Silicon Valley Redneck

Information security

Sometimes, old-school metadata can be important.

Fer example: an ex-military colleague once explained to me how newspaper clippings could wind up classified.  It's not the content of the newspaper article that's significant; it's the little scribbles in the margin, or just the fact that someone in this office thought this article interesting enough to cut it out and file it.

Now, let's consider the Snowden Files.  They're computer documents, released to the public by a person of dubious reputation.  They look official... but how many among us know what actual official NSA documents look like, and would comment on the matter in public?  And how many of those could verify the actual authenticity of the documents, or even the plausibility of the content, even in general terms?

Right.  Hardly anyone.

But!  We now have metadata.  Specifically: various government departments have been sending forth directives cautioning their employees not to look at the classified documents (or not to do so on government networks reserved for unclassified material).

While I'm sure our masters in Washington would like us to believe that the NSA has been totally behaving itself, and the scandal is all a hoax, and anyone can create documents on a home computer and slap the NSA logo on them... the official reaction is based on the documents being authentic.

Not exactly the traditional "neither confirm nor deny", nor even a "Senator, you know I can't answer that question one way or the other in public, but if you'd care to arrange a private meeting I could answer it for you."  Nope.  We got public officials telling bald-faced lies, then, when documents of dubious provenance show up exposing their lies, their reactions confirm the authenticity of those documents.

Can't anyone play this game?

Tribal warfare

So, word is the House Republicans are planning a restrictive abortion bill (Tenth Amendment?  Wozzat?), which of course stands no chance of actually becoming law, but it's just one of those things they do.

As Number 6 once famously asked: Why?

Well... it's come to me that when Democrats pass a restrictive gun law, or Republicans pass a restrictive abortion law or a put-religion-back-in-biology-class law, they're not expecting it to benefit the public.

Nor are they expecting it to benefit themselves.

Nor to benefit supporters, though it may draw money from certain high-dollar supporters (*cough* Bloomberg *cough*).

And it's not really that useful in getting the base to show up and vote... especially in an odd-numbered year.

So why do they do these things?

It's not to benefit anyone.  It's to harm, or annoy, or demonstrate the weakness of, the other tribe.

Passing a noxious law, or even just getting it reported out of committee, is a display of strength.  "Look, we can pass these laws and you can't stop us!"

It's a way of counting coup on their enemies.

And remember: to the faithful of either party, anyone not a Party member is an enemy.

Not to get all radical, but...

McMegan takes a look at that Medicaid study.  The one that shows no actual health improvements from subsidized access to health care.

As in: now we can put an actual, empirically-determined number to the benefit, and that number is right around zero.

This leads me to a totally crazy thought: why don't we try evidence-based government?

Yeah, I know: a totally unrealistic idea.  Just like the ones that routinely become law....

Getting it even more wronger

Via Insty: Matt Yglesias proposes fixing middle-class retirement savings.

By making the middle class pay more into Social Security.  Or forcibly collectivizing retirement savings into government-run pension plans.  With special extra mandatory savings.

(Wait, hasn't that idea been bouncing around Sacramento lately?  Force most private-sector workers to pay into CALPERS, ostensibly so their retirement will be taken care of, but mainly as a temporary bailout for the underfunded government pension plan?)

Here's the thing: the past couple of decades, this country has had a severe case of malinvestment.  And: it isn't the little guys, with their own money, doing it.  Large-scale malinvestment happens when you have a small number of fund managers deciding how to invest vast amounts of other people's wealth, with an incentive system that separates risk from reward.  (See also: CALPERS investing in the big Sand Hill Road venture-capital firms.  And losing.  Further: politically-motivated investment decisions based on social engineering rather than sound money management.)

Officially abolishing private investment decisions and handing everything over to the same damn idiots who brought us the dot-com bubble, the subprime-mortgage bubble, the insolvent state pension funds, and negative real returns on Treasury bills... yeah, that's great public policy.

And then there's this: I haven't been able to save anything toward my retirement lately - even if there were any positive-return investments available to non-insiders - because I don't have the money available.  If the Feds weren't "borrowing" (at a negative real interest rate) sixteen-point-mumble percent of every damn dollar I earn, I'd have cash available for investing in stocks, building up my own business, or otherwise making preparations for a better future. 

And I'd be making my own decisions, with my own little bit of money.  If I screw up my retirement planning, it affects me and a few other people.  If the central planners screw up....

High finance WTF: Apple bond sale

Big news of the day: Apple sells $17 billion in bonds.

Wait, what?  Companies sell bonds to raise cash, no?  I thought Apple was already sitting on a pile of cash...?

Here we go, further down in the article: "...reluctance to share any of Apple's massive $145 billion cash pile..."

And, yes, there's sort of an explanation yet further down.  Seems to involve the screwy U.S. tax situation, and the expense of repatriating earnings.  Unless it's the former Nigerian Minister of Finance.  Which would make about as much sense.

Update: El Reg reports that, yes, it's an expensive scheme to avoid even more expensive taxes on repatriating overseas cash.  Which wouldn't work without the combination of high taxes and stupid low interest rates.  And still seems to make about as much sense as if the CFO had fallen for a 419 scam.

"Internet sales tax"

More accurately: Congress is attempting to grant states the power to tax businesses located in other states.

"To boost the British economy, I'd tax all foreigners living abroad."
        - Terry Jones

Seems to me the power to regulate Commerce among the several States has already gotten distorted in two important ways:

• Somehow, growing a little weed in your own window-box for personal use became "Commerce among the several States", and
• This power is no longer preëmptive.  Surely the intent was to prevent a hodgepodge of state regulations affecting commerce among the states... and yet, when Congress enacts a law regulating, e.g., intrastate possession of certain herbs, this fails to preëmpt state laws in the same area.

Well, now Congress is attempting to delegate its power to the states, which surely can't be legal... and thereby create exactly the hodgepodge that the Commerce Clause was meant to avoid.

Remind me again: what exactly is the point of having a written Constitution?

So, naturally, we need another round...

...of restrictions on guns, reloading materials, and any sort of identifiable chemicals.  (Because chemicals!)

The Al-Quaedish instructions for making crude bombs?  Call for using match heads and sugar.  Not commercial gunpowder, whether black or smokeless.  'Cause, you know, in most places where these guys operate you can't just walk into the neighborhood sporting-goods store and buy a can of powder for your smokepole.

I'm reminded that the last round of restrictions on the sale of blackpowder, back in the 60s or some such, was driven by a Dick Tracy story line.  ZOMG a bad guy in t3h funny papers is using blackpowder in a highly-contrived arson scheme!  We gots to ban itz!

And, should matches not be available?  Why, the good folks at the Frankford Arsenal addressed that one long ago (and in more practical fashion than the Rocket City Rednecks).  Look up TM 31-210.  Got salt, water, electricity, sugar, and time on your hands?

Update: and if we're looking at deflagrating compositions, I stumbled across a doozy back in high school*.  Two ingredients**; one easily found, while the other took a bit of looking for.  Part 'A' remains as easy as ever.  Part 'B'... well... I haven't looked for it in stores in a great long time now, but it's probably there if you look in the right places, and I just discovered that it's unexpectedly easily bought on line***.  Maybe even without getting on any (more) watch lists.

* I was trying to make pretty colored fire. What I got was quite an impressive bang, from a small amount of the mixture with very light confinement.  Thanks to the very light confinement, the fragments thrown around by the blast were bits of paper, and didn't go too far.

** Two ingredients, considered at the retail level.  At least one of them has several different chemicals in it.

*** Oh, and it can also be made at home, without too much effort, from materials which are and will surely remain ubiquitous.

Initial reports...

... are generally wrong.

As is What Everybody Knows For Sure.

There were at least two (most recent reports say exactly two) explosions in a high-crowd-density area at a famous event today.

It's a pretty good bet this was a terrorist attack... but even that's not a sure thing.

Apparently some talking head has already absolutely, positively pinned the blame on right-wing anti-government radicals.  Because April 15th.

Just like a lot of people knew for sure that it was ragheads what blew up the Murrah building back in '95, and TWA flight 800 a year or so later.  Because duh.

Only: those obvious certainties turned out to be completely wrong.

And this one may turn out to be the work of the Kyrgyz October 27th Movement.  Or a gas leak.

Update, 19 April, early morning: from this story...

The suspect at large, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, is 19, was born in Kyrgyzstan

Wait, I thought I just made up the Kyrgyz thing...?

(Yeah, they're ethnic Chechens.  Apparently they couldn't find any schools full of little Russian kids to blow up.)

Because annoying your neighbor should be a federal offense.

Politically-connected rich guy Eric Schmidt is calling for urgent regulation of drone technology.

Reasons given in the article: people might use drones in ways that would annoy their neighbors.

Yup.  Gotta have a law against it, then.  A one-size-fits-all* federal law, no less.

The Precautionary Principle once again rears its ugly head.  Anything that might be misused must be preëmptively suppressed, regardless of what benefits it might have had.

* Except for the rich and politically-connected, of course.  Expect Google to have no problem at all getting permission to use drones for whatever purposes it wants.

Stockman strikes again

So there's this piece at Bloomberg about David Stockman's current thing, and this kinda leaps out at me:

Impose -- get this -- a one-time wealth tax of 30 percent to pay down the national debt once and for all.

Oooo-kay.  So, how would that work, exactly?  Even postulating that it's truly a one-time thing, and not to be repeated every time the politicians get greedy again... are we talking about confiscating 30% of bank balances?  Or everybody cough up 30% of your total asset value, in cash, right now?  (Does the taxed wealth include one's primary residence?)  Does this lead to a sudden urgent need for vast amounts of private borrowing, to come up with the cash to pay off the decades of government borrowing?

Is he talking about confiscating 30% of all capital?  If you have a farm, come up with 30% of the total value of the farm in cash - and good luck with that.  If you have a factory, sell off 30% of your equipment (to whom?) to raise the cash...?  Is this really what he has in mind?

So maybe that sentence is just Clive Crook's textbite summary, and I'm supposed to read the book to find out whether Stockman elaborates on what wealth he's proposing to tax, and what he means by it.  Still: the vastly wealthy always have maneuvering room, so short of an economy-smashing tax on capital assets, they'll find ways to squirrel away their wealth in forms not subject to the wealth tax, while the lower middle class gets hit with the full force of the new tax.  Oh, and if everyone tries to convert large amounts of non-cash assets to cash all at once... look for simultaneous price collapses in everything that's being sold - stocks, bonds, real estate, and so on.  (Maybe not physical precious metals, though: if the tax man doesn't know how much gold you have buried under your house, he can't hit you up for 30% of its assessed value.)