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lodelss · 6 years ago

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ACLU: Raising our Voices for Equality at Stonewall and the Supreme Court

Raising our Voices for Equality at Stonewall and the Supreme Court 50 years after the riots at Stonewall, we are telling the Supreme Court not to roll back protections for LGBTQ people.

It’s been half a century since the Stonewall uprising began on June 28, 1969, the reason we celebrate Pride each June. But there’s another fitting date to commemorate this month, and it falls just two days before the 50th anniversary of Stonewall.

June 26 marks the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in 2003 striking down state laws that criminalized same-sex intimacy. The court’s opinion in Lawrence v. Texas did much more than decriminalize being LGBTQ; it was the first step toward recognizing the equal dignity of same-sex relationships under law.

What’s more, June 26 isn’t the anniversary of just one blockbuster Supreme Court opinion advancing LGBTQ rights. It’s also the anniversary of two others. Ten years to the day after its decision in Lawrence, the court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, which consigned the marriages of same-sex couples to second-class status. Exactly two years later, the court held that same-sex couples have the freedom to marry.

While it’s fitting that the anniversaries of these court decisions fall during Pride month, it isn’t a coincidence. The Supreme Court’s yearly term ends in June, and decisions in the most high-profile cases typically aren’t announced until the final month, giving the justices until the very last minute to put the finishing touches on their opinions. The landmark 1994 case Farmer v. Brennan, in which the court concluded that prison officials could not allow a transgender woman to be raped in prison, was also decided in June, though not on June 26. Still, that three key decisions were announced on the exact same day in June feels significant.

This June 26, however, brings not the end, but the opening salvo in the next major LGBTQ rights issue before the court. Today, LGBTQ employees filed their opening briefs in three cases that will determine whether we are protected from discrimination on the job.

The cases involve three workers who were fired because of who they are. Aimee Stephens, a funeral director in Michigan represented by the ACLU, was fired for being transgender. Donald Zarda, a skydiving instructor in New York represented by the ACLU as co-counsel with NY lawyer Greg Antollino and the Stanford Law School Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, was fired for being gay, as was Gerald Bostock, a child welfare services coordinator in Georgia.

That’s illegal under prevailing interpretations of federal law, but the court could reverse decades of progress and announce that it is perfectly legal to fire someone for being LGBTQ. That would be shocking to most people in this country. Yet the fact that the court agreed to hear the cases raises that alarming possibility, particularly now that Justice Kennedy, long seen as the court’s champion of LGBTQ rights, has been replaced by Justice Kavanaugh.

There are reasons for LGBTQ people to stay optimistic, however.

For starters, there’s the text of the statute itself. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits job discrimination “because of sex.” Firing someone for being a man who dates other men, or for being a woman who was assigned the sex male at birth, is literally discrimination “because of sex.”

Then there’s the Supreme Court’s robust history of interpreting Title VII to protect workers from sex discrimination in myriad forms. The court’s very first Title VII case involved Ida Phillips, who was disqualified from applying for a job because she was a mother with young children. The problem was not that Phillips was a woman; the employer hired women in droves. It was the kind of woman she was: one who, the employer assumed, would be too busy with her preschoolers to do the job.

That is precisely the kind of group-based assumption that Title VII was intended to stamp out. Just as Ida Phillips was entitled to the opportunity to prove that she could do the job, so too LGBTQ people must be free to compete based on their own merit, not assumptions about gender roles.

Finally, there’s the fact that the current crop of cases, unlike the June 26 trio of years past, involves not constitutional rights, but the words of a statute. That means the justices don’t have to agree that the marriage question was rightly decided—or that they are bound to follow it—to rule in favor of the LGBTQ employees here. That will be key to the path to victory, because the workers will need the vote of at least one justice who opposed marriage equality in 2015 or who has since been appointed by President Trump.

We won’t find out whether the court will affirm workplace protections for LGBTQ people this Pride month, however. For that, we’ll have to wait until next year—perhaps until June 26.

In the meantime, employers don’t need to wait to do the right thing. And all of us should call on the Senate to pass the Equality Act—which will provide express protection against discrimination because a person is lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender—right now. This Pride month, it’s never been more important to make our voices heard.

Published June 26, 2019 at 09:15PM via ACLU https://ift.tt/2ZKTlNx from Blogger https://ift.tt/2ZOF3eE via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Blogger

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nancydhooper · 6 years ago

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Raising our Voices for Equality at Stonewall and the Supreme Court

50 years after the riots at Stonewall, we are telling the Supreme Court not to roll back protections for LGBTQ people.

There are reasons for LGBTQ people to stay optimistic, however.

We won’t find out whether the court will affirm workplace protections for LGBTQ people this Pride month, however. For that, we’ll have to wait until next year—perhaps until June 26.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8247012 https://www.aclu.org/blog/lgbt-rights/raising-our-voices-equality-stonewall-and-supreme-court via http://www.rssmix.com/

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jazfood · 7 years ago

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The inglorious rise of Two Buck Chuck

The tale of two men, one wine brand, and the economic revolution of an entire industry.

BY ZACHARY CROCKETT

Walk into almost any Trader Joe’s store and the first thing you’ll see is an enormous display of Charles Shaw wine — or, as it’s more affectionately known, “Two Buck Chuck.”

At $2.99 per bottle, Two Buck Chuck is one of TJ’s all-time best-selling products. Since debuting in 2003, it has won the hearts of critics and customers alike and has sold over 1B bottles.

“I’ve tried a lot of cheap wine,” a young Trader Joe’s-goer in Austin, Texas assures me. “Charles Shaw is the crème de la crème.” Clutching two bottles of 2017 vintage Chardonnay, a shopper in Palo Alto, California adds that it “goes down smooth and [is] cheaper than water.”

How is a supposedly decent wine sold at such a low price-point? And where did it come from? This is the tale of one wine brand, two men, and the economic revolution of an entire industry.

Will the real Charles Shaw please stand up?

Charles Shaw embodied the elitist aura of the wine industry.

He obtained degrees from West Point and Stanford Business School. He worked as an investment banker in France and spent his summers wearing polo shirts in Nantucket. He could sniff a glass of Gamay Nouveau and pick out the “notes of banana.”

In the early ‘70s, while banking in Paris, Shaw fell deeply in love with the craft of winemaking.

So he quit his banking gig, bought 20 acres of land in Napa, California with his wife’s inheritance, and launched Charles F. Shaw Winery.

Shaw’s wines were not crafted for the plebes. Debuted in 1978, his flagship bottle, a Beaujolais, retailed for $13.50 ($35 today), and won international acclaim. “It had an amazing garnet color and was really quite striking, he later told Thrillist. “I liked to drink it with a Tiffany's all-purpose glass.”

TOP: Charles Shaw (left) samples a glass of his 1986 Gamay Nouveau (The Tennessean, April 23, 1987); BOTTOM: An advertisement for one of Shaw’s “fine boutique wines” (San Francisco Examiner, 1990)

Charles Shaw Winery soon expanded to 115 acres, 60 employees, and 15k cases per year. Business was booming. Shaw and his wife, Lucy, epitomized the Haute couture of Napa Valley: Tall, elegant, and beautiful, they turned heads at fancy galas and industry events.

Then, in the late ‘80s, things began to fall apart.

Shaw lost “hundreds of thousands of dollars” after a supplier error tainted 1.4k barrels of wine. He dealt with a devastating root louse infestation that claimed 50 acres of his vines. He over-anticipated the demand for Burgundies. He went through a nasty divorce that took a toll on his management. Then, a recession hit.

By 1992, Shaw was $3m in debt and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. He “stashed the last of his cash under the floor of his car,” took a final glance over his trellised hills, and left town.

The box wine baron

Fred Franzia did not share Shaw’s air d'élégance.

He was unrefined and heavyset, with a body shape the New Yorker likened to a “gourmet marshmallow” (Business 2.0 Magazine called him “a cross between John Madden and Shrek”).

Reclusive and gruff, he shied away from public appearances and scoffed at Napa Valley’s wine snobbery. He referred to winemakers as “bozos.” He didn’t care for France.

Franzia came from a long lineage of winemakers. His great-grandfather, Giuseppe, had immigrated to California’s Central Valley in 1893 and set up Franzia Brothers Winery (later sold to Coca-Cola); his uncle, Ernest Gallo, had built the largest wine exporter in California.

In 1973, Franzia launched his own wine company, Bronco Wine Co. In a rickety wood-paneled trailer held together with duct tape, he set out to produce extremely cheap, high-quality “super-value” wines — wines that rejected the pretentiousness of Napa Valley.

TOP: Fred Franzia (right) breaks ground on Bronco Wine Co. with his brothers (via Bronco); BOTTOM: Franzia inhales grapes (via Michael Kelley, Business 2.0 Magazine)

Initially, Bronco operated as a wholesaler, buying bulk wine and selling it to larger wineries at a profit. But soon Franzia saw an opportunity to produce his own cheap wines — wines, as he later put it, that “yuppies would feel comfortable drinking.”

He developed a strategy of buying out distressed wineries with distinguished-sounding names — Napa Ridge, Napa Creek, Domaine Napa — and using them to sell his stock of less-desirable Central Valley wines. Through a legal loophole, he could say the wines were “Cellared and Bottled in Napa,” so long as the brand was founded prior to 1986.

On a summer day in 1995, a few years after Charles Shaw Winery went bust, Franzia purchased the winery’s brand, label, and name for a mere $27k.

"We buy wineries from guys from Stanford who go bankrupt,” he later boasted. “Some real dumb-asses from there."

Unbeknownst to the real Charles Shaw, Franzia was about to transform his once-fancy wine brand into an impossibly cheap “everyman’s juice” — and change the wine industry forever.

How Franzia “shorted” the wine business

In the late 1990s, there was a wine boom: Vineyard acreage grew by 24% and suddenly everyone from car mechanics to plumbers was putting up vines on spare California land.

Soon, there were rumblings that the industry was over-producing grapes and could face a crash. While most dismissed the warning, Franzia hedged a bet on it.

He constructed a faux-Tuscan, 92k-square-foot bottling plant with high-speed lines that were capable of producing 18m cases per year — 2x the amount of wine in the entire Napa Valley. He also stopped producing wine altogether, and his 452 stainless steel storage tanks sat empty, waiting for the market to go belly-up.

A small portion of the vineyards at Bronco’s San Joaquin Valley vineyard in Central California (Bronco)

Franzia’s intuition paid off. The industry soon faced a massive glut, and while other vintners suffered surpluses, he bought up as much cheap wine as he could get his hands on.

Wineries were forced to “purge” massive quantities of their high-quality wine, or risk oversaturating their own market. Franzia was able to suck it up for as little as 50 cents/gallon — an astonishingly low price compared with the going rate of $10/gallon just a few years earlier.

Franzia had let the Charles Shaw Winery brand sit dormant since purchasing it years before. Now, he was ready to bring it back to life.

Using the exact same name and label (which pictures Shaw’s old tennis court pagoda), he launched a large-scale production effort. His facilities ran 24 hours a day, 7 days per week — and in a short time, he’d churned out a two-story-tall stack of Charles Shaw cases ready for distribution.

The inglorious rise of Two Buck Chuck

Trader Joe’s already carried several other wine brands operated by Franzia, and they were willing to give Charles Shaw a whirl.

In the Spring of 2002, the label made its retail debut at the shockingly low price of $1.99 per bottle. Early on, in an internet chat room, a Trader Joe’s employee dubbed it “Two Buck Chuck” — a moniker that caught the eyes of budget-conscious shoppers.

These were the days following the Dot-Com bubble and the early 2000s recession: There was a demand for cheap wine. But nobody — not even Franzia — could’ve anticipated the wine’s success.

Come Fall, certain locations were selling up to 6k bottles per day. People would come to Trader Joe’s and fill up their SUVs with dozens of cases; some days, customers would line up outside the stores before they opened, and an entire supply would sell out in minutes.

Charles Shaw wines were met with surprisingly good reviews (via assorted newspapers 2003-4)

“People went apeshit,” Keith Wallace, a wine expert, told Thrillist. “It was the ‘Macarena’ of wine… And it was this blue-collar pride thing. People thought, ‘This bottle is just as good as one that's $20. Screw those snobs.��"

By early 2003, Charles Shaw had already sold 60m bottles, accounting for 12% of all of California’s wine shipments within the state. It was, by wine experts’ estimation, the fastest-growing wine in US history. When Franzia sold his 400-millionth bottle of Charles Shaw in 2009, he had only one thing to say: “Take that and shove it, Napa.”

For a $2 bottle, it performed astonishingly well in competitions. The Chardonnay won a double-gold at the 2007 California State Fair, and Wines & Vines Magazine rated it higher than a $67 bottle in a blind tasting.

Two Buck Chuck, declared one critic, had “revolutionized wine drinking” forever.

How to make money on a $2 bottle on wine

Franzia pulled off something wine experts never thought possible: He managed to produce a rock-bottom-priced wine that people actually like to drink — and make money on it. How on Earth is that possible?

For starters, though the Charles Shaw label boasts “Cellared and Bottled in Napa,” most of the wines’ grapes come from the Central Valley, where Franzia owns 35k+ acres of vineyards. Though he capitalizes on the Napa name, his operation is rooted in an area with dramatically cheaper land and operation costs.

Franzia’s enormous holdings have allowed him to produce Charles Shaw wines at an extremely low price point (The Hustle)

These days, most Charles Shaw bottles contain a blend of bulk-purchased grapes and grapes grown by Franzia on his own land. Using a suite of 700k-gallon tanks (most small wineries use 700-gallon tanks), he is able to pump out 90m gallons of wine every year.

Franzia also has a hand in nearly every part of the supply chain: He maintains his own bottling plant (which produces 250 bottles per minute), a 62m-gallon storage facility, and a distribution network that includes a fleet of steel tanker trucks.

Lastly, every corner is cut: He uses oak chips to ferment his wine rather than barrels; he swaps real corks for composites; he subs traditional wares for lightweight bottles and crates.

Franzia has stated that his tactics would make the average farmer “shit in his pants.” But his robust empire, tremendous output, and ruthless bulk-buying tactics have allowed him to keep prices down and earn reported revenues of ~$500m per year.

Just business

Today, Charles Shaw lives in Chicago and works at the Chicago Board of Trade, a futures and options exchange.

At 74 years old, he has mostly moved on from wine — though he once referred to the continued use of his name as “embarrassing and demeaning.” He has never seen a penny from Two Buck Chuck.

"It's not a Napa wine, and not of the quality of the Charles Shaw brand [that was] estate grown with layers of complexity,” he told the Napa Valley Register, during the height of the Two Buck Chuck boom in 2003. "To take [my name] and come out and have a lesser wine from another appellation — that isn't what I started out to do, was it?”

Charles Shaw and Fred Franzia today (The Hustle)

Franzia, on the other hand, continues to rake in the big bucks from his Charles Shaw and his other 150 labels.

On his compound in the sparse agricultural town of Ceres, California, he works 100-hour weeks. As his friend, Michael Mondavi, once said: “He sleeps, drinks, eats the wine business... He doesn’t worry about yachting or golf. Just business.”

His role in changing the wine industry has earned him near universal hated by “true wine people” — mainly vintners who claim he’s “cheapened” the good Napa name. But this doesn’t bother him much.

“You tell me why someone’s bottle is worth eighty dollars and mine’s worth two dollars,” he retorted. “Do you get forty times the pleasure from it?”

- thehustle.co

#wine #TJ’s #Trader Joe's

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knotfodder · 2 years ago

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orbemnews · 4 years ago

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A Tax Change Is Coming, Maybe Let the haggling begin The Biden administration has unveiled its corporate tax overhaul, intended to raise $2.5 trillion over 15 years to pay for an infrastructure program. “Debate is welcome. Compromise is inevitable. Changes are certain,” President Biden said, but he stressed that “inaction is not an option.” “America’s corporate tax system has long been broken,” the Treasury secretary Janet Yellen wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed coinciding with the plan’s release. In addition to raising the headline corporate tax rate, the administration’s proposal takes aim at companies that shift profits abroad, especially to low-tax havens like Bermuda or Ireland. Some of the changes could be enacted by regulation, but things like raising the corporate tax rate will need the approval of Congress. What’s in the plan? Here are the main provisions: Raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent. The increase from 21 percent would put the U.S. more in line with other big countries and, the administration says, lift corporate tax receipts that have fallen to their lowest levels as a share of the economy since World War II. Ensure big companies pay at least 15 percent in taxes. A minimum tax on book income for companies with annual profits of $2 billion or more would mean firms that use deductions, exemptions and other methods to reduce their liability wouldn’t be able to go lower than a certain level. If this had been in place in recent years, 45 companies would have faced the tax. Strengthen the global minimum tax to end profit shifting. This would double the rate on foreign intangible assets introduced by the Trump administration in 2017. The Biden administration also says it will push for global agreement on common rates, to discourage companies from shopping around for tax jurisdictions. Finance ministers from the Group of 20 nations said yesterday that they hoped to agree on a global minimum tax rate by midyear, but previous efforts have faltered when it came to nailing down the details. Punish companies that headquarter in low-tax countries. A provision in the plan would target “inversions,” where American companies merge with a foreign entity in order to move headquarters to a low-tax country. Replace fossil-fuel tax subsidies with clean-energy incentives. Previous attempts to eliminate subsidies on oil and gas met with stiff industry and congressional opposition. Beef up the I.R.S. The agency’s enforcement budget has fallen by 25 percent over the past decade, and the proposal would bolster the budget for experts in complex corporate litigation. What effect would it have? A Wharton School budget model concluded that the corporate tax rate increase would “not meaningfully affect the normal return on investment,” but when combined with the proposed minimum tax on book income, business investment would fall somewhat. All told, by 2050 the tax provisions would reduce government debt by more than 11 percent from the current baseline, but also reduce G.D.P. by 0.5 percent over that period. Business groups aren’t happy about it. The Chamber of Commerce said the plan would “hurt American businesses and cost American jobs.” The Business Roundtable said it “threatens to subject the U.S. to a major competitive disadvantage.” Republican lawmakers have also argued that it’s bad for business, but the White House was quick to note that the former Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn, a key player in the 2017 tax cut, said last June that “I’m actually OK at 28 percent.” “I think there could be bipartisan interest in about half of what the president proposed on the spending side, but of course the corporate tax increases would be a non-starter,” Rohit Kumar, the head of PwC’s Washington tax policy group and a former aide to Senator Mitch McConnell, told DealBook. He’s not convinced there’s even enough support among Democrats for tax increases. For more on this, see our sister newsletter, The Morning: “Corporate Taxes Are Wealth Taxes” HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING The counting of votes in the Amazon union drive begins soon. The union seeking to represent workers at a warehouse in Alabama said that 3,215 ballots were cast, representing 55 percent of eligible workers. The hand count of the ballots will begin either later today or tomorrow. Britain curbs the use of AstraZeneca’s vaccine for people under 30. The decision came as regulators increasingly suspect a link between the shot and rare blood clots. While Britain has enough vaccines from other makers to avoid a slowdown in its inoculation efforts, the concerns may dent vaccination efforts in developing countries. Senator Mitch McConnell walks back his comments on companies and politics, sort of. The minority leader conceded that his criticism of companies for speaking out against voting restrictions was not spoken “artfully.” (Democrats noted that Republicans have benefited from corporate donations.) “They are certainly entitled to be involved in politics,” Mr. McConnell said. Tencent’s biggest shareholder sells a slice of its holdings for $14.7 billion. Prosus, the Europe-based tech investor, sold 2 percent of its stake in the Chinese tech giant in the biggest-ever block trade (breaking its own record). Prosus still owns a 29 percent stake in the company. The N.R.A.’s chief concedes that he hid the group’s Chapter 11 plans. Wayne LaPierre said at a bankruptcy court hearing that he hadn’t told top executives or his board of the arrangement. He is accused of having the gun-rights group file for Chapter 11 to stymie an investigation by New York State’s attorney general. Acres of empty desks Many parts of the economy have held up during the pandemic — but corporate real estate isn’t one of them. Landlords and cities are worried that remote working will irreversibly sap demand for office space, The Times’s Peter Eavis and Matthew Haag report. The numbers are grim for landlords. The national office vacancy rate in city centers has hit 16.4 percent, according to Cushman & Wakefield, a decade-long high. In Manhattan alone, over 17 percent of all office space is available, the most in over 30 years. And rents on existing space could also face pressure from new buildings coming online, representing 124 million square feet. Updated April 8, 2021, 6:08 a.m. ET Some are staying hopeful. Landlords like Boston Properties and SL Green haven’t suffered big financial losses from the pandemic, thanks to many tenants being locked into long leases. They’re also betting many companies want their workers to meet in person to better collaborate and train younger employees. The final damage won’t be known for some time. Companies are still trying to figure out their real estate needs, based on their work policies: While Amazon expects a return to an “office-centric culture,” JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon said that the bank may need only 60 seats for every 100 employees after the pandemic. “We are just going to be bleeding lower for the next three to four years to find out what the new level of tenant demand is,” Jonathan Litt, the chief investment officer of Land & Buildings, told The Times. “Even though I’m sort of a pro-crypto, pro-Bitcoin maximalist person, I do wonder whether at this point Bitcoin should also be thought in part of as a Chinese financial weapon against the U.S.” — Peter Thiel, the tech investor, on how cryptocurrency threatens the U.S. dollar. “China wants to do things to weaken it, so China’s long Bitcoin,” he added. Doing vaccine passports right New York recently became the first U.S. state to offer Covid-19 “vaccine passports,” while the governors of Florida and Texas banned them. Airlines, universities, event venues and other businesses are also testing various methods of vaccine verification. The starkly different approaches reflect a wider national and global debate on proof of health in the pandemic era. “There are a lot of ways it could be done badly,” Jay Stanley of the American Civil Liberties Union told DealBook, but he suggested a “narrow path” to a certification system that could work. The ideal system would be paper-based with a digital supplement, Mr. Stanley argues, so that people who lack access to technology aren’t disadvantaged. Encrypted data would be stored on a decentralized network, protected with a public key for vaccine providers and private keys for users to ensure privacy. Fairness also demands a standardized approach, rather than the current variety of systems, which could result in “a mess for civil liberties, equity and privacy,” he said. The Biden administration has said it won’t mandate vaccine passports, a point it reiterated this week, but it is working on standards the private sector can adopt. New York partnered with IBM on the state’s opt-in Excelsior Pass, which allows access to restricted activities and venues. The certificates can raise a slew of social and legal issues, depending on who is asking for proof of vaccination and why, according to the Stanford law professor David Studdert. Government mandates trigger more concerns than opt-in programs, he noted, and companies will have different considerations if they seek certification from customers or workers. Given all the variations, he said, “within reason” the market should decide what works, and officials should avoid both mandates and bans: “Different communities and employers have a different tolerance for risk.” More on vaccine passports: THE SPEED READ Deals A top S.E.C. official warned of “significant and yet undiscovered issues” with SPACs, the latest words of caution from the regulator about blank-check funds. (WSJ) Twitter is said to have held talks to buy Clubhouse for $4 billion, though negotiations aren’t currently active. (Bloomberg) Shares in Deliveroo rose after retail investors were allowed to start trading in the food delivery service. (CNBC) Politics and policy China is offering tax breaks and other perks to financiers in Hong Kong to keep them from leaving the territory. (NYT) A federal official warned last June that Emergent BioSolutions, the company behind the Johnson & Johnson vaccine mix-up, lacked trained staff and had problems with quality control. (NYT) Tech Uber and Lyft are “throwing money” at drivers to bring them back to work. (FT) Within weeks, Apple will roll out new privacy notifications for apps, which companies like Facebook have argued would harm their businesses. (Reuters) “No publicly traded company is a family. I fell for the fantasy that it could be.” (NYT Op-Ed) Best of the rest How the pandemic pummeled the world’s most famous shopping streets. (Quartz) Former employees of Marcus, the consumer lender that is key to Goldman Sachs’s future, reportedly say they were burned out by an ambitious product launch schedule. (Insider) All about muons, the subatomic particles that seem to disobey the known laws of physics. (NYT) We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected]. Source link Orbem News #Change #Coming #Tax

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theconservativebrief · 7 years ago

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Elijah Stewart first heard about the Juul three years ago, during his sophomore year of high school.

Many of his friends had started sucking on the e-cigarette that resembles a USB flash drive. It was suddenly a lot more socially acceptable, even cool, “to Juul” than to smoke cigarettes.

Stewart was an occasional cigarette smoker when he began experimenting with Juul. Very quickly, he felt he was addicted. “After about a week, you feel like you need to puff on the Juul,” he says. “To some people it is like a baby pacifier, and they freak out when it’s not near.”

Stewart, who is 19 and studies engineering at Providence College, now wants to throw away his Juul. Every four or five days, he burns through a pod — which comes in eight flavors, including Creme Brûlée and Cool Cucumber, and delivers as much nicotine as up to two packs of cigarettes. The habit sets him back about $16 to $32 every month.

But quitting won’t be easy, he says, because Juul is everywhere. “If you were to go to any party, any social event, there would no doubt be a Juul.”

What Stewart is seeing on his campus in Rhode Island is part a dramatic shift happening across America: E-cigarettes have quietly eclipsed cigarette smoking among adolescents. The possibility of another generation getting hooked on nicotine is a nightmare scenario health regulators are scrambling to avoid.

No device right now is as worrisome as the Juul — because of both its explosion in popularity and the unusually heavy dose of nicotine it delivers. In 2017, the e-cigarette market expanded by 40 percent, to $1.16 billion, with a lot of that growth driven by Juul.

As of March, Juul made up more than half of all e-cigarette retail market sales in the US, according to Nielsen data. Considering it has only been on the market since 2015, and there are hundreds of other devices available to consumers, Juul’s market share is staggering.

“I don’t recall any fad, legal or illegal, catching on in this way,” says Meg Kenny, the assistant head of school at Burr and Burton Academy in Manchester, Vermont, who has worked in education for 20 years. Students at her school are Juuling in bathrooms, in class, and on the bus. Because it’s against the school’s rules, they hide the devices in ceiling tiles and in their bras and underwear.

“Ninety-five percent of the disciplinary infractions we dealt with in the fall and continue to deal with into the spring are all connected to the Juul,” she added.

While school administrators like Kenny are glad that cigarette smoke is disappearing from campuses, they’re concerned that students don’t understand the risks of using the Juul. What sets it apart from other e-cigarettes is that it hits the body with a tobacco cigarette-worthy dose of nicotine. We don’t know if Juul is more addictive than regular cigarettes but it’s certainly possible that teens getting into Juul now may be wading into a lifelong habit.

The long-term health impacts of e-cigarettes are still unknown and a recent case study, published in the journal Pediatrics, suggests there are risks. An 18-year-old woman was diagnosed with hypersensitivity pneumonitis, also known as “wet lung,” a few weeks after taking up vaping. The chemicals in the e-cigarettes, the doctors hypothesized, caused an allergic reaction in her lungs that led to respiratory failure and forced her on to a breathing machine until her lungs recovered.

Doctors and public health officials also worry about the immediate harmful side effects of nicotine on young people’s developing brains and bodies. The “nicotine in these products can rewire an adolescent’s brain, leading to years of addiction,” said Scott Gottlieb, the head of the Food and Drug Administration. And there’s strong evidence that vaping may encourage young people to try cigarettes.

That’s why Gottlieb announced in April that the agency is cracking down on Juul and other e-cigarette companies like it, which appear to be selling and marketing their products to youth. The agency is going after retailers that illegally sell these products to minors, and they’ve asked Juul’s makers, Juul Labs, to submit paperwork about their marketing practices and health impact.

But the FDA, under Gottlieb, also delayed the compliance deadline for the regulation of e-cigarettes until 2022. This gave e-cigarette manufacturers who had products on the market before 2016, including Juul Labs, a free pass when it came to filing public health and marketing applications before selling in the US.

“In this world, a delay of [five] years is a lifetime,” said Matt Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. “And the data seems to indicate this product is being used by kids all across the country.”

So what can and should be done about e-cigarettes like Juul, a growing market that Myers calls the “Wild West”? Let’s break it down.

The Juul e-cigarette looks like a thumb drive. Boston Globe via Getty Images

E-cigarette sales have exploded over the past decade — and the devices have slowly been embraced by many in the public health community for their potential as a harm reduction tool to help smokers quit.

Juul’s stated mission is “improving the lives of the one billion adult smokers.” Created by two former smokers and Stanford design graduates (one of whom also worked as a design engineer at Apple), the duo wanted to make a device that looked sleek and attractive:

When they could find no attractive alternative to cigarettes, [James Monsees and Adam Bowen] recognized a groundbreaking opportunity to apply industrial design to the smoking industry, which had not materially evolved in over one hundred years.

So they designed an e-cigarette that could easily be mistaken for a USB flash drive — and can fit in the palm of the hand.

The Juul has two components: the e-cigarette, which holds the battery and temperature regulation system; and the “pod,” which contains e-liquid — made up of nicotine, glycerol and propylene glycol, benzoic acid, and flavorants — and is inserted into the end of the e-cigarette device. Pods come in a variety of colors and flavors, from cucumber to creme brûlée, mango, and tobacco. Juul’s “starter kit,” the e-cigarette, USB charger, and four flavor pods, sells for about $50.

When you insert the pod into its cartridge and inhale through a mouthpiece on the end of the Juul, the device vaporizes the e-liquid. When the device runs out of power, you can insert it into your computer via a USB charger for a reboot.

With such a sleek design and enticing flavor options, it’s not difficult to see why these devices appeal to more than just older smokers.

“[Juul] is everything old vapes were not,” college student and Juul dabbler David* told me. “It’s very lightweight and portable, super easy to charge and refill, and it’s low-maintenance,” unlike other e-cigarette devices that require users to replace coils or atomizers.

But the biggest appeal for David is how discreet the device is. “You can essentially Juul wherever without drawing much attention.”

For Stewart, the student at Providence College, it’s also the flavors. “If they had bland flavors, then not as many people would [Juul].”

While Juul’s official marketing campaign appears to be targeted to adult smokers, young Juul users have taken it upon themselves to spread the word. Campaigns have sprung up on social media, including #doit4Juul on YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram, where enthusiasts share photos and videos doing tricks with the product. Meg Kenny told me teachers often catch students Juuling in photos they’ve shared on social media.

Vaping devices, with Juul in the center. AP

Another feature that sets Juul apart from many of the other e-cigarettes on the market is the nicotine punch it packs.

Each pod contains 59 milligrams of nicotine per milliliter of liquid. Juul claims one pod is equal to a pack of cigarettes in terms of nicotine, but tobacco experts told me the precise equivalency is difficult to determine because not all the nicotine released in cigarette smoke is inhaled, and some is trapped in the filter. Juul also contains three times the nicotine levels permitted in the European Union, which is why Juul can’t be sold there.

Juul’s creators ramped up the nicotine levels on purpose. They realized many of the e-cigarettes on the market don’t hit smokers’ systems in a way that’s comparable to cigarettes. (Typical e-cigarettes have nicotine levels ranging from 6 to 30 milligrams per milliliter.)

To address that gap, Juul vaporizes from a liquid that contains nicotine salts. In Juul, these nicotine salts are absorbed into the body at almost the same speed as nicotine in regular cigarettes, a speed that comes from the use of freebase nicotine.

But unlike the freebase nicotine in regular cigarettes, which can be very irritating, nicotine salt goes down smoothly and doesn’t cause the unpleasant feeling in the chest and lungs that cigarette smoke does, said David Liddell Ashley, a former director of the office of science in the Center for Tobacco Products at the FDA. The vapor also doesn’t have the nasty smell of cigarettes, and can emit a subtle whiff of fruit or other flavors when users vape.

“[That’s] my biggest concern,” Ashley added. With traditional cigarettes, users typically cough uncontrollably on their first puffs. With Juul, vapers can get the same nicotine effect but without the pesky irritation. “It may be much easier for a user to start on these products,” Ashley said.

Stewart says he also finds Juul more addicting. “It gives you a head rush that is stronger that is a drag of a cigarette.”

As regulators scramble over what to do about Juul, one thing has become clear: Many teens don’t seem to understand the potential harms of these devices.

A new study, published in BMJ’s Tobacco Control journal, suggests many young people know about Juul, though they aren’t aware of its potential harms. In the survey of youth ages 15 to 24, a quarter recognized Juul, and 10 percent reported both recognizing and trying the device. Alarmingly, most respondents were not aware that Juul pods always contain nicotine.

“The actual true science behind [Juul] and the concentrate and how the nicotine is derived — that’s not common knowledge to [students],” Kenny said. “And I think that’s the work that we have to do and with our students and families. When we’ve intervened and had meetings with parents, they’re even confused as to what’s in the product. ‘Is there really nicotine in it? My kid just told me it’s flavored oil.’”

To get to the bottom of why teens hold these views, the FDA took the unusual step in April of demanding Juul submit documents about its marketing and research and what it knows about Juul use among youth. The move was part of FDA’s new Youth Tobacco Prevention Plan. In May, the agency followed up by sending requests for information to four other e-cigarette makers, which also appear to be marketed at young people.

“We don’t yet fully understand why these products are so popular among youth,” said Gottlieb in a statement. “But it’s imperative that we figure it out, and fast. These documents may help us get there.”

The FDA has also started an undercover sting investigation of e-cigarette retailers, including gas stations, convenience stores, and online retailers, sending warning letters to anyone who is violating the law against selling these devices to kids under 18 (or even 21 in some states). If retailers don’t comply, they face escalating fines for their violations.

This may not go far enough. While e-cigarette makers, like regular cigarette makers, aren’t supposed to sell their products to minors, companies can design and market their devices in ways that appeal directly to youth.

Public health authorities generally agree that e-cigarettes and other cigarette alternatives are less harmful than conventional smoking for individual smokers, but their long-term public health consequences are still unknown.

For example, these devices may save the lives of smokers at a time when one in five deaths in the US is still linked to traditional cigarettes. They may also entice more young people to use them, or even to smoke, at a time when smoking rates have been declining. (We know that most people who currently use e-cigarettes continue to smoke.)

This tension between helping smokers while minimizing harm to public health is a big reason why health and regulatory agencies have been hamstrung over how to regulate products like Juul.

Last summer, the FDA delayed the compliance deadline for the regulation of e-cigarette products to 2022. This gave the industry five more years to file public health applications that show that their products are safe alternatives to conventional cigarettes and that they weren’t unduly targeting minors. The FDA’s Gottlieb positioned the delay as a way to give manufacturers time to get in step with the new laws while ensuring smokers had access to cigarette alternatives that could save their lives.

Some public health advocates viewed the move as a giveaway for the vaping industry, and a chance for e-cigarette makers to further expand their market share among kids at a time when e-cigarette in teens has eclipsed conventional cigarette use. For these reasons, health groups sued the FDA over the delay and sent a letter to Gottlieb asking the FDA to begin to regulate e-cigarette products like other cigarettes immediately. (Something to look out for is whether e-cigarettes in young people becomes a big dark spot on Gottlieb’s otherwise respectable track record.)

In the absence of a tougher federal response, cities may start cracking down: San Francisco voters just approved a proposition to ban the sale of flavored tobacco products, including e-cigarette liquids. A group of senators also sent a letter to Juul with a series of questions about their products, including the health impact of their products and when they’d stop selling flavors that appeal to kids.

“[Juul’s success] could be the first sign of a very important new category,” said University of Waterloo public health researcher David Hammond. “But here’s the funny thing,” he added. The more appealing and cigarette-like an e-cigarette is, the better it competes with cigarettes, and the more it helps people quit. “On the flip side — the more likely it is to recruit new people into the market in terms of youth,” he said.

Juul is certainly not the only super-subtle and slick e-cigarette device that may entice youth. A bunch of copycats have sprung up, and unlike Juul, they very openly target kids. Check out the KandyPens website, and how it explodes with images of young models and rappers.

The FDA says it will continue exercising its regulatory authority to crack down on these manufacturers ahead of that 2022 deadline by warning and fining retailers. E-cigarette makers are also required to register the ingredients in their products, list any nicotine content on their packages, and remove “modified risk claims,” among other regulations.

Juul has also said it’ll work with federal and state health regulators to fight underage use, and a company spokesperson told Vox it “strongly condemn[s] the use of our product by minors,” defined as 18 or 21, depending on the state.

“Our company’s mission is to eliminate cigarettes and help the more than one billion smokers worldwide switch to a better alternative,” said Juul Labs chief executive officer Kevin Burns in an April 25 statement. “At the same time, we are committed to deterring young people, as well as adults who do not currently smoke, from using our products. We cannot be more emphatic on this point: No young person or non-nicotine user should ever try Juul.”

But the free market, and vaping culture, may be evolving faster than any health regulator.

“The nightmare scenario for public health is that this product brings kids into the market, addicts them to nicotine, and leads to smoking,” Hammond said. For now, it’s not clear whether this is happening. But there seems to be good reason it could.

*David did not want his full name and identity revealed to protect his privacy.

For more on Juul and e-cigarettes, please listen to the May 3, 2018 episode of Today Explained.

Original Source -> Juul, the vape device teens are getting hooked on, explained

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lodelss · 6 years ago

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ACLU: Raising our Voices for Equality at Stonewall and the Supreme Court

Raising our Voices for Equality at Stonewall and the Supreme Court 50 years after the riots at Stonewall, we are telling the Supreme Court not to roll back protections for LGBTQ people.

There are reasons for LGBTQ people to stay optimistic, however.

We won’t find out whether the court will affirm workplace protections for LGBTQ people this Pride month, however. For that, we’ll have to wait until next year—perhaps until June 26.

Published June 26, 2019 at 04:45PM via ACLU https://ift.tt/2ZKTlNx from Blogger https://ift.tt/2FzhXBc via IFTTT

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mthrynn · 8 years ago

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Last week, Singularity – the fast-growing HPC container technology whose development has been spearheaded by Gregory Kurtzer at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab – took a step ‘out of the lab’ with formation of SingularityWare LLC by Kurtzer. In this Q&A interview with HPCwire, Kurtzer discusses Singularity’s history, adoption and technology trends, and what the organizational change means for Singularity and its growing user base. Singularity remains firmly in the open domain says Kurtzer.

Container technology, of course, isn’t new. Docker containers and its ecosystem of tools have stormed through the enterprise computing environment. Enhanced application portability, reproducibility, and collaborative development efforts are among the many attractions. HPC was late to this party, or perhaps more accurately Docker was less than ideal for HPC. For example, security issues and inability to run well in closely-coupled computing environments were prominent stumbling blocks.

Gregory Kurtzer, SingularityWare CEO

Singularity was developed specifically to solve those problems and to accommodate HPC needs and it has enjoyed surprisingly rapid adoption. Kurtzer started working on the project in November of 2015 and release 1.0 was roughly one year ago in April 2016; the latest release, 2.2.1, was issued in February 2017.

Kurtzer says that Open Science Grid has already served roughly 20 million containers in Singularity. A listing of existing Singularity users and the computational resources being used is available for download at the Singularity web site (still hosted at LBNL, at least for the moment). Some of the institutions working with Singularity include: TACC, San Diego Supercomputer Center, GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research, NIH, Stanford University, and LBNL. There is also a small scattering of commercial users.

More than many, Kurtzer in his role as HPC systems architect and technical lead of the HPC group at LBNL has had a close eye on efforts to adapt containers for use in HPC. Incidentally, he will remain a scientific advisor for LBNL but become CEO of SingularityWare, which is being funded by another start-up, RStor. Parsing the SingularityWare-RStor relationship seems a little fuzzy at present but these are early days. Kurtzer informed the community of the new changes under the heading ‘Big Singularity Announcement‘ last Friday.

HPCwire: Container use – mostly Docker – grew rapidly in the enterprise/commercial space; what did you see as the need and role for container technology in HPC at the start of the Singularity project?

Greg Kurtzer: This occurred in chronologic steps. First the problem to solve was, how do we support Docker on our HPC resources. Scientists were asking for it, begging for it in fact, yet no HPC centers were able to install Docker on their traditional HPC systems. After dedicating some time to this, talking to many other resource providers, and integrators, and becoming very frustrated at the inherent incompatibilities. Then I had the novel idea of talking to the scientists. Learning from them what they need. Understanding what problems Docker was solving for them and how best to address that.

These problems that Docker solved for scientists really boiled down to: software environment reproducibility, environment mobility/agility, the ability to leverage the work of their peers, control of their own software stack, and the ability to do all of the above intuitively. But in HPC and on supercomputers, Docker has been deemed a non-starter due to its usage model. For example it would allow users to control a root owned damon process, without appropriate precautions in place to securely access and control data or limit escalation of user contexts. Nor is it generally compatible with resource manager workflows or compatible with MPI workloads, among lots of other factors. So while Docker was working fine for scientists using loosely coupled or non-parallel applications on private resources just fine, it is a dead end path for anyone requiring to scale up to supercomputers.

Singularity approached this from the perspective of, what problems do we really need to solve for science and compute, and what was found is that there is a much more appropriate manner to solve these problems then shoe-horning Docker, a solution designed for enterprise micro-service virtualization, onto scientific computing.

HPCwire: Can you give a few numbers to illustrate Singularity’s growth? Roughly how many users does Singularity have today, what’s been the rate of growth, and what segments (academia, labs, etc.) have been the most active and why? What does the typical user(s) look like?

Kurtzer: This is really hard to keep track of. I had someone recently come up to me and say “In less than a year, Singularity went from being unheard of to a standard component on every HPC resource I have access to!”. I had no response, but was jumping up and down excitedly … on the inside.

Along the effort of trying to keep up, I created a Google form that allows people to self register their system. On this voluntary registry you will find some of the largest public HPC resources in the world. One of them, at any given moment, is running 2000 Singularity containers at a time. The OSG (Open Science Grid) has served up well over twenty million containers with Singularity! I can go on, but the gist is that Singularity has been adopted faster than I could keep up with development, support and maintenance.

HPCwire: What have been the dominant use cases (research, development/prototyping, production, etc.) and how do you see that changing over time? Could you briefly cite a couple of examples of Singularity users and what they are using it for?

Kurtzer: I can elaborate on a couple of very general usage examples:

A scientist has a workload where the dependencies and environment is difficult to (re)create or includes some binary components specific to a particular distribution or flavor of Linux. Singularity will allow this scientist to build a container that properly addresses the dependencies. Once this has been done, that container can be copied to any system (private/local, HPC, or cloud) that the scientist has access to and run that container; assuming of course that Singularity has been installed on that host.

Cloud computing resources are becoming more common, a single Singularity container image can include all of the dependencies necessary to bring that workload from site to site and cloud to center. A result of the image being a single file makes it very easy to “carry around” an image that has all of the applications, tools and environment you may need.

Not all scientific workflows are public, many scientific libraries, programs and data are controlled (export, classified, trade secrets, etc.) which makes managing the visibility and access to these containers critical. Singularity’s use of single file images, like any file on a local file system, abide by standard POSIX permissions, makes Singularity a very capable technology for this use-case.

HPCwire: Maybe we should briefly describe what Singularity is and its underlying technology. What are the key features today, what feature gaps have been identified, and what’s the technology roadmap going forward? I realize the latter may not yet be fleshed out. How do Power- and ARM-based systems fit into the plans?

Kurtzer: Singularity is a container platform designed to support containers utilizing a single image file which allows users to have full control of where and how their containers are accessed and used. Embedded in the container image file is the entire encapsulation of the contained environment, and running any program, script, workflow, or accessing any data within, is as easy as running any command line program. Singularity can also deal with other container formats like Squash FS based containers and Docker containers, but these other formats are less optimal as general purpose Singularity containers.

Comparing to Docker and other enterprise container systems, these focus on the necessity for full process isolation and strive to give the illusion of sole occupancy on the physical host. For scientific compute, the goal is almost 180 degrees opposite. We want to leverage the host’s resources as directly and efficiently as possible. That may include file systems, interconnects and GPUs. Isolation from these services becomes a detriment in terms of our needs.

I have already ported Singularity to Power and it worked “out of the box” on ARM, but I don’t have much access to these architectures, so I don’t test much on them.

HPCwire: How should we relate Singularity to Docker? Are they competitive or likely to bump against each other in the HPC community?

Kurtzer: Traditionally, HPC is referring to a subset of use cases, where the applications are very tightly coupled, based on MPI (or PVM), and they require non-commodity internets for decent performance, and can scale to gigantic extreme scales. While this form of scientific computing is relatively small compared to the overall range of scientific computing in general (e.g. the long tails), large centers have to build computing resources capable of supporting this highest uncommon denominator of computing. As a result, for a container system to run on this resource it must be compatible with this architecture.

Docker is designed for micro-service virtualization. While some of the enterprise feature sets as I mentioned previously fit the scientific uses, Docker is not designed or compatible with the general multi-tenant shared compute architectures traditionally implemented on traditional HPC that I described above. For this reason, in HPC, I see no competition, as Docker just isn’t an option.

But outside of the traditional HPC, as we look more to the generalized scientific application stack, we do see that Docker is being used for local private use-cases. Here scientists now have options, with neither tool being “wrong” when it works. Singularity as a result is building in native compatibility with Docker; for example, in Singularity, you can run a container directly or bootstrap a new container image from a remote Docker registry, without having any Docker bits installed on your host.

Thus commands like:

$ singularity shell –nv docker://tensorflow/tensorflow:latest-gpu would work exactly as expected.

BTW, the above command demonstrates how to run GPU enabled Tensorflow utilizing Singularity’s native Nvidia GPU support, without having Tensorflow installed on the host. After installing Singularity (at present from the ‘development’ GitHub branch), it takes approx 30 seconds to start running programs like this.

HPCwire: Given the move to a for-profit organization, what are the expansion plans for Singularity’s user base/target market?

Kurtzer: While being funded primarily by the government, Singularity had limitations in terms of funding, partners, support and growth. Now that we have a sustainable funding and growth model, it is all about building the team, and developing new features! Some of these features will include support for backgrounded processes (daemons), trusted computing, integration with cloud orchestration platforms like Kubernetes and Mesos, as well as optimization for object stores. We will hopefully expand our use base even more by addressing more of the scientific use cases – e.g. the above command with Nvidia/Cuda support is an example of that – and the “target market” and project goals and direction, will remain the same.

HPCwire: Many job schedulers (e.g. Univa) and “cloud orchestrators” (e.g. Cycle Computing) have worked to become “container” friendly; do you expect the same will happen for Singularity?

Well, Singularity is job scheduler neutral. Any user can add Singularity container commands into their own batch scripts (as long as Singularity is installed) thus all resource managers are supported. As far as orchestration systems outside of traditional HPC, yes! We are recruiting people right now to help with that.

HPCwire: What does moving Singularity into SingularityWare mean for you personally?

Kurtzer: My previous capacity at LBNL was HPC systems architect and technical lead of the HPC group. After I developed Singularity, my “day job” did not vanish, so Singularity has been a side project that I’ve been working on primarily in the evenings and weekends. Working with RStor to create SingularityWare, LLC., has enabled me to focus my time and efforts to Singularity development and building the community and project by making it my primary effort.

HPCwire: As a for profit entity, SingularityWare’s goals and aspirations are presumably somewhat different.

Kurtzer: SingularityWare, LLC, is a hosting platform for Singularity (and Warewulf) rather than a for profit entity. As with any thriving project, it is important not to change anything, but only add value. This means there will be no changes in the existing support, development, contributions or release models that people have become accustomed to. Additionally, because there is no part of the fiscal sustainability model that relies on commercial support contracts, services, consulting or paid licenses, means that there is no pressure to “sell” Singularity.

Of course, if you find that you need more support services then what is currently provided via the open source community, then our door is always open. This is also the same now for technology partnerships.

HPCwire: Perhaps review the changes along the lines of how users will/can receive support, what (products) to expect from SingularityWare, and how community contributions will be handled?

Kurtzer: Given that RStor is funding my time (and others) for Singularity development, I would raise my hand, on behalf of my team at RStor as a provider of support and services for Singularity. As far as community contributions, all commits originating from RStor will assign copyright to SingularityWare, LLC. Contributions from other sources will be maintained and accepted exactly as they do now.

HPCwire: So what’s your new title and are you building a staff at SingularityWare??

At RStor, my title is “Senior Architect” and YES, I am looking to hire developers! C programmers, Python, and Go developers please send me your resumes ASAP! I am also interested in working with academia and helping them receive funding for interns, grads and postdocs to contribute to Singularity. With regard to SingularityWare, LLC… I suppose I have the fancy title of CEO of a one person company.

HPCwire: I couldn’t find much online about RStor. What does partner/support mean here? What’s the relationship between the two. Will you have a position at RStor?

Kurtzer: To reiterate above, my primary responsibility at RStor is development and leadership of Singularity to which they are providing me a team. But given that they are doing some fantastic stuff, I find myself drawn to be part of helping to make sure their storage platform is highly optimized for the use-cases that hit home personally for me (e.g. Research Data Management – RDM).

This is one of the reasons I decided on this path; an appropriate RDM solution is severely lacking in the scientific industry. When I learned what RStor was planning on doing I became very excited with their direction and was impressed by their leadership and vision. I saw that RDM became easily tangible thanks to the technologies they are creating and if you couple RDM with Singularity single image file based containerization, you end up with the holy grail of reproducible and agile computing.

HPCwire: What haven’t I asked that I should? Please add what you think is important.

Kurtzer: Warewulf is another project that I lead and it is a widely utilized cluster management and provisioning system. Warewulf has been around for 15+ years and currently the basis of provisioning for OpenHPC. I have giant grand visions and have had many discussions with Intel, other national labs, and other corporates about how to make Warewulf exascale ready. I also have commitment from RStor to facilitate this as well.

The post Singularity HPC Container Technology Moves Out of the Lab appeared first on HPCwire.

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yoursatanboyfriend · 9 years ago

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The Ninth Paradigm: chap 3.

Title: The Ninth Paradigm (X) Rating: M Warnings: Heavy themes such as: Non-con/dub-con, PTSD, Manipulation, Child Abuse, Gang Violence, references to depression and self-harm. Summary: ‘Those to whom evil is done do evil in return’ is a specious statement under certain circumstances- specifically ones involving Bill Cipher.

“So, what’re you wearing, Ford?”

“I’m always watching you.”

- Gaspard Giodarno.

Sixteen. The number of times Ford began punching the police department’s number only to end up chickening out at the very end, every single time. A comprehensible story was hard to formulate; for starters, what would he even tell them? Talking about Bill would inevitably bring to light the circumstances under which he’d been hired; the police would go digging and if they’d found out about Ford’s previous dealings with Gaspard Giordano, it would be over for him. Plenty of the police were under Gaspard’s thumb and if the impression he’d ratted the man out was given, he would be killed. He knew how this sort of thing played out. One of the few times fiction accurately portrayed reality.

And now it was already Thursday night, and as promised, Stanford’s phone finally rang. On the other end could only be Bill Cipher for Stanford rarely received phone calls anymore on account of the reclusive lifestyle he’d adopted since his split from Fiddleford. Not that he’d been particular social before that; he’d always been a bit of loner, with his youth primarily spent in the company of his pet dog, Stanley. Those were content days for him but that was such a long time ago.

Who cared about the past, anyway?

Apparently Stanford Pines did.

On the third ring and after rushed attempts at mental preparation, Ford took the call. Even with preventive measures, his hand still shook as it grasped the receiver.

“Hiya Fordster. Did you miss me? Of course you did!” Bill’s voice is clear on the other end and ripe with enthusiasm. Discomfort immediately set in and Ford’s thoughts could only go back to their last encounter, which still left the sticky residue of anxiety all over him.

“Hello Bill. Let’s just get straight to business.” Ford said, very eager to be done with this and found himself surprised at how confident his voice came out.

“Whoa, not even a bit of foreplay? Suit yourself, pal. So gonna assume you want me to give you the dirty details on what I was paid to do?”

“You said you had to tell me something. I can only assume that is what you meant.”

“Alright alright. It’s after-hours, my tie’s off, I can get a little wild with it. Ask questions, and I’ll deliver answers to your heart’s content.”

“Why did Fiddleford hire you?”

“Ah, right to the main course. Okay then. Your little country boytoy is sick with fear about your safety and what have you. Wants to know you’re safe but can’t meet up with you and no talkie walkies. He’s gotta avoid sharing any kind of personal information with you.”

“Why?” Ford had an idea behind his past assistant’s actions but the more he had considered it, the more farfetched it seemed. All this appeared too elaborate.

“You know why.”

“If I knew why I wouldn’t be asking! If this is—I don’t know what he told you about why we separated but, but it’s been enough time. I doubt anything’s going to happen. Especially now of all times.”

“Riiight, by ‘now of all times’, you’ve confirmed my suspicions that for a smart guy, you aren’t very smart. I’m revoking that nickname—and it’s gone, the nickname is gone.”

Getting impatient, Ford sought to realign the conversation at hand. “Elaborate, enough cryptic ciphers.”

“HA! Good one! No really, I really liked that one. A little word play on my name there. So, you know about that little deal you and Fiddleford got offered by the big kahuna?”

“So, you know about that.”

“Yeah, of course! He had to tell me so I’d know what I was getting myself into. Anyway, looks like you don’t know but he’s dead.”

“…What?!” Ford is not sure whether he’s relieved and happy, or even more scared than before. Monsters killing monsters meant monsters remained, regardless of the outcome.

“Oh, so you really didn’t know? Yikes. Entire family—or, most of his family—dead. Some weird freak house fire accident. Don’t really know the details—wait, don’t think it was a house fire. It was a fire something. A few folks who’d been affiliated with him ended up going missing too. All on the hush hush you see, gang crime top news never really…makes the news. Money makes people shut up.”

“…so he thinks whoever was responsible is going to come after us? But we aren’t affiliated with him at all!”

“Yeah well, it’s not like they care. They just know you dealt with the guy and had something he wanted. Also, going into hiding entails years, Stanford. Not 3 months. You need years to fall off the radar and disappear. Years. It’s only a matter of time before they do find you. In fact, I bet they have and are probably waiting to grab Fiddleford first.”

“If we are truly in danger, why does Fiddleford not want to meet up? We’d be safer and stronger together—he should, he should contact me, he should’ve been the one to tell me this. He should’ve—”

“Not so fast there, wise guy. You two staying separate is crucial to your safety. If the big bad guy catches you and tortures Fiddledork’s information out of you, then what? And vice versa. Besides, you two being both potential targets, being together is a bad idea, take it from me.”

“So, what now? I’m meant to just sit here?! I’m a sitting duck at this rate.” Ford frowned, his mind sorting and filing through both the information he’d been given and what he already knew. If they knew where he was, what could he really do? What was the point of Bill being here? What was one man to an organization of immoral men?

“Keep a low profile, just like you do now, and let me do my job, and all’s well, that ends well.” After Bill finished talking, a loud crunching sound broke Ford’s concentration; his nose scrunched up in response to the unexpected sound. “Are you eating chips?”

“Yeah.”

“I won’t tell you what to do but that’s rather rude.”

“It’s after-hours and I am under no obligation to be nice to you and you bet your ass I will take advantage of that. Anyway, something’s been on my mind and I wanna hear your side of the story. Why’d you say no? To the deal.”

Ford had already previously contemplated whether it was a good idea to tell Bill or not and concluded that if Fiddleford had entrusted this obscure man with the truth then Ford would, too. Even if the man was utterly despicable, the least he could do was show some respect for Fiddleford’s decisions. “We—I– wanted to say yes. And Fiddleford was against it. Eventually, we mutually decided to deny it. Science should not be at the exploitation and suffering of others.”

Bill laughed. “Everything is built of the ‘suffering and exploitation of others’, Ford, come on. How dense are you? Science the only thing you know anything about? Besides, scientists test on live subjects all the time. Helpless, defenceless animals, like come on, that moral bullshit you’re spewing is so lame. Not to mention tediously cliché. Why’d you really say no?”

Ford thought once more about it, and really, he’d said no because of Fiddleford. Sure, Ford thought himself a good man, but you had to make sacrifices in the name of science and he wasn’t one to be bound to a code of honour which existed only to stifle his growth and hinder his potential. He had been willing, more than willing, to wet his feet in the filth. Fiddleford, however, had not.

“I—I just, no you’re right. I claimed to have taken the moral high ground but I really…Fiddleford’s my assistant, I value his opinion. I said no out of respect for him.”

“That really worked out for you, huh? Whatever. I’m surprised you had trouble getting funding for your little projects. Aren’t you like a celebrity? With all these Ph.D.’s and the like.”

“Unorthodox projects are less likely able to gain and sustain funding regardless of the one behind them.” It had been a humiliating experience for him, the denial of his request for funding despite his tenacity. But he didn’t want to think about that right now.

“Aww, poor you. Hey, what was he like? The big guy.”

Ford thought for a second, and then assumed Bill was talking about Gaspard Giordano, the man in question who had offered the deal and was now dead.

“He was…polite, well-spoken, terrifying. Meeting him felt like…there was this whole world I knew nothing about. A world…some feared and avoided while others sought to gain entry. I could’ve gone my entire life never knowing anything about him and his organization. Is organization the right word? It was…it was just… something like out of a dream. You see it in movies, read it in books but when it happens to you, it’s just—just so surreal. I was so ignorant, so ignorant.”

So ignorant…

“Huh. Hey, some more Q and A. So, back then at the office, when I did the whole ‘alleged attempted rape’ thing, why didn’t you fight back?”

“You had a gun, Bill.”

“Well yeah, I had a gun but you could’ve pushed me off, made a run for it, called the cops and boom. Safety.”

“I don’t know. I was…afraid.” Ford had spent a lot of time reflecting on that…incident, while being torn between embarrassment and anger.

“So, no fight or flight for you huh? You just freeze up?”

“I had my reasons, Bill.”

“Time for me to hear them then, kid.”

Silence came between them for a few seconds, now only breathing being exchanged through the receivers. Finally, Ford speaks. “It’s such a little insignificant thing but seems to have imbedded itself within my mind. The tattoos—your tattoos. And, a few minor things, it just came together in my mind and I panicked.”

“My tattoos? Why did they freak you out?” Bill nearly sounds offended.

“Your tattoos…just reminded me a little of his—of Gaspard’s. “

“Oh I see.” A quick-passing silence intercepts the conversation. “What kind did he have?”

“I didn’t get a very clear look but they were intricate and covered his entire hand—even the palms, I think. I recall Fiddleford mentioning they were significant but I couldn’t for the life of me think why. Anyone can get tattoos.”

Shuffling caused by skittish movement could be heard on the other end and when Bill spoke, he sounded more excited than usual. “Time for a little lesson in history, kid. Some cultures, can’t name any off the top of my head, place lots of value on tattoos. They can hold lots of connotations and only certain few may be allowed to receive specific designs. Bringing this on back to the topic at the hand, in the Giordano family, those tattoos are pretty important. They mark one of the Giordano family, serving as an identity card, sort of. Like, you got your credit cards and shit, right? Well a Giordano would just show their tattoos instead. Like maybe a guy will go buy a shirt. He takes the shirt, flashes his hands, and they put it on the Giordano tab.”

“That sort of thing actually happens?” Ford was astonished that something like that actually occurred in reality. The very concept seemed like something you’d pull out of a crime novel.

“Yeah. They have their muddy claws in the roots of this place, Ford. You’ve been living under a rock.”

“But anyone can get tattoos. It’s a lous—”

“No, I told you. Those are special. Anyone caught imitating them gets punished, the 40 lashes kind. I’ve heard some sick stories but I can’t say what’s real. I just know no one’s stupid enough to try and steal a Giordano’s identity. Besides, there are not that many of them at a given time. Like, you’d have 2 sons, or a son and a daughter and whatever so the people will already have an idea of what to expect.”

“And yours, you haven’t gotten—you’ve never gotten in trouble for them? You know, with…with Gaspard?” Ford said.

“Maybe that’s why I wear gloves all the time. They really gotta learn they don’t have a patent on designs. I’ve been in New York for the past 5 years, I get back and people freak out over my cool new trendy finger tattoos.” An edge of annoyance coated Bill’s words, and it’s the first time he’s revealed personal information about himself. New York…

“I’ll show you my tattoos up close sometime. But since you’re sooo scared of me—”

The strange accent Ford heard slip through occasionally was a New York one then? Did Bill have family in New York? A likely possibility, he did say he left town the weekends. Perhaps he returned home? Ford put his thoughts on hold and mentally returned to the conversation at hand.

“I think your company is not, well, it’s not half bad when you’re not attempting to assert your pseudo dominance.”

“I guess I’m better when I’m not threatening you with a gun huh?”

“That’s hardly funny.”

“Wasn’t joking, Fordsy. And what happened to your ‘YOU TRIED TO RAPE ME’ spiel?”

“I’m not excusing your actions and frankly, I’d rather not be alone with you in the future.”

“I was going to stop. You must think highly of yourself if you think you can drive me to some mindless lust. I don’t like men in their sixties. God, you’re pretty old, aren’t you?”

“Did you miss my earlier statement about your poor attempts at asserting your dominance? The dominance part is important, don’t overlook it.”

“Poor huh? They seemed to be working. But get a load of you, in all your little bravado glory. It’s only ‘cause I’m not there in person, right?” Bill’s voice took on a challenging tone, and once again, Ford felt like he was being threatened.

“You know Stanford, if the bad guys do catch you, they’re going to do something similar what I did. Gang life isn’t what most people think it is. It isn’t like what you see in your 80’s Italian mob movies. I mean, sure, maybe in some places you’ll see that, but really, it’s a lot more…gritty, and with more dicks. Lotta dicks.” Bill spoke with conviction that slowly faded into the ghost of reminiscence.

“I really just wanted to see how you tested under pressure. I’m telling you, Ford…wait, I got a story for you. I knew a guy, let’s call him Ron, okay? So, Ron tells me he’s gotten an invitation to join this gang. I’m not going to give you Ron’s life details but it’s a step up from his current life. So, Ron is chipper, he’s happy, he accepts. So, he goes over to the meeting where they discuss his initiation. And guess what initiation he gets? Gang bang. I’m not fucking kidding you. The guy died 2 weeks later his internal organs so fucked, they couldn’t do anything for him. Looking back on it now, I don’t think they intended to let him join at all. They just wanted to fuck some poor guy to death for the hell of it.”

Whether Bill was attempting to justify and excuse his actions with this story, or whether he’s truly concerned for Ford’s safety didn’t matter. The story, whether it was real or not, was vile. Partially irrelevant, Ford thought. It seemed like a scare tactic. He had no intention of joining a gang, so why the story?

“They fuck you, Ford. When you’re new, when you’re low rank, as punishment, as reward, just for the hell of it. You’re a piece of meat until you get at the top. You’re just a dog who gets ordered around and fucked.”

Ford understood why now, the implication clear—it’s a potential outcome for Fiddleford and himself. Never would he ever have thought he’d one day be faced with threats of sexual violence of this nature. Insane, it seemed so utterly insane.

“You speak as though you have experience.” Ford said quietly. The shift in Bill’s voice did not go unnoticed by him, but dare he strike the bee’s hive?

“Ha. I’ve had enough people close to me fall victim to them. Let’s just say my life hasn’t been all roses, ice-cream and Kumbayah’s around the camp fire.”

Ford rethinks what he knows about Bill Cipher.

Then Bill added, in a tone Ford might’ve considered as frightened. “These people make me sick.” The words appeared to hold such sincerity, that for a second, Bill appeared vulnerable to Ford.

“Maybe we’ll get lucky with the next accident and be finally done with that family.” Bill continued.

“Would it fall apart then? Without Gaspard, surely there should be struggling, and fighting over who gets to be the new leader?”

“Without Gaspard? Gaspard isn’t dead.”

“What? You just said– you’ve just been telling me he died!”

“Oooh boy. You really know nothing, do you? I’m gonna need a drink because I’m about to lay on you life lessons. I’m going to fetch me a drink, don’t go anywhere.”

A series of noises passed through Ford’s receiver and finally Bill returned. “Now, let’s start from the beginning. Okay no, just the important stuff—okay wait. Let’s start with Gaspard Giordano.”

“Are you drinking alcohol?”

“No. Who drinks pure alcohol, Ford?”

“Is there a percentage of alcohol in the beverage you are about to consume.”

“It may have some alcohol content, yes.”

Ford rolled his eyes and removed his glasses, the frames now feeling heavy on his nose bridge. “Just get on with the story.”

“Okay so if you do a background check on Gaspard Giordano, you’ll find it’s a man in his hundreds. Gaspard Giordano has been alive for generations—the name. See, when the boss position is inherited, the inheritee—is that a word? It is now– takes the name Gaspard Giordano, the identity, everything. Their original identity is then erased—scrapped– and then business resumes as usual. So, Gaspard Giordano is always the person in charge, but it’s not always the same person. Cousins, brothers, sisters, daughters, wives, a whole damn farm has passed through the name Gaspard Giordano. I really feel for the women who got stuck with that name. Really, they could’ve picked a more unisex name. Moral of the story: everything started with Gaspard Giordano, and it will end with him, too.”

“So, who inherited the position?”

“His son.”

“So…his son is the one who’s after us?”

“Probably.”

“Why didn’t you say this in the beginning? You made it sound as if you had no idea who was behind this.” Ford said, suddenly suspicious of Bill. “You withheld information from me.” Bill was young, conveniently had hand tattoos, knew of Fiddleford and Ford’s deal and history with Gaspard Giordano—more and more, scepticism grew in Ford.

“I had to wait for the right time to reveal that juicy bit of information.”

“You’re treating this as more of a game. One would expect you to be upfront and straight-forward regarding matters that apparently affect your safety.”

“Apparently?” Bill asked, seemingly taken aback.

“I’d appreciate a more serious attitude from you in the future, regarding this.” Ford said, deciding not to voice his new found sudden distrust of Bill Cipher. He barely trusted the man before but now, more and more, the possibility of Bill being Gaspard’s son appeared highly plausible. Tattoos, friends in high places, a tendency towards violence and a sense of entitlement were good enough evidence. Not to mention the man was lying about his age, that was certain, and the fact he’d suddenly appeared after the supposed death of the ‘former’ Gaspard Giordano meant that Bill could be seeking to rectify a mistake his father had left behind.

Gaspard and Bill, however, looked absolutely nothing alike. Genetics weren’t necessarily ones to be trusted though, and Ford chose to let his suspicion rest but not die.

“I’ll give it a shot. So, in conclusion, we’re all in this together. I might get killed for having tattoos and you two might get killed because you once upon a time denied ‘Gaspard Giordano’ and he’s a fickle man who changes his feelings at a moment’s notice, if you catch my drift. We all lay low for a little while until we get a good look at what options we actually have.”

“Do you really think they’re after me?” Ford suddenly asked, wanting Bill’s opinion. The man couldn’t have such a devil-may-care attitude without reasoning—even he wasn’t that reckless and foolish.

“Nah. I think this drama is hilarious. Your buddy is damn paranoid. You’d be dead if they wanted you dead. Personally, I think you have nothing to worry about, but this is my job so I gotta ham this up as much as I can to ensure Fidd’s keeps paying me.” Bill’s honesty nearly elicited a smile from Ford, but he attributed it more to the reassurance of Bill’s words- be they true or not. This entire thing did seem messy, as though Bill could never get his story straight; him deceiving Fiddleford, to an extent, now made sense. Money.

“I’m surprised you answered that truthfully.”

“What makes you think I was being honest? Not every day you get to play a part in some conspiracy mafia cat and mouse. But really, play it safe anyway, Ford. Just like I am.”

Bill’s lack of professionalism stuck out; at 31, he should’ve been slightly more seasoned and less inclined to such immature antics. Another flag that Bill was lying; either about his age or his occupation.

“I’m going to bed now, Bill. Thank you for the call.” Ford hung up quickly before the other man could even manage a word of protest.

He had a lot of information to digest.

Bill frowned, dropping the receiver carelessly with the dial tone still blaring through it.

Well, that was rude.

Ford's little playing-hard-to-get act was fun though. Not to mention exciting, risque, dangerous–

And wow, when was the last time he showed someone his tattoos only for flat-out rejection to follow? Even if Ford didn't know...

He still liked the thought of having been denied. A little edging was nice on occasion.

It made the climax that much more intense.

Speaking of climax...Bill suddenly wonders what Ford's face would look like when he came. (he feels like he already knows?)

#billford #bill cipher #stanford pines #gravity falls #mystuff #guys there were so many bad typos and shit in prev chapters how did anyone get through it #I DONT WANT TO CHANGE IT TOO MUCH BC...I AM WEAK #the ninth paradigm #TNP chapters

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