The Big Story
Millions of Americans will now have to verify their identity with a “video selfie” (a video of your face you record on your phone and upload to an online portal) to access key tax documents and online payment systems, the IRS announced. The IRS has granted an $86 million contract to an intelligence company called ID.me to carry out its facial recognition program. The move is “one of the largest expansions of facial recognition technology in the U.S.,” Caitlin Seeley George, a campaign director of a technology watchdog, told The Washington Post. “And there is no question that it will harm peoples’ privacy.”
A high volume of complaints from those who’ve already had to wait several hours or days to complete the ID.me verification ensures that the complicated facial recognition process will only degrade the tax-filing process. Put aside, though, that this will make taxes harder for everyone to complete or that the particular type of so-called one-to-one facial recognition technology used by ID.me has been shown to produce “higher rates of false positives for Asians and African American faces relative to” white people by a factor as high as 100 times, leaving people of color more, not less vulnerable, to identity theft. Ignore as well that the last government contractor in charge of taxpayer verification, Equifax, lost their contract in 2017, when it exposed the personal information of 148 million people to hackers. What’s perhaps most troubling is the rollout of a sophisticated government data collection regime that will fully integrate biometric information with financial records and existing government data profiles, such as the driver’s licenses and passports one must submit along with their new video selfies. Not only will submitting paperwork to the government become an exercise in violating civil liberties, it’ll be one filled with technical glitches and hours of headaches.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/01/27/irs-face-scans/
Back Pages: The Israelization of Judaism or the Judaization of Israel?
The Rest
→ By carefully examining the blood samples of the nation’s blood blank, a new study led by Kondwani Jambo, an immunologist in Malawi, found that his African nation, like several others on the continent, might have recorded enough positive COVID-19 infections to have nearly if not entirely crossed into an endemic stage of the pandemic. “There was absolutely no way we would have guessed that this thing had spread that much,” Jambo said of the infection rate that is now as high as 80%, thanks in large part to last summer’s Delta variant. Malawi’s path to the endemic stage of the pandemic will give researchers much to ponder about the nature of the virus because Malawi’s death rates remained low while less than 5% of the nation was vaccinated.
→ A recent report in ChinaScope, a China news aggregator, suggests there’s more trouble brewing in parts of the Chinese housing market. A post there cites a Jan. 14 broadcast on Radio Free Asia from Professor Han Fuling of the Central University of Finance and Economics, who noted that at the start of the year, “200,000 people had stopped making their mortgage payments and were sued by the four major banks in China,” adding that real estate prices in Chinese cities have been dropping just as rates of unemployment have been on the rise. Indeed, unemployment has been ticking up in China since the summer, growing to 5.1%, according to the most recent count by China’s National Bureau of Statistics. The rash of mortgage delinquencies in China is potentially more troubling than the Great Recession of 2008 in the United States in that most of the risk is held by families rather than banks: More than 90% of Chinese households are currently homeowners, and because property down payments are as high as 40% in China, a great percentage of homeowners have had to borrow money from their families to begin and maintain homeownership. In other words, a high volume of mortgage defaults wouldn’t necessarily wipe out the banking industry, as it did in the United States, but rather pull the rug out on the family borrowing system that has pegged as much as 70% to 80% of Chinese household wealth to real estate, according to a recent CNBC analysis.
→ McDonald’s has confirmed the price hike for its U.S. stores. Menu prices have been bumped up 7.5% from those at the end of 2021, which were already up 6% compared to the previous year as the fast-food chain contended with labor shortages and slow foot traffic. However, the rising cost of burgers isn’t causing more people to turn to plant-based meal options. After major interest in plant-based products in restaurants and stores in 2020, when sales for the plant-based sector rose 46%, demand has flatlined and even started to decline in some parts of the country. That lack of interest in soy burgers has been a tough hit to companies like Beyond Meat, which has seen its initial market capitalization peak at more than $15 billion and then crater to less than $4 billion. As Neil Rankin, a plant-based business leader said recently, “There are a lot of people that have moved to plant-based because of sustainability issues, but yet they aren’t really satisfied with what’s out there.”
→ Fresh off the presses, check out this week’s issue (#02) of The Tab, Tablet magazine’s new printable weekly digest. Laid out in an PDF for reading on a tablet or desktop, or to be printed, The Tab takes you into Shabbat and through the weekend, for free. Get your copy at tablet.ag/tab.
→ The men’s final of the Australian Open this weekend will see either Rafael Nadal become the first men’s player to win 21 Grand Slam championships or Daniil Medvedev, the reigning U.S. Open champion, solidify his place at the top of the pack of the next generation of tennis stars coming up from behind Nadal and the Big Three cohort. History suggests Nadal has the edge, with a 3 to 1 record against Medvedev, including a victory over him in the U.S. Open finals in 2019. Nadal is also in top form and seems to be possessed by an inner strength or some superhuman capacity that has overwhelmed his opponents this tournament—a power that Medvedev, who’s had to eke out a few wins, lacks. Still, Medvedev was the one who thwarted Novak Djokovic from winning his 21st major at the U.S. Open, so he’s familiar with how to keep Big Three players from making history. Contrasting styles and high stakes means it will be a finals to watch.
→ President Biden is going big on electric vehicles as part of his effort to combat climate change, but he’s not so keen on bringing Tesla into the process. “I meant it when I said the future was going to be made right here in America. Companies like GM and Ford are building more electric vehicles here at home than ever before,” President Biden wrote yesterday in a Twitter thread with a video of him beside Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors. Biden conspicuously made no mention of the brand most emblematic of U.S. electric vehicle manufacturing or its leader—who is arguably responsible for getting electric vehicles on the road. The snub is likely in no small part because of Elon Musk’s high-profile provocations and critiques of anthemic government officials—Biden included. But there’s a less personal and more toxic reason for the slight: Tesla is not a union shop, and happily so. As Andrew Sorkin pointed out in this recent video interview with Barra, “It appears by my math that on average, Tesla employees, who are nonunionized, on an hourly basis may be making more money than unionized workers, for example, at GM.”
→ A Texas federal judge ruled earlier this month that the FDA will have to shorten the estimated 75 years and four months it said it would need to satisfy a public records request made by a group of research scientists who want the underlying documentation used by the agency to tap Pfizer for its COVID-19 vaccine. Now the FDA will have to provide the 450,000 or so pages by July, said U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman. In his order, Pittman wrote that accelerating the release of the files to the public will help quell what the late senator John McCain described as unnecessary government secrecy that only “feeds conspiracy theories and reduces the public’s confidence in the government.”
→ It hasn’t been the prettiest few months in the crypto sphere, with the values of coin currencies dropping and a growing unease among regulators about the myriad schemes duping people out of their money in exchange for clip art of cartoon animals. Facebook is now getting out of the crypto racket, at least a little bit, as it winds down its Diem project, a digital coin formerly known as Libra, supported by a suite of crypto technologies that Facebook is now allegedly selling to a California investor. The Facebook currency struggled right out of the gate, after regulators grew skeptical of the platform getting into financial instruments and major partners like Mastercard and PayPal bowed out of the project.
The Israelization of Judaism or the Judaization of Israel?
by Neil Rogachevsky
A Review of Yossi Shain’s The Israeli Century
Over the course of the last few decades, the State of Israel has become the center of Jewish life. Some welcome this. Others try to fight against it. But all in a way now see this stunning turn of events.
At its founding in 1948 the State of Israel had a mere 600,000 Jews who, even during brief interludes of peace, lived in great precarity. For many decades, Jews of the diaspora saw Israel as a vulnerable outpost that required all the support that those Jewish communities that had not been destroyed by the Holocaust could muster.
For a long time, that remained the dominant paradigm in diaspora-Israel relations even as that vulnerable outpost overcame war, terrorism, and periods of serious political and economic mismanagement and continued to grow in size and strength. By most estimates the Jewish population of Israel surpassed that of the United States sometime in the late 2000s.
The astonishing demographic strength of Israeli Jews, both secular as well as religious, combined with declining birthrates of diaspora Jews portends a continued shift in the balance of forces.
Read the rest here:
Soy is unhealthy for estrogen receptor (ER+) positive cancer survivors and those at risk for those cancers. People think they are eating healthy but SOME (not all) may be harming themselves.