Lululemon Partners With Dalai Lama, Enrages Critics

Lululemon can't even donate to charity without miring itself in controversy.

The yoga-wear retailer is getting slammed after announcing a partnership this week with the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education. Lululemon will contribute $750,000 to the Tibetan spiritual leader's nonprofit organization over the next three years to expand education initiatives and for "researching the connection between mind-body-heart," according to the company's press release.

Some critics say the alliance is hogwash. They don't think the Dalai Lama's name should be associated with a money-making enterprise and complain he's been "hijacked" and turned into a mere corporate marketing tool.

A mob flocked to Lululemon's official blog, lighting up the comments section with accusations of hypocrisy.

"As he believes that luxuries are not necessities, you believe in $100 yoga pants," one commenter pointed out.

"It is offensive that you have sunk so low as to use the Dalai Lama and his image as part of your branding," another wrote.

"I am put-off by Lululemon’s bizarre effort to hijack the Dalai Lama for brand-building and commercial gain," a third added.

A few who spoke out against the partnership claimed not to like the Dalai Lama, with one calling him "cruel" and another calling him "greedy."

Lululemon appears to disagree. "Both organizations share a common vision for developing the next generation of compassionate leaders in the world and are committed to engaging and empowering healthy communities," the company said in its press release.

Lululemon and the Dalai Lama Center did not respond to requests for additional comment.

Lululemon has a lot on its plate. Last spring, quality control issues sparked a recall of too-sheer yoga pants. Then, last fall, co-founder Chip Wilson irked many customers when he said Lululemon's pants "don't work" for some women's bodies. Earlier this month, Lululemon managed to offend the entire city of Buffalo, New York, by making fun of its NFL team.

One commenter summarized: "Dear Lulu, your product is still in question, don’t get me wrong. Great marketing, done! Now get back to improving your product and winning clients back."

Overweight Women More Likely To Have Low-Paying Jobs Than Overweight Men

Fat shaming can have economic consequences.

As a woman gets heavier, her chances of working in a low-paying, physically taxing job grow, according to a new study from Jennifer Shinall, a law professor at Vanderbilt University. But weight doesn’t have nearly as much bearing on the type of job a man lands.

Though obese men are more likely than men of average weight to work in lower-paying, physical jobs, the effect isn't nearly as strong as it is for women. As a result, obese women make $7 less than their average-weight counterparts, while obese men make just $2 less.

“It absolutely suggests that weight is much more of a consideration in the labor market for women than it is for men,” Shinall told The Huffington Post in an interview.

Shinall’s findings add to the growing body of evidence that physical attributes play a depressingly large role in the lives of working women, no matter how they look. Very skinny women tend to get paid more. Hiring committees penalize attractive women by not calling them for interviews.

Such factors typically add to the broader discrimination women already face at work. Research shows women earn less than men in the same roles and are also more likely to work in low-paying fields.

Many female-dominated, low-wage jobs, such as home health care and child care, are where obese and morbidly obese women are most likely to end up, Shinall’s study found.

"Those are the only jobs that are available for the heaviest women in the labor market," she said.

For her study, Shinall analyzed occupation, health and population data for 10,007 women and 8,928 men. She found that, the heavier women get, the more likely they'll end up working in jobs that require more physical activity.

The opposite is true for women seeking jobs in fields that involve a lot of personal interaction, such as sales. Women become less likely to land those roles the more overweight they are. Morbidly obese women who do get jobs in such fields are paid about 5 percent less, on average, than other women, even controlling for factors like education, the study found.

For men, on the other hand, being heavier can actually boost earnings in some jobs. Overweight men working in more physical jobs make about 4 percent more, on average, than their average-weight colleagues, according to the study.

Shinall said she suspects that one of the main reasons obese and morbidly obese women tend to cluster in low-paying, strenuous jobs is because of discrimination in hiring for white-collar roles. Companies may not want an overweight woman representing them to customers, she said, and it's also possible that the person doing the hiring may not want to work with an obese woman.

McDonald's Is Still Very Cheap, But People Don't Want To Eat There

As sales and profits have crumbled at McDonald's recently, some observers have blamed low-income Americans, saying they must not be able to afford Big Macs any more.

But that's wrong. If anything, Big Macs have gotten more affordable lately. The real problem is that the iconic chain needs to win back its true base: middle-class Americans looking for a cheap, quick meal.

For the past 11 months, sales at U.S. McDonald's restaurants open at least a year -- a key measure of an eatery's health -- have fallen or remained flat. The company announced earlier this week that U.S. same-store sales fell 4.1 percent in September, the worst monthly drop in more than a decade, and that profits plunged 30 percent in its latest quarter. The company's stock price has tumbled about 11 percent over the past six months.

One common explanation for McDonald's woes is that low-income Americans are suffering from a sluggish recovery and unable to afford eating out at McDonald's any more.

But the numbers don't back up that take. For one thing, McDonald's has actually become more of a bargain relative to other food options in recent years: McDonald’s prices haven’t risen as quickly as prices at fast-casual eateries like Panera Bread, according to data from Technomic, a food research firm. Nor have they risen as quickly as broader food inflation, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data:

McDonald's menu prices grew more slowly than prices at fast-casual chains and food inflation overall between 2009 and 2014.

And yet diners are still flocking to other chains despite their typically higher costs. When Chipotle raised menu prices earlier this year, customers didn’t bat an eye -- the chain reported a profit jump of 25 percent the following quarter. That suggests McDonald's problem isn't so much pricing, but a perception that its food isn't worth any price -- unlike, say, Chipotle, which has positioned itself as offering fast, fresh and quality food for which customers are willing to pay more.

Unlike Walmart, whose fortunes have largely mirrored that of the poor, McDonald’s doesn’t take food stamps. That makes it an unlikely regular destination for low-income Americans, according to Joel Berg, the author of “All You Can Eat? How Hungry Is America?”

In fact, a 2011 study from the University of California-Davis found that fast-food consumption actually rises with income, until incomes reach about $60,000.

“That conventional wisdom is wrong,” Berg said of the notion that poor people are more likely to eat at places like McDonald’s.

Given the strength of that conventional wisdom, it's likely going to take a full revamp of McDonald's image to convince the middle-class customers who have fled the chain that it offers more than just cheap burgers for people who can’t afford anything better. What has been the quintessential McDonald’s experience for decades -- inexpensive food that tastes the same everywhere -- just isn’t as appealing any more.

To fix this, the company is working to convince diners it sells “fresh, quality food” at a reasonable price, partly through "transparency initiatives" like a campaign last week asking people to submit questions about its food, according to Heidi Barker, a McDonald's spokeswoman.

"McDonald’s appeals to customers of many diverse backgrounds and lifestyles," Barker wrote in an e-mail statement. "There’s value at every level of the menu, from our Dollar Menu and More to our premium sandwiches and salads, and McCafe beverages."

It could be a hard sell, as McDonald’s CEO Don Thompson acknowledged on a conference call with analysts Tuesday.

“The question is whether or not our value and our food options are resonating as strongly," he said. "I believe that that is the fundamental basis of some of the challenges that we are having.”

Company Makes Gun Tech That Could Help Prevent Police Brutality

Police may soon start using electronic guns that can track how, when and where the weapons are used, which could lead to greater accountability in investigations of police shootings.

The firearms technology company Yardarm Technologies has developed a new product that can record crucial information about when, where and how police officers use their firearms. This technology could be a welcome tool amid growing criticism of heavy-handed police tactics in the U.S., which were exemplified by the controversy around the police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August.

Yardarm’s new system can recognize and record things such as when the weapon is unholstered, when a magazine is inserted, when the first bullet enters the chamber and when and (roughly) where the weapon is fired, company spokesman Jim Schaff told The Huffington Post. Soon, Yardarm plans to give the gun the ability to know the direction and angle of each shot, Schaff said.

Why is it important to know this information? The system can provide an objective record of an incident in which a police officer used his weapon, Schaff said, which could be helpful in an investigation. He added that it "goes both ways" -- the data could also be used to exonerate an officer accused of misconduct, or to prosecute a criminal in a court of law.

“We’re there to show what happened, to make an accurate reporting of the event, so that it can be used as necessary after the fact,” Schaff said.

Earlier this month, the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Department and the Carrollton, Texas, Police Department began equipping some of their officers’ Glocks with the new technology, Yardarm stated in a press release Friday.

“We’re looking forward to what we believe law enforcement is heading towards,” Carrollton Police Sgt. Wes Rutherford told HuffPost. “We thought we might be interested in purchasing this in the future.”

Schaff added that the technology can be also be used to keep police officers safer. When an officer draws his weapon, for example, the gun will send an alert to the police command center and to nearby officers, alerting them to a potentially dangerous situation.

Yardarm does not manufacture an actual gun, but a two-inch long device that fits into the grip of an existing gun. That device detects the gun’s every movement through high-powered motion sensors known as accelerometers.

“It’s the same kind of sensor your iPhone uses to change the screen from vertical to horizontal when you turn the phone to the side,” Schaff said. “But ours is way more powerful.”

Currently, for the sensor to work, an officer must be carrying a smartphone. That’s because the device sends a signal through the officer’s phone and then on to Yardarm’s data servers in Washington and Texas, where the information is stored for future use.

The SENSOR can also detect, to a limited extent, where each shot is fired in relation to the shots that were previously fired. “If you fire a shot and then moved laterally ten feet and fired another, we’d know that you moved,” Schaff said. “But three feet? Maybe not.”

Rutherford noted that the sensor could be helpful in an event where an officer uses his gun on a civilian. “Whenever we investigate an officer-involved shooting, we look for every particular avenue that we can, to obtain the objective information, in order to piece together the whole puzzle of what happened,” he said. “So it could absolutely help, yes.”

One of the most recent major development in police officer accountability is the use of body-worn cameras by officers in several states across the country, a practice that has received greater attention after Brown’s killing. Studies have shown that when officers wear video cameras on their uniforms, they’re significantly less likely to use force in their interactions with civilians. Civilian complaints against officers have also been shown to drop when officers wear the cameras, suggesting that this kind of technology could save cities money by reducing litigation fees.

Dashboard cameras, which became popular in the 1990s, have also proven useful for providing an objective record of problematic encounters between civilians and police: Camera footage often helps cut through the he-said-she-said chatter that inevitably accompanies allegations of police misconduct.

But there is a welter of issues with police recording themselves on the job, including privacy concerns and the nation’s complicated patchwork of consent laws. Another problem is that video footage isn’t always as reliable as we think. “Sometimes there can be multiple gunshots and it will sound like one, because they cover each other up,” said David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and a police accountability expert.

And even though dashboard cameras have been around for years, they still aren’t used in some places in the United States. Body-worn cameras, a much newer concept, are hardly used at all, though more cities are starting to consider them.

For as long as police officers have carried guns, advocates have bemoaned the lack of data and accountability regarding police shootings. To date, there is still no official data on how many people are shot by cops in the United States every year.

Gun tracking technology like Yardarm's would add to the amount of data available to law enforcement officers and courts about controversial officer-involved shootings. Knowing where and when each shot is fired could bring greater transparency to investigations of these episodes.

In Brown's case, the version of events recounted by Darren Wilson, the officer who shot him, has at times been at odds with accounts from witnesses. But it’s not clear that the sequence of events would be any less hazy if Wilson had been using Yardarm’s technology.

“Cameras and sensors on weapons would represent a quantum leap forward in policing and accountability,” said Kirsten John Foy, a civil rights advocate who is also the Northeast Regional Director of the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network. “But technology has its limitations as well. You can’t understand a person’s intent, a person’s mindset, or the circumstances which that officer felt made it necessary to use deadly force. It won’t record those things."

"So I think we have to be mindful that policing is not just a science, it’s also an art form," he added. "And there are other factors that have to be taken into account.”

This isn't the first time Yardarm Technologies has attempted to develop a firearm to help address public safety issues. After the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Yardarm set out to create a consumer "smart gun" that could be remotely disabled using an app. But the company abandoned that plan when it realized how politically controversial the idea was. Compared to the consumer market, Yardarm encountered much less resistance marketing its technologies to law enforcement, Schaff told HuffPost earlier this year.

CORRECTION: This article originally suggested that Yardarm manufactures its own firearm. Rather it makes a small sensor that fits into an existing gun.

Yardarm Technologies from Jim Schaff on Vimeo.

Hackers Ran Loose Inside JPMorgan For 2 Months Before Getting Caught

It's as if a robber were to break into a bank today and stay there until Christmas before someone noticed.

That's how long hackers had access to JPMorgan Chase's computer system, The New York Times reported this week. If two months seems like an eternity for cyberthieves to wander through the computers of the country's largest bank, consider that hackers have had free rein for even longer at several major retailers this past year.

Hackers resided on the computers of Neiman Marcus for five months, Home Depot for five months, arts and crafts store Michaels for eight months and Goodwill, the thrift store, for a year and a half.

That hackers were able to roam through JPMorgan's computer network for two months is another sign that companies are struggling not only with keeping cybercriminals out, but with spotting them once they get in.

A spokesman for JPMorgan did not respond to a request for comment. The bank said earlier this month that hackers had compromised the data of 76 million households, but that no money or Social Security numbers were stolen and the bank hadn't seen any unusual customer fraud.

The length of time that hackers reside on a computer system doesn't always correlate to the number of people affected. The size of the company's customer base also makes a difference. Target, for example, said 40 million customers had their payment card data compromised during an attack last fall that lasted just two weeks, while Michaels said that a much smaller number -- 3 million people -- were affected during its eight-month attack.

Still, the length of time of a data breach matters. Unlike real-life bank robbers who escape in minutes, digital bank robbers can take weeks or months before they gain access to the data they're after.

"A lot of people think hacking happens overnight and the the bad guys break into the network and they're done," said Aleksandr Yampolskiy, chief executive officer of SecurityScorecard, a cybersecurity firm. "The reality is it takes a long time."

Hackers are able to go undetected for so long because they use numerous techniques to disguise their activities. For one, they often attack computers using malicious software that doesn't set off alarms with anti-virus programs. And once inside, they route the data they steal through a series of intermediary computers, for example at a church or a public school, according to Yampolskiy. Such computers seem innocent to security teams and avoid raising red flags by communicating directly with computers in Russia, where many hackers are based, he said.

Some cybercriminals even fix the security flaws that allowed them to gain access to a computer network in the first place, like a burglar breaking a window and then replacing it before he leaves so nothing appears amiss.

But Yampolskiy said perhaps the biggest reason that hackers go unnoticed is that security teams are often overwhelmed with data. Companies will spend millions of dollars on sophisticated intrusion detection systems and vulnerability scanners that set off numerous alarms, many of which aren't serious. A security engineer at a company with 4,000 employees might get an alert every time an employee visits a suspicious website on the network, for example.

While those security tools are supposed to help keep hackers out, they create an avalanche of alerts that allow hackers to blend in.

"You get so much information that the event that matters is buried in those security logs," Yampolskiy said. "It's like looking for a needle in a haystack."

Socialist Party Pushing $20 Minimum Wage Defends $13-An-Hour Job Listing

The Freedom Socialist Party has right-wing bloggers seeing red over a job listing that paid less than the group advocates for a minimum wage.

Earlier this month, the nonprofit posted listings on Craigslist and Indeed to advertise an opening for a part-time web designer. It offered to pay $13 an hour or more, depending on the designer's experience. That's well below the $20 minimum wage the party pushes for in its platform, and lower than the $15 wage it helped pass this year in Seattle. Right-leaning sites promptly seized on what they saw as hypocrisy.

But Doug Barnes, the party's national secretary, told The Huffington Post on Saturday that the group relies heavily on donations from low-wage workers and could not afford to pay much to an inexperienced designer.

"We're practicing what we're preaching in terms of continuing to fight for the minimum wage," Barnes said, making his first public comment on the controversy. "But we can't pay a lot more than $13."

He said the party's revenues would increase if the minimum wage were raised to $20 -- and he'd even prefer $22, at least in Seattle. The city will begin phasing in a $15 minimum wage in April.

"Our donor base would all be affected, and the low-wage workers who support us with $5 to $6 a month would be able to give more," he said. "That would affect our ability to pay higher wages as well."

But Barnes said he removed the $13 starting wage from the Craigslist ad on Friday in response to the online criticism.

"The right-wing attack is very hypocritical," he said. "These are the same people who fought against the minimum wage and support companies like Walmart."

He said the Freedom Socialist Party, which was formed in 1966 as a revolutionary feminist breakaway group from the United States Socialist Workers Party, does not accept donations from corporations.

$10.10 Minimum Wage Would Save The U.S. Government $7.6 Billion A Year

Raising the federal minimum wage would save the government billions and have sweeping benefits for low-income families, according to a new analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank focused on labor issues.

EPI's report found that if the minimum wage were boosted from its current level of $7.25 per hour to $10.10, as proposed by the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2014, more than 1.7 million Americans would no longer have to rely on public assistance programs. This would produce $7.6 billion per year or more in savings for the federal government, according to the study.

Millions of Americans, known as the "working poor," are unable to lift themselves above the poverty line despite working full-time, minimum-wage jobs. Increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 would mean that many of these people wouldn't have to rely on additional public subsidies to make ends meet.

Currently, half of all people earning under $10.10 per hour, roughly 11.9 million Americans, receive some form of means-tested benefits from the government, like the Earned Income Tax Credit, food stamps and others.

Last year, EPI researchers estimated that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would likely boost wages for 27 million American workers.

The federal minimum wage has not been raised since July 2009. The Fair Minimum Wage Act, which would gradually bump the federal minimum wage up to $10.10 over three years and peg future increases to the consumer price index, is currently stalled in Congress.

If the minimum wage had been pegged to the overall productivity rate of the U.S. economy since 1968, workers would be earning about $18.42 per hour today, according to the study.

EPI argues that the savings produced from a minimum wage hike should be reallocated to other underfunded social safety net programs that reduce poverty, rather than just reducing the budgets of the programs that saved money.

"Raising the minimum wage is one simple and long-overdue step toward rebalancing the social contract so that the private and public sectors are more equal participants in improving living standards for American workers," the report states.