#Rohits

[a2zsportsnews]

India vs South Africa, Key Matchups T20 World Cup 2024 Final: Will Indian spinners hold Klaasen, Miller? Rohit’s approach vs Jansen in focus

India, which has not won a World Cup for 13 years, will play first-time finalist South Africa in Barbados on Saturday. Ahead of a high-octane match between the two unbeaten sides in the tournament, here’s a look at the key matchups. Win toss, bowl ? Rohit Sharma has won the toss thrice and elected to field twice. | Photo Credit: DEEPAK KR/The Hindu Rohit Sharma has won the toss thrice and…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The CFPB is genuinely making America better, and they're going HARD

On June 20, I'm keynoting the LOCUS AWARDS in OAKLAND.

Let's take a sec here and notice something genuinely great happening in the US government: the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau's stunning, unbroken streak of major, muscular victories over the forces of corporate corruption, with the backing of the Supreme Court (yes, that Supreme Court), and which is only speeding up!

A little background. The CFPB was created in 2010. It was Elizabeth Warren's brainchild, an institution that was supposed to regulate finance from the perspective of the American public, not the American finance sector. Rather than fighting to "stabilize" the financial sector (the mission that led to Obama taking his advisor Timothy Geithner's advice to permit the foreclosure crisis to continue in order to "foam the runways" for the banks), the Bureau would fight to defend us from bankers.

The CFPB got off to a rocky start, with challenges to the unique system of long-term leadership appointments meant to depoliticize the office, as well as the sudden resignation of its inaugural boss, who broke his promise to see his term through in order to launch an unsuccessful bid for political office.

But after the 2020 election, the Bureau came into its own, when Biden poached Rohit Chopra from the FTC and put him in charge. Chopra went on a tear, taking on landlords who violated the covid eviction moratorium:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cfpb

Then banning payday lenders' scummiest tactics:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/29/planned-obsolescence/#academic-fraud

Then striking at one of fintech's most predatory grifts, the "earned wage access" hustle:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usury/#tech-exceptionalism

Then closing the loophole that let credit reporting bureaus (like Equifax, who doxed every single American in a spectacular 2019 breach) avoid regulation by creating data brokerage divisions and claiming they weren't part of the regulated activity of credit reporting:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does

Chopra went on to promise to ban data-brokers altogether:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/13/goulash/#material-misstatement

Then he banned comparison shopping sites where you go to find the best bank accounts and credit cards from accepting bribes and putting more expensive options at the top of the list. Instead, he's requiring banks to send the CFPB regular, accurate lists of all their charges, and standing up a federal operated comparison shopping site that gives only accurate and honest rankings. Finally, he's made an interoperability rule requiring banks to let you transfer to another institution with one click, just like you change phone carriers. That means you can search an honest site to find the best deal on your banking, and then, with a single click, transfer your accounts, your account history, your payees, and all your other banking data to that new bank:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights

Somewhere in there, big business got scared. They cooked up a legal theory declaring the CFPB's funding mechanism to be unconstitutional and got the case fast-tracked to the Supreme Court, in a bid to put Chopra and the CFPB permanently out of business. Instead, the Supremes – these Supremes! – upheld the CFPB's funding mechanism in a 7-2 ruling:

https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/05/supreme-court-lets-cfpb-funding-stand/

That ruling was a starter pistol for Chopra and the Bureau. Maybe it seemed like they were taking big swings before, but it turns out all that was just a warmup. Last week on The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner rounded up all the stuff the Bureau is kicking off:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-06-07-window-on-corporate-deceptions/

First: regulating Buy Now, Pay Later companies (think: Klarna) as credit-card companies, with all the requirements for disclosure and interest rate caps dictated by the Truth In Lending Act:

https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2024/06/cfpb-applies-credit-card-rules

Next: creating a registry of habitual corporate criminals. This rogues gallery will make it harder for other agencies – like the DOJ – and state Attorneys General to offer bullshit "delayed prosecution agreements" to companies that compulsively rip us off:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-creates-registry-to-detect-corporate-repeat-offenders/

Then there's the rule against "fine print deception" – which is when the fine print in a contract lies to you about your rights, like when a mortgage lender forces you waive a right you can't actually waive, or car lenders that make you waive your bankruptcy rights, which, again, you can't waive:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-warns-against-deception-in-contract-fine-print/

As Kuttner writes, the common thread running through all these orders is that they ban deceptive practices – they make it illegal for companies to steal from us by lying to us. Especially in these dying days of class action suits – rapidly becoming obsolete thanks to "mandatory arbitration waivers" that make you sign away your right to join a class action – agencies like the CFPB are our only hope of punishing companies that lie to us to steal from us.

There's a lot of bad stuff going on in the world right now, and much of it – including an active genocide – is coming from the Biden White House.

But there are people in the Biden Administration who care about the American people and who are effective and committed fighters who have our back. What's more, they're winning. That doesn't make all the bad news go away, but sometimes it feels good to take a moment and take the W.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/10/getting-things-done/#deliverism

[raviposting]

Just a minute, Naina fell...oh, Rohit has fallen too.

[janesurlife]

Weirdest combination ever 🤣🤣🤣🤣

none of you will get this but it's fine.

[aworldofpattern]

Rohit Bal at India Bridal Fashion Week 2013

[dreamboatt]

PIC AND EMOTIONS OF THE DAY🇮🇳❤️

[aeolianblues]

The image of Rohit Sharma with his arm round Quentin de Kock’s head, consoling and comforting him and his kid will be one of the enduring images of this World Cup.

Also Rohit recreating the moon landing by digging up the outfield and planting an Indian flag, will also remain an image etched in my mind for a very long time.

[mohabbaat]

baap ka, dada ka, wc 2023, sab ka badla lega tera rohit

[ayushsan]

The Sky Is Pink (2019)

[planningficmemes]

Cas and Crowley watching Winchesters get in some new mess, wondering if they have the time to help

[aashiqeddiediaz]

the day bollywood realizes the homoerotic tones of all their “rival and bromance” movies is the day i will know inner peace

[elaine-of-shalott-blog]

Ananya Panday for House of Lakmē Grand Finale x Rohit Bal at Lakmē Fashion Week in partnership with FDCI.

The iconic Rohit Bal brings his extraordinary vision to life at the House of Lakmē Grand Finale at Lakmē Fashion Week in partnership with FDCI. In a showcase that promises to be nothing short of spectacular, Rohit Bal’s latest collection is a poetic ode to nature, beauty, and the art of transformation. With roses as the centrepiece, each garment unveils a story woven through intricate embroidery and masterful craftsmanship, capturing the delicate balance of time and metamorphosis. This grand finale is a stunning celebration of nature’s elegance, where fashion blooms into art, leaving an indelible mark on the world of haute couture.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Shifting $677m from the banks to the people, every year, forever

I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

"Switching costs" are one of the great underappreciated evils in our world: the more it costs you to change from one product or service to another, the worse the vendor, provider, or service you're using today can treat you without risking your business.

Businesses set out to keep switching costs as high as possible. Literally. Mark Zuckerberg's capos send him memos chortling about how Facebook's new photos feature will punish anyone who leaves for a rival service with the loss of all their family photos – meaning Zuck can torment those users for profit and they'll still stick around so long as the abuse is less bad than the loss of all their cherished memories:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

It's often hard to quantify switching costs. We can tell when they're high, say, if your landlord ties your internet service to your lease (splitting the profits with a shitty ISP that overcharges and underdelivers), the switching cost of getting a new internet provider is the cost of moving house. We can tell when they're low, too: you can switch from one podcatcher program to another just by exporting your list of subscriptions from the old one and importing it into the new one:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/16/keep-it-really-simple-stupid/#read-receipts-are-you-kidding-me-seriously-fuck-that-noise

But sometimes, economists can get a rough idea of the dollar value of high switching costs. For example, a group of economists working for the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau calculated that the hassle of changing banks is costing Americans at least $677m per year (see page 526):

https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_personal-financial-data-rights-final-rule_2024-10.pdf

The CFPB economists used a very conservative methodology, so the number is likely higher, but let's stick with that figure for now. The switching costs of changing banks – determining which bank has the best deal for you, then transfering over your account histories, cards, payees, and automated bill payments – are costing everyday Americans more than half a billion dollars, every year.

Now, the CFPB wasn't gathering this data just to make you mad. They wanted to do something about all this money – to find a way to lower switching costs, and, in so doing, transfer all that money from bank shareholders and executives to the American public.

And that's just what they did. A newly finalized Personal Financial Data Rights rule will allow you to authorize third parties – other banks, comparison shopping sites, brokers, anyone who offers you a better deal, or help you find one – to request your account data from your bank. Your bank will be required to provide that data.

I loved this rule when they first proposed it:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/10/getting-things-done/#deliverism

And I like the final rule even better. They've really nailed this one, even down to the fine-grained details where interop wonks like me get very deep into the weeds. For example, a thorny problem with interop rules like this one is "who gets to decide how the interoperability works?" Where will the data-formats come from? How will we know they're fit for purpose?

This is a super-hard problem. If we put the monopolies whose power we're trying to undermine in charge of this, they can easily cheat by delivering data in uselessly obfuscated formats. For example, when I used California's privacy law to force Mailchimp to provide list of all the mailing lists I've been signed up for without my permission, they sent me thousands of folders containing more than 5,900 spreadsheets listing their internal serial numbers for the lists I'm on, with no way to find out what these lists are called or how to get off of them:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/22/degoogled/#kafka-as-a-service

So if we're not going to let the companies decide on data formats, who should be in charge of this? One possibility is to require the use of a standard, but again, which standard? We can ask a standards body to make a new standard, which they're often very good at, but not when the stakes are high like this. Standards bodies are very weak institutions that large companies are very good at capturing:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/

Here's how the CFPB solved this: they listed out the characteristics of a good standards body, listed out the data types that the standard would have to encompass, and then told banks that so long as they used a standard from a good standards body that covered all the data-types, they'd be in the clear.

Once the rule is in effect, you'll be able to go to a comparison shopping site and authorize it to go to your bank for your transaction history, and then tell you which bank – out of all the banks in America – will pay you the most for your deposits and charge you the least for your debts. Then, after you open a new account, you can authorize the new bank to go back to your old bank and get all your data: payees, scheduled payments, payment history, all of it. Switching banks will be as easy as switching mobile phone carriers – just a few clicks and a few minutes' work to get your old number working on a phone with a new provider.

This will save Americans at least $677 million, every year. Which is to say, it will cost the banks at least $670 million every year.

Naturally, America's largest banks are suing to block the rule:

https://www.americanbanker.com/news/cfpbs-open-banking-rule-faces-suit-from-bank-policy-institute

Of course, the banks claim that they're only suing to protect you, and the $677m annual transfer from their investors to the public has nothing to do with it. The banks claim to be worried about bank-fraud, which is a real thing that we should be worried about. They say that an interoperability rule could make it easier for scammers to get at your data and even transfer your account to a sleazy fly-by-night operation without your consent. This is also true!

It is obviously true that a bad interop rule would be bad. But it doesn't follow that every interop rule is bad, or that it's impossible to make a good one. The CFPB has made a very good one.

For starters, you can't just authorize anyone to get your data. Eligible third parties have to meet stringent criteria and vetting. These third parties are only allowed to ask for the narrowest slice of your data needed to perform the task you've set for them. They aren't allowed to use that data for anything else, and as soon as they've finished, they must delete your data. You can also revoke their access to your data at any time, for any reason, with one click – none of this "call a customer service rep and wait on hold" nonsense.

What's more, if your bank has any doubts about a request for your data, they are empowered to (temporarily) refuse to provide it, until they confirm with you that everything is on the up-and-up.

I wrote about the lawsuit this week for @eff@mastodon.social's Deeplinks blog:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/10/no-matter-what-bank-says-its-your-money-your-data-and-your-choice

In that article, I point out the tedious, obvious ruses of securitywashing and privacywashing, where a company insists that its most abusive, exploitative, invasive conduct can't be challenged because that would expose their customers to security and privacy risks. This is such bullshit.

It's bullshit when printer companies say they can't let you use third party ink – for your own good:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/hp-ceo-blocking-third-party-ink-from-printers-fights-viruses/

It's bullshit when car companies say they can't let you use third party mechanics – for your own good:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

It's bullshit when Apple says they can't let you use third party app stores – for your own good:

https://www.eff.org/document/letter-bruce-schneier-senate-judiciary-regarding-app-store-security

It's bullshit when Facebook says you can't independently monitor the paid disinformation in your feed – for your own good:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#quis-custodiet-ipsos-zuck

And it's bullshit when the banks say you can't change to a bank that charges you less, and pays you more – for your own good.

CFPB boss Rohit Chopra is part of a cohort of Biden enforcers who've hit upon a devastatingly effective tactic for fighting corporate power: they read the law and found out what they're allowed to do, and then did it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/23/getting-stuff-done/#praxis

The CFPB was created in 2010 with the passage of the Consumer Financial Protection Act, which specifically empowers the CFPB to make this kind of data-sharing rule. Back when the CFPA was in Congress, the banks howled about this rule, whining that they were being forced to share their data with their competitors.

But your account data isn't your bank's data. It's your data. And the CFPB is gonna let you have it, and they're gonna save you and your fellow Americans at least $677m/year – forever.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/01/bankshot/#personal-financial-data-rights

[haveyouseenthismovie-poll]

[just2bubbly]

ab kal ke match ka heartfelt ramble ka waqt aaya hai honestly there's sm energy in me and it has to go somewhere, I'm gonna start off with the tournament as a whole, because some teams like Afghanistan and South Africa do deserve their appreciation as well. They both managed to do what their own teams before then failed to- playing a final and semi-final is a feat worth achieving ✨🙌🏻 and they managed to do it. We saw some good old West Indies back and that brought back a sense of childhood who had seen the likes of DJ Bravo and Chris Gayle play. Now as a fellow indian, seeing the Australian being defeated by Afghanistan and then later us 🥳 only to pin down their hope on Bangladesh- IT FELT SO SURREAL, LIKE YES BITCH CUMMINS THAT'S WHAT YOU GET FOR BEING SO RUDE (and 19 Nov ka badla hum toh Aussies se bohot baar lenge, with dugna lagaan)

Ind vs Eng, was the ultimate banger for me, the whole transition from a 10 wicket loss to 10 wicket haul was just amazing!! And sometimes we Indians forget the essence of our own bowlers in our team, but this wc was all about bowlers (ours and other countries)- after the ipl bashing, this entire month must have felt so hopeful to them. We got so many players like Bumrah, Maharaja, Rashid Khan, Naveen-ul-Haq defending low scoring matches- these matches that kept us as audience on edge. What a beautiful time to be a skilled bowler!

Now coming to yesterday, as a person that had nothing against South Africa as such but only had love for India- I deeply feel sorrow for your loss. I guess, we Indians know better than anyone how it feels to win all matches and then lose the final. I believe, your captain Markram is gonna do the magic our Rohit Sharma did last night. You just have to believe in him!

And to my beautiful Men in Blue- kal toh dil jeet liya 🥹🙌🏻 Everyone had been so worked up in the entire tournament. All of 11 players deserved the world cup, especially those that had played the 19 Nov. Last night's match was taking my breath away every over, it was so suspenseful and thriller and in the words of Sidhu "yeh match nazuk dil walo ke liye nahi hai" and it definitely wasn't and Bapu tumne toh humari jaan leli kal with that over (jeet mei sab maaf hai) but thank you Sky for taking the catch which people will talk about 10 years from now and thank you Hardik for not breaking our trust in that last over (Rohit did kiss you on behalf of 1.5 billion people yesterday 😚) but more than thank you to Captain that ended the trophy draught and thank you to the Coaches! ❤️

To Rahul Dravid, who was so intense yesterday- Indiranagar ka gunda jag gaya kal full 🥹😂 but thank you so much for making us what we are!! We are going to miss you so much 🫂🥹 and to Rohit and Kohli, we aren't sure if t20i will ever be same without you.

to the indian cricket team, WE ARE SO FUCKING PROUD OF YOU!! 💙🇮🇳

[ishuess]

WE WONNNNN WE JUST WONN THE T20 WORLD CUPPP...

I'm crying and so are u

Also Virat's Retirement does hurt but he got his fairytale ending. The one he badly deserved.

Pandya I LOVE YOUUU BABBYYY. I believed in you then and I believe in you till your last over.

Rohit also got his dream fulfilled. Finally a trophy in his name.

Kisi ne sacch hi kahaa hai "End mein sab accha ho jaata hai. HAPPIES Endings'.

I have no words for the ict fam who raised me. Nazar na lage🧿🧿🧿🧿