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....

Getting it exactly backward

Here's this, from MoDo:

The job of the former community organizer and self-styled uniter is to somehow get this dunderheaded Congress, which is mind-bendingly awful, to do the stuff he wants them to do.

Bzzt!  No, his job is to take care that the Laws be faithfully executed.

Making domestic policy is exactly nowhere in the President's job description.  To the extent that the making of domestic policy at the national level is authorized at all, that job is assigned to Congress.

The President is responsible for carrying out the policies made by Congress.  That's what "executive" means.

Presenting the temporary chief exec with a kingly crown both doesn't work and is extremely dangerous.

"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.

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.

Malinformation

One of the things about reading the morning funnies online... there's a comment section.

And, inevitably, when a comic strip shows a little kid mimicking the behavior of a megacorp - demanding special government favors, bailouts, and so on - at least one person (and usually more) will pop up in the comments to label the kid a true Tea Partier.

Excuse, please?  Last I checked, the Tea Party movement sprang up in opposition to the '08/'09 corporate bailouts.  You want supporters of corporate bailouts, look to the mainstream Republicans... and the mainstream Democrats, when they're not on camera.  (Remember, kids: Obamacare is yet another bailout of Big Finance, written by corporate lobbyists to prevent spontaneous reform.)

Just another of those areas where a significant portion of the public, courtesy of the propaganda spread by the establishment press, is severely malinformed.

So apparently there's some big shindig...

...in Washington today?

A grandly expensive celebration of four more years of unbridled looting and crony corporatism?

This from the same crowd that was all upset about Mittens having a big fancy house that he paid for with his own money?

Yeah.  Money you earn in the private sector is dirty money.  Money that's taken from the private sector at gunpoint and handed out by the ruling class is virtuous money.

And, you know, our masters deserve their luxurious lifestyle, because they work so hard, like, 5 hours a day, 100 days a year or something for a six-figure pittance of a salary, so we can hardly begrudge them a few perks of office, right?

And, we must always remember, some animals are more equal than others.