Saturday, June 22, 2013
Afternoon Thread
Greetings from NYC.
It hasn't gotten any quieter. There is construction on every single street. Or, at least it seems that way.
It hasn't gotten any quieter. There is construction on every single street. Or, at least it seems that way.
Friday, June 21, 2013
Happy Hour
Sometimes it's interesting to see how a newspaper front page looks in another country. Here's the UK Independent tomorrow. Or read Matt Taibbi's piece on the rating agencies.
Afternoon Thread
With all the hoopla, I missed this story. . Did you know there's a war on men and James Taranto of the WSJ blames women's new found sexual freedom. My only response is "suck on it." Or not, as the case may be.
Afternoon Thread
Apologies for the suckiest blog week ever, but finding it harder than usual to multitask conferencing and blogging.
Talk amongst yourselves. You all hate me anyway. [/pout]
Talk amongst yourselves. You all hate me anyway. [/pout]
A Sober God-Fearing Man
Haven't had time to follow anything over the last few days, but is there any reason the defeat of the farm bill is bad news?
Threats
Threat that requires surveillance of everybody in the world who uses the internet:
Mr. Mueller referred — but in greater detail than had been provided at Tuesday’s hearing — to newly declassified information linking the program to a case in which several men in San Diego were discovered to have sent about $8,500 to Al Shabab, a terrorist group in Somalia.Threat that, sadly, can't be addressed, beyond additional service charges:
State and federal authorities decided against indicting HSBC in a money-laundering case over concerns that criminal charges could jeopardize one of the world’s largest banks and ultimately destabilize the global financial system.
Thursday, June 20, 2013
Paneling, Paneling
Fun fun fun fun.
We've saved Social Security, now on to ending sexism and misogyny.
We've saved Social Security, now on to ending sexism and misogyny.
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Greg Mankiw Defends the One Percent
Should you suddenly feel compelled to study the economic arguments that might justify why the very rich are so very rich and why the rest of us are not, you can read Mankiw's paper (pdf).
My impression, after reading it, is that Mankiw tries to explain increasing income inequality in a world where tax policies have never changed in the direction of benefiting the wealthier, where outsourcing and globalization are not fairly recent phenomena, and where all markets are not only very competitive but where we all can immediately spot the true marginal productivity of all financial firm managers!
For more erudite criticisms, go here, here, and here. More on the topic here and here.
"Progressive" language lessons
I felt like having a ramble recently about the way our "centrist" leaders in the Democratic Party explain their policy agenda, so I wrote this.
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Skills Gap
We've been getting regular reports of employers who are deeply concerned that they don't have a vast pool of highly skilled workers with specialty training willing to work in undesirable locations for 12 bucks an hour. That isn't actually a skills gap.
Afternoon Thread
This has to be the most absolute stupidest thing I've ever heard:
Notice, he doesn't think female babies do the same. Asshat.
There is no question in my mind that a baby at 20-weeks after conception can feel pain. The fact of the matter is, I argue with the chairman because I thought the date was far too late. We should be setting this at 15-weeks, 16-weeks,” said the former OB/GYN during the House Rules Committee debate on the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.
Watch a sonogram of a 15-week baby, and they have movements that are purposeful,” he continued. “They stroke their face. If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. If they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to believe that they could feel pain?
Notice, he doesn't think female babies do the same. Asshat.
HAMP'd
The key point here is that these are ongoing practices (one ex-employee confirms BofA was deliberately pushing their customers into foreclosure as late as last August) and that there's documentary evidence in addition to sworn statements (the plaintiffs already submitted emails under seal).
Somehow every state and federal law enforcement official in the country skipped over talking to bank employees who got Target gift cards as bonuses for putting homeowners in foreclosure, and this had to come out in a class-action lawsuit. Funny how that goes.
Oh, and also, mortgage servicers try to rip off natural disaster victims.
Your bowl of sadness for the day.
The Grift Goes On
Everything Is Illumilooted.
Its most interesting feature, however, is not architectural, but financial. The house, which is owned by John Sexton, the president of New York University, was bought with a $600,000 loan from an N.Y.U. foundation that eventually grew to be $1 million, according to Suffolk County land records. It is one of a number of loans that N.Y.U. has made to executives and star professors for expensive vacation homes in areas like East Hampton, Fire Island and Litchfield County, Conn., in what educational experts call a bold new frontier for lavish university compensation.
N.Y.U. has already attracted attention for the multimillion-dollar loans it extends to some top executives and professors buying homes in New York City, a practice it has defended as necessary to attract talent to one of the most expensive cities on earth. Mortgage loans to Jacob Lew, a former N.Y.U. executive vice president, part of which was eventually forgiven, became an issue during Mr. Lew’s confirmation hearings as treasury secretary this year.
I Hate Waking Up To An Alarm Clock
Yes, yes, that's a problem most of you face regularly but since I rarely need to, whenever I do, I spend the night being paranoid that I set it incorrectly, it won't go off, and I'll miss my flight or whatever. So crappy sleep.
Monday, June 17, 2013
Spooky Action At A Distance
No I didn't have wireless broadband for my Commodore 64, but as a fairly early adopter I do remember people being relatively freaked out by Wifi when they first saw it. Some of you oldsters might remember that having a wired home broadband connection was pretty miraculous not all that long ago. I remember when a friend was visiting and we needed to check something online and he kept telling me that I needed to plug in my internet. That wifi worked at all and was actually pretty fast (even then - newer protocols are faster) freaked people out at first.
Culture
One never quite knows the truth of stories like this, because SECRET, but if true this hardly portrays an institutional culture which respects privacy and has meaningful safeguards (from 2008).
This isn't just individual abuse of power, it's an environment where people thought it was cool to share.
US Soldier's 'Phone Sex' Intercepted, Shared
Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer.
"Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News.
This isn't just individual abuse of power, it's an environment where people thought it was cool to share.
Barack Obama Doesn't Run Booz Allen
Even if one thinks that the policies of the Obama administration are basically correct and that Barack Obama is, unlike [insert name of likely future Republican president here], basically a good guy, he doesn't actually control the day to day operations of a sprawling surveillance state which includes tens of thousands of people and many private contractors. Even if abuse of power isn't state policy, it's almost unfathomable that controls exist to prevent abuse by individuals within the system. Also, too, unfathomable that we'll ever hear about such abuses if they happen. Because secret.
I get that people want to trust Obama, but he's really not in control.
I get that people want to trust Obama, but he's really not in control.
Tiny Bit Of Eschaton History
Don't think I ever actually ate a waffle, but Bonte offered free wifi back before most people had even heard of wifi, so I used to go there to have coffee and write sucky blog posts.
Program Notes
Travel/nerd convention this week so blogging will probably be a bit random. More generally, I've been trying to detach from the blog a bit more than I have in the past (on weekends, at least). It isn't the hardest job in the world, but I do get in the habit of hitting publish and then thinking 'ok, 90 mins. to come up with another post...' and doing that 7 days a week for 11 years isn't entirely healthy. I need to be out and about sometimes without my little netbook. Thanks to all the people with keys who help keep this blog mighty and strong when I disappear for a bit.
Savvy
I'm seeing responses along the lines of "How dare Snowden reveal that we spy on other countries and of course we spy on other countries everybody knows that."
It can't really be both, you know.
It can't really be both, you know.
A truly fine reporter on stuff that matters
Everybody knows by now (because it's true) that Marcy Wheeler is one of the very best reporters anywhere, in any medium, on important national issues, and we were very lucky recently that she was able to appear twice on Virtually Speaking shows on timely subjects. Jay Ackroyd interviewed her on the heels of Obama's drone speech, and listeners had a lucky break a few days later when she was on the Sunday show and her co-panelist's internet connection went down long enough to give Marcy time to say a lot more than she might otherwise, about the way the administration managed to paper over its egregious violations of press freedom in the
so-called "war on media" with a brilliant piece of co-optation - just as the Bradley Manning trial was about to start. There's a real cornucopia of information in these two shows and I heartily recommend them to anyone who really wants to know what's actually going on.
A point to remember about all this when we're talking about keeping information from "the enemy": This is all information that "the enemy" already knows because, you know, when you've run drone strikes on people, it's not a secret to them. The "enemy" who is being kept in the dark by any administration that practices this kind of secrecy, war on whistle-blowers, and treating a nominally free press as traitors, is the American people.
Sunday, June 16, 2013
Is there finally a stake in its heart?
Sam Seder was saying the other day that he thinks the Grand Bargain is dead. I sure hope he's right.
(I always want to use that Blood From the Crypt font when I write "Grand Bargain", but I'm too lazy.)
Some thread
And if you're bored you could read "How The American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps".
The Big Money
I don't mean to minimize the civil liberties issues - I think they're very real - but my opinion (perhaps wrong!) is that ultimately all of this stuff is about the grift.
But the grift and the civil liberties issues are one and the same. We might be able to trust civil servants toiling away at decent if not huge salaries for the greater good. There's no reason we can even imagine trusting a giant network of for profit companies bilking taxpayers for everything they can.
I've told this story a million times, but it was the most instructive overheard conversation I ever had the privilege to overhear. At a resort in Palm Springs: "Katrina happened, and then everyone got rich."
Obviously everybody didn't get rich. The victims didn't get rich. But this guy and his friends did.
But the grift and the civil liberties issues are one and the same. We might be able to trust civil servants toiling away at decent if not huge salaries for the greater good. There's no reason we can even imagine trusting a giant network of for profit companies bilking taxpayers for everything they can.
I've told this story a million times, but it was the most instructive overheard conversation I ever had the privilege to overhear. At a resort in Palm Springs: "Katrina happened, and then everyone got rich."
Obviously everybody didn't get rich. The victims didn't get rich. But this guy and his friends did.
What's It All About Then
Just a big $$$ scam.
WASHINGTON — When the United Arab Emirates wanted to create its own version of the National Security Agency, it turned to Booz Allen Hamilton to replicate the world’s largest and most powerful spy agency in the sands of Abu Dhabi.
Multimedia
It was a natural choice: The chief architect of Booz Allen’s cyberstrategy is Mike McConnell, who once led the N.S.A. and pushed the United States into a new era of big data espionage. It was Mr. McConnell who won the blessing of the American intelligence agencies to bolster the Persian Gulf sheikdom, which helps track the Iranians.
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