States — under some of the world’s heaviest sanctions — to expand the Kremlin’s drone program. Altogether, the documents indicate that, despite delays and a production process that is deeply reliant on foreign-produced electronic components, Moscow has made steady progress toward its goal of manufacturing a variant of the Iranian Shahed-136, an attack drone capable of traveling more than 1,000 miles.

The documents show that the facility’s engineers are trying to improve on Iran’s dated manufacturing techniques, using Russian industrial expertise to produce the drones on a larger scale than Tehran has achieved and with greater quality control. The engineers also are exploring improvements to the drone itself, including making it capable of swarm attacks in which the UAVs autonomously coordinate a strike on a target.

https://wapo.st/3DXQHtQ

Drone swarm attacks. A vision of 21st century warfare.

August 17, 2023

Vile Homophobic Bigot Jenna Ellis Did Good Deed One Time, Please Pay Her Legal Fees

Cry. More.

Rumor has it that because indicted homeschooled former junior varsity Kraken idiot Jenna Ellis has been nice to Ron DeSantis of late, Donald Trump won’t lift a finger to help pay her legal fees. Republican operative and DeSantis guy John Cardillo tweeted it on the platform formerly known as Twitter, and desperate Trump troll Laura Loomer is piling on. Newsweek says it hasn’t independently verified the reports, but Ellis indeed is crowdfunding for legal fees on the low-rent white Jesus GoFundMe knockoff called GiveSendGo.

She’s shilling for her grifting page on Twitter as we speak:


That’s a quote from Ellis’s lawyer Mike Melito, which says, “We will fight for Jenna. If you would like to help support our efforts, please consider donating by clicking the link below. America and the profession of law are worth the fight.”

Indeed, we must stand firm to protect Americans’ rights to swim in Rudy Giuliani’s sulfurous fart clouds while he lies about imaginary voter fraud in Michigan.

At the moment, the fund has $13,834 in it, raised by 217 people. Meanwhile 1,067 people have sent a “pray” — it’s a really stupid platform — which is sure to be counteracted by the millions of people worldwide currently praying for Donald Trump and all his friends to be buried under their nearest prison.

https://www.wonkette.com/p/vile-homophobic-bigot-jenna-ellis

August 17, 2023

When will they pay? Floridians say state not holding insurance carriers accountable post-Ian

It started in the master bedroom.

The night Hurricane Ian threw itself against the edges of Southwest Florida, battering homes and sheeting down rain, its 145-mile-per-hour winds lifted the roof from the home where Sara Alvarez and her husband, Justin Jackson, sheltered.

Rain poured in, soaking belongings, walls and floors. As the winds battered the townhouse for hours, it leaked in wherever roof met wall. By the time the storm had passed, the ground floor was covered in 2 inches of water despite Jackson's attempts to suck it from the ceiling with a Shop-Vac.

Mold soon grew in the paths water had carved in the walls. It plagued Alvarez, who works from home, with daylong headaches and flu-like symptoms.

But that was just the start.

After a contractor tore out the couple's moldy walls, the insurance company for the homeowner's association at Phase VI of Parkwoods in south Fort Myers refused to pay the $2 million in emergency repairs for their and 67 other townhouses in the community. It left dozens of families living in half-gutted homes.

But Heritage Casualty & Property Insurance is far from the only insurance company leaving Floridians in the lurch, state records show.

https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/state/2023/08/16/florida-insurance-crisis-low-payouts-claim-denials-hurricane-ian-recovery/70277542007/

The DeSantis administration is not interested in dealing effectively with Florida's insurance problem. The insurance industry is one of the biggest campaign contributors to Florida's Republican Party candidates and officeholders.