If you read the Affordable Care Act when it was passed, you knew that it was dishonest for President Obama to claim that “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” as he did—and continues to do—on countless occasions. And we now know that the administration knew this all along. It turns out that in an obscure report buried in a June 2010 edition of the Federal Register, administration officials predicted massive disruption of the private insurance market.I think that this will break the Democratic Party. I wonder what Obama is planning to prevent that.
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“The Departments’ mid-range estimate is that 66 percent of small employer plans and 45 percent of large employer plans will relinquish their grandfather status by the end of 2013,” wrote the administration on page 34,552 of the Register. All in all, more than half of employer-sponsored plans will lose their “grandfather status” and get canceled. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 156 million Americans—more than half the population—was covered by employer-sponsored insurance in 2013.
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How many people are exposed to these problems? 60 percent of Americans have private-sector health insurance—precisely the number that Jay Carney dismissed. As to the number of people facing cancellations, 51 percent of the employer-based market plus 53.5 percent of the non-group market (the middle of the administration’s range) amounts to 93 million Americans.
We're in the middle of an epic battle for power in cyberspace. On one side are the traditional, organized, institutional powers such as governments and large multinational corporations. On the other are the distributed and nimble: grassroots movements, dissident groups, hackers, and criminals. Initially, the Internet empowered the second side. It gave them a place to coordinate and communicate efficiently, and made them seem unbeatable. But now, the more traditional institutional powers are winning, and winning big. How these two side fare in the long term, and the fate of the rest of us who don't fall into either group, is an open question -- and one vitally important to the future of the Internet.I'm not sure that I agree with everything here, but this is a very good overview of where we are and how we got here. This is certainly correct:
In many cases, the interests of corporate and government powers are aligning. Both corporations and governments benefit from ubiquitous surveillance, and the NSA is using Google, Facebook, Verizon, and others to get access to data it couldn't otherwise. The entertainment industry is looking to governments to enforce its antiquated business models. Commercial security equipment from companies like BlueCoat and Sophos is being used by oppressive governments to surveil and censor their citizens. The same facial recognition technology that Disney uses in its theme parks can also identify protesters in China and Occupy Wall Street activists in New York. Think of it as a public/private surveillance partnership.This, too:
The truth is that technology magnifies power in general, but rates of adoption are different. The unorganized, the distributed, the marginal, the dissidents, the powerless, the criminal: They can make use of new technologies very quickly. And when those groups discovered the Internet, suddenly they had power. But later, when the already-powerful big institutions finally figured out how to harness the Internet, they had more power to magnify. That's the difference: The distributed were more nimble and were faster to make use of their new power, while the institutional were slower but were able to use their power more effectively.He recommends increased transparency. That's where I'm not so sure. He's correct that we need it, but neither public nor private institutions like it and will resist overtly (public opposition) and covertly (bureaucratic foot dragging). And what is scary is how the attacks on Internet freedom and privacy increasingly resemble attacks on gun ownership and the Second Amendment:
The more destabilizing the technologies, the greater the rhetoric of fear, and the stronger institutional powers will get. This means increasingly repressive security measures, even if the security gap means that such measures become increasingly ineffective.Printed guns result in freak outs. Encryption means you must be a child molester. Objecting to NSA metadata sweeps means that you have something to hide. As opposed to the Government, who is only hiding things for your own safety. And the safety of your kids. Relax, Citizen - the chocolate ration has been increased again ...
If you miss me too, don't forget to check the archives. There's some good stuff here that I've posted over the years. For you new readers, start with the 'best of covertress' section on the right.
I guess that's it.
So long, it's been good to know you...
c
APPENDIX: THE EXPERIMENT THAT FAILEDToo wordy. Yes, it needed polishing, but was typed on a mechanical typewriter, not tapped into a blog text editor. But even to this day there's sometimes a whispering about my posts, This is NOT a conclusion!
In the beginning (as it is often said), we may suppose that people thought that the speed of light was infinite - when they ever thought about it at all. The first person to try to experimentally measure this (as far as we know) was Galileo. In his experiment, he stood on a hilltop one evening with a darkened lantern. His assistant stood on a hill a mile away with another - also darkened - lantern. Galileo would uncover his lantern; the assistant, upon seeing the light, would uncover his own, and Galileo would count the time from when he shown his lantern to when he saw his assistant's. Unfortunately, the time elapsed was the time it took his assistant to think, "Hey, there's the old man's light." The experiment was inconclusive, but did convince Galileo that the speed of light was very great indeed.
A half century later, a Danish astronomer by the name of Claus Roemer was working at the Paris observatory, observing the orbits of Jupiter's satellites. Their periods of revolution had been carefully measured, and it was thought that the exact time of their eclipse behind the planet could be predicted; this, in fact, had been done. Although the calculations seemed flawless, Roemer discovered that the satellites were disappearing at the wrong time. He further noted that they were early when the Earth was approaching Jupiter and late when the two planets were moving apart. He reasoned that the difference was the time it took the light to travel the extra distance. The maximum distance was when the two planets were on the opposite sides of the sun, and was equal to the diameter of the Earth's orbit. Using the best estimate of the diameter of the Earth's orbit, Roemer calculated the speed of light to be 138,000miles per second. He announced this result, but it was burried under a storm of controversy and forgotten.
Fifty years later, in the 1720's, a British astronomer named James Bradley was hot on the trail of the stellar parallax. This was an old dispute between Copernicus and the older Ptolemians, where the latter said that if the Earth revolved around the Sun, the stars should be seen to move; they don't, so Q.E.D. Not so, replied Copernicus, for the motions of the stars (parallax) would be very small. Bradley did not resolve this argument, but he did discover what is called the "aberration of light," and used it to calculate the speed of light. His value was 188,500 miles per second, only 1.2 percent too high.
In 1849, a Frenchman by the name of Armand Hippolyte Louis Fizeau decided that the speed of light could be measured in the laboratory. He returned to Galileo's expiment, but made some major improvements: the assistant was replaced with a mirror, and the light made to pass through a rapidly rotating toothed disk. If the disk could be made to rotate at just the right speed, Fizeau reasoned, then a ray of light would return just as a blank space opened up on the wheel. If the speed of rotation was known, the speed of light could be measured. Fizeau's experiment was not of high precision - only within about five percent - but it was a great success for a first try. His assistant, Jean Bernard Leon Foucault improved Fizeau's method by replacing the disk with a rotating mirror (this was the experiment we repeated). His accuracy was much better, and he even proved that light travels more slowly through water than through air. This finally put to rest the particle theory of light.
The Fizeau-Foucault experiment was further improved by and American,Albert Abraham Michelson. Michelson added some ingenious improvements to Foucault's apparatus, and measured the speed of light to within a fraction of a percent. The importance of his experiment, however lies elsewhere, the story of which begins two centuries previously.
Sir Isaac Newton, back in the seventeenth century was firmly convinced in the particle theory of light. He reasoned that a wave could not travel through a vacuum, such as the one above out atmosphere. Unfortunately, light was shown to have definite wave properties very early on. Newton struggled for the rest of his life with this problem, and almost united the two theories centuries before Maxwell. Still, he failed, and the problem was ignored.
Later, it was shown conclusively that light was a wave. Furthermore, it was shown that it had to be a transverse wave (by experiments with Iceland spar). This was a terrible blow to the Physicists of the day who had postulated a medium - the "luminiferous ether" - to conduct the waves which pervaded all space. Unfortunately, it was calculated that the ether had to be more rigid than steel to conduct the wave at that known velocity. Nevertheless, the concept of a massless, frictionless medium, indistinguishable from vacuum yet rigid as steel was explained away by the slick, snake-oil experimenters, and became the prevalent theory (the above is, of course, not very charitable, but it does stretch the imagination to understand how the scientists who pulled down the Ptolemaic view of the cosmos for being top heavy and cumbersome could turn around and erect one of their own).
Michelson decided to try to measure the motion of the Earth through the ether (the so called "Ether Wind"). He reasoned that if the ether were motionless, then the motion of the Earth through it would be, while small, detectable. With Edward Williams Morley, he spent a considerable amount of time and effort to eliminate all external vibration from his equipment. When he finally measured the ether wind he found nothing. After eliminating all possible errors, he was left with not a thing. The experiment was a complete failure.
The results caused a world-wide furor. Some of the greatest minds in science, such as Lord Kelvin and George Gabriel Stokes, tried heroically to explain it away. The game was up, however, and it was shown that no ether wind was detected because there was no ether.
The explanation had to wait until Max Planl in 1900 and Albert Einstein in 1905 showed the complete lack of ether which saved the day.
Michelson's experiment had failed so spectacularly that he won the Nobel Prize in 1907, the first American to win a prize in the sciences.
The Syrian Electronic Army has been up to its old tricks again, this time claiming to have infiltrated president Barack Obama’s official Twitter and Facebook accounts, and re-election web site.Derp.
A series of tweets were sent from @BarackObama account and updates were made to the president’s Facebook account on Monday linking to a YouTube video from the pro-Assad hacktivist collective.
Angela Merkel is all finger-wavy over finding out that the U.S. government has been listening in on her phone conversations as though she were Russian or somethingWhat's interesting about this is that Frau Merkel is a politician, which means that she knows very well that politics ain't bean bag. This posturing on her part says that she sees upside in the German electorate which viscerally reacts to "spying" by thinking "Stasi". The NSA has painted themselves with Erich Mielke's brush.
It makes me furious when I see the Mosquito. I turn green and yellow with envy. The British, who can afford aluminum better than we can, knock together a beautiful wooden aircraft that every piano factory over there is building, and they give it a speed which they have now increased yet again. What do you make of that? There is nothing the British do not have. They have the geniuses and we have the nincompoops. After the war is over I’m going to buy a British radio set – then at least I’ll own something that has always worked.I wonder if he had a British radio in his cell after the war?
– as cited in “Pathfinder Aircraft” published by the RAF
"We're going to keep fighting and we're going to pass something to rein in the NSA," [Rep. Justin Amash, R-Michigan] said, adding that the "NSA is fighting back, the establishment is fighting back."Looks like the NSA ia acting as a uniter, not a diver, bringing what looks like a majority from both parties together!
When I explained I was originally from America, the man made a face, held his hand up to his ear like a telephone, and said, "USA? Why are you listening to my mobile phone? Why are you listening to my phone calls?" He was joking, of course, as he promptly laughed, slapped me on the shoulder, and provided directions to the field, but it really startled me to discover that in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, the immediate reaction to an American would be to bring up the NSA.Sure, this all started under Bush. But if anything it's accelerated under Obama's "Smart Diplomacy". Just get the right sort of "Smart" people in charge, and they will realize that Chancellor Merkel would immediately think "Stasi" when she found out that the NSA was tapping her phone. The right sort of "Smart" people who would realize that the Cold War was over, and so espionage programs and goals should be re-thought to fit the new geopolotical reality. The right sort of "Smart" people who could make tradeoffs favoring the long term strategic, not the short term tactical.
And the more elite Europeans aren't blind to the opportunities presented by the scandal either. I spoke to several high-level investment executives over the last few weeks, and to a man, they see the scandal as being a reason for Europe to make a serious effort to break away from the technology chains of Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Twitter, Facebook, and other American companies that have dominated the world. The larger the corporation, the more determined they are to keep the US out of their emails and servers.
This isn't merely a diplomatic or political scandal, it is probably an economic one as well.
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| Image via Wikipedia |
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Failure is inevitable and in fact it has already started, 2 days after the announcement. You see, the analogy is entirely wrong: the "surge" in Iraq (especially in al Anbar) was a dynamic of introducing additional, independent assets. The key word is "independent". The Healthcare.gov folks aren't.
She'd trade Colorado if he'd take her with him,
Closes the door before the winter lets the cold in,
And wonders if her love is strong enough to make him stay,
She's answered by the tail lights
Shining through the window pane
He said I wanna see you again
But I'm stuck in colder weather
Maybe tomorrow will be better
Can I call you then
She said you're a ramblin' man
And you ain't ever gonna change
You gotta gypsy soul to blame
And you were born for leavin'
At a truck stop diner just outside of Lincoln,
The night is black as the coffee he was drinkin',
And in the waitress' eyes he sees the same 'ol light a shinin',
He thinks of Colorado
And the girl he left behind him
He said I wanna see you again
But I'm stuck in colder weather
Maybe tomorrow will be better
Can I call you then
She said you're a ramblin' man
And you ain't ever gonna change
You got a gypsy soul to blame
And you were born for leavin'(born for leavin')
Well it's a winding road
When you're in the lost and found
You're a lover I'm a runner
And we go 'round 'n 'round
And I love you but I leave you
I don't want you but I need you
You know it's you that calls me back here baby
Oh I wanna see you again
But I'm stuck in colder weather
Maybe tomorrow will be better
Can I call you then
Cause I'm a ramblin' man
I ain't ever gonna change (I ain't ever gonna change)
Gotta gypsy soul to blame
And I was born for leavin' (born for leavin')
And when I close my eyes I see you
No matter where I am
I can smell your perfume through these whispering pines
I'm with your ghost again
It's a shame about the weather
But I know soon we'll be together
And I can't wait till then
I can't wait till then
But what's offensive about cowboys?It takes a PhD program to compress that much stupid until it becomes weapons grade. And a really impressive inferiority complex. Just sayin'.
A university spokesman called cowboy costumes a "crude stereotype."Okay, I'll just go as a university spokesman.
... you should be troubled by these two letters, written by Chief Judge Walton of the FISA court. They say, in essence that the government’s 99% success rate before the FISA court fails to take into account the frequent and intense negotiations between the court and the government, negotiations that result in modification or withdrawal of roughly a quarter of all FISA applications. The most recent letter promises that in the future the court will keep track of all the modifications or withdrawals of FISA orders that the court negotiates and will report the court’s track record to Congress and the public.Stewart Baker (onetime #2 or #3 man at the Department of Homeland Security) thinks that it's an outrage that people are calling the FISA court oversight of the spy-a-palooza a "rubber stamp" because 99% of the requests are approved. He says that the real number is that only 75% of the requests get rubber stamped.
In my view, nothing better illustrates the error behind the popular bien-pensant meme that the FISA court is just a rubber stamp. The reverse is true, and for obvious reasons.
The Wall Street Journal points out [note: behind a pay wall - B.](search for “Bay Area Shutdown” if this link doesn’t work) that the BART employees who are on strike represent an industry that has seen one of the steepest declines in worker productivity in history. By just about any measure–transit trips per worker, revenues per worker-hour, costs per passenger mile–the transit industry has gone backwards more than a century in both labor and capital efficiency.Now explain to me again how a government run health care system will be more efficient than a private run one.
The really scary thing, at least if you are a transit rider, is that the result of this strike will be that BART, along with other transit agencies, will sacrifice safety in order to politically accommodate its workers. Many public employees have fat pensions and guaranteed health-care for life, but if paying for these things forces your local planning department to not pass a few new rules or your local library to buy a few less books, no one is going to be particularly damaged.
However, transit agencies–and especially rail transit agencies–can and do cut maintenance budgets in order to keep the money flowing to workers with cushy jobs. This is because of the asymmetry in union-employer negotiations when the employer is a public agency that reports to elected officials who depend on union support to get elected. In the case of transit, this asymmetry is both local and national in scope, as federal law requires that transit agencies keep unions happy in order to be eligible for federal grants.
This has been known for a while. I actually posted on this five years ago:A property of that information reality is that 'meaning' is relative to other items of info, and that any single item can change the interpretation of a big set of facts. E.g., "Muslim, bought pipes, bought gun powder, visits jihadi sites, attends the Mosque weekly, tithes ..." can be completely changed in meaning by a fact such as 'belongs to the Libertarian Party', even 'is a plumber, 'is a target shooting enthusiast'".
This will continue to be true no matter how much info the NSA gathers: it will be a small subset of the information needed to answer the question 'possible terrorist?'.
Thus NSA's tradeoff of privacy vs security is inconsistent with reality: no matter how much info they gather, no matter how sophisticated their filters, they can never detect terrorists without a false positive rate so high that there will be insufficient resources to follow up on them.
There are roughly 700 Million air passengers in the US each year. One chance in a million means the system would report 700 likely terrorists (remember, this thought experiment assumes a ridiculously low false positive rate). The question, now, is what do you do with these 700 people?This explains why the NSA program hasn't identified any actual terrorist attacks. In the midst of grabbing everyone's metadata, a couple of whackos who went to jihadi summer camp in Chechnya - and who the Russians told us to watch out for - waltzed some bombs into the Boston Marathon. The two links above will explain why the NSA will never catch this sort of stuff.
Right now, we don't do anything, other than not let them fly. If they're Senator Kennedy, they make a fuss at budget time, and someone takes them off the list; otherwise, we don't do anything. So all this fuss, and nothing really happens? How come?
Cost. If we really thought these folks were actually terrorists, we'd investigate them. A reasonable investigation involves a lot of effort - wire taps (first, get a warrant), stakeouts, careful collection of a case by Law Enforcement, prosecution. Probably a million dollars between police, lawyers, courts, etc - probably a lot more, if there's a trial. For each of the 700. We're looking at a billion dollars, and this assumes a ridiculously low false positive rate.
There are on the order of a hundred thousand people in TSA's no-fly or watch databases. Not 700. If you investigated them all, you're talking a hundred billion bucks. So they turn the system off.
It also proves my theory that government (NSA) snooping isn’t about finding terrorists because it can’t. It’s about digging up dirt on political enemies, which is what secret police have ALWAYS been about.The secret courts and double hush up National Security Letters sure fit the "Secret Police" mindset, too.
By weakening encryption, the NSA allows others to more easily break it. By installing backdoors and other vulnerabilities in systems, the NSA exposes them to other malicious hackers—whether they are foreign governments or criminals. As security expert Bruce Schneier explained, “It’s sheer folly to believe that only the NSA can exploit the vulnerabilities they create.”RTWT, which is detailed and persuasive.
Now that we know the NSA has a bit of trouble with spam, a nasty little thought has occurred to me. Sure, people like to append standard sig lines, chock full of "terrorist" keywords, to all their emails to screw with them. But just maybe...RTWT, which is detailed and delicious. Up the system!
Imagine a few hundred people creating Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, and so-on-and-so-forth accounts for "Al-Qaeda of New Hampshire (and every other state, county, and city in the country(ies).
A guy is walking along a beach when he comes across a lamp partially buried in the sand.
He picks up the lamp and gives it a rub.
A genie appears and tells him he has been granted one wish.
The guy thinks for a moment and says, "I want to live forever."
"Sorry," said the genie, "I'm not allowed to grant eternal life."
"OK, then, I want to die after a Democrat government balances the budget and eliminates the debt."
"You crafty little bastard," said the genie.
Purely for trivia and posterity’s sake, if you could indulge some (even more) inane queries: One story that’s made the rounds is that a plush toy manufacturer once delivered a box of Hobbes dolls to you unsolicited, which you promptly set ablaze. For people who share your low opinion of merchandising, this is a fairly delightful story. Did it actually happen?
Not exactly. It was only my head that burst into flames.
Washington on the RocksPretty interesting mix of stuff, and way less precious than you might think.
3 ounces dry vermouth
1.5 ounces brandy
1 teaspoon simple syrup
3-4 dashes bitters
Glassware: Rocks glass
Method: Pour all ingredients into the glass, stir gently, fill to the top with ice, turn off the news, and enjoy.
Yet another anthropogenic global warming alarm, and just in time for IPCC AR5, whose newly released WG1 chapters 7 and 11 say there is high confidence that dry regions will get drier, wet regions will get wetter, and storms will get stormier. “But there is only low confidence in the magnitude.” These Caribbean experts are much more certain—Caribbean water resources will not be available.Math, science, and engineering are hard. Just gin up some ZOMG THERMAGEDDON!!!11!!! to get some sweet, sweet political support for big money UN projects. Remember, boys and girls, if the Caribbean nations run out of fresh water, it's the fault of Global Warming - because Global Warming causes everything.
Little in this MSM AP news is what it seems. Paragraph 2 starts out saying rising sea levels could contaminate Caribbean fresh water supplies. What a curious assertion. Less dense fresh water floats on top of salt water no matter the sea level. Excessive groundwater drawdown can cause saltwater intrusion from below. That is already a problem in urbanized Broward County, Florida despite proximity to the Everglades. And on the Tuvalu atolls in the Pacific, where government owned tourist hotels have strained its very limited groundwater capacity. Tuvalu is another urban development problem, not AGW. It was caused by Tuvalu’s government itself, eager to develop ecotourism (diving) after their new Funafuti runway was built with World Bank financing.
Gotta keep rollin, gotta keep ridin',
keep searchin' till I find what's right
And as the sunset faded
I spoke to the faintest first starlight
And I said next time
Next time
We'll get it right
In the 1950s, when modern academic research took shape after its successes in the second world war, it was still a rarefied pastime. The entire club of scientists numbered a few hundred thousand. As their ranks have swelled, to 6m-7m active researchers on the latest reckoning, scientists have lost their taste for self-policing and quality control. The obligation to “publish or perish” has come to rule over academic life. Competition for jobs is cut-throat. Full professors in America earned on average $135,000 in 2012—more than judges did. Every year six freshly minted PhDs vie for every academic post. Nowadays verification (the replication of other people’s results) does little to advance a researcher’s career. And without verification, dubious findings live on to mislead.Incentives matter, and you get what you pay for. Now governments are paying tens of Billions of dollars a year for "publishable results". Well, OK - here are a bunch of publishable results. Some of them even seem like they are true (although "some" may only be a quarter or less).
Careerism also encourages exaggeration and the cherry-picking of results. In order to safeguard their exclusivity, the leading journals impose high rejection rates: in excess of 90% of submitted manuscripts. The most striking findings have the greatest chance of making it onto the page. Little wonder that one in three researchers knows of a colleague who has pepped up a paper by, say, excluding inconvenient data from results “based on a gut feeling”. And as more research teams around the world work on a problem, the odds shorten that at least one will fall prey to an honest confusion between the sweet signal of a genuine discovery and a freak of the statistical noise. Such spurious correlations are often recorded in journals eager for startling papers. If they touch on drinking wine, going senile or letting children play video games, they may well command the front pages of newspapers, too.
SecureDrop is an open-source whistleblower support system, originally written by Aaron Swartz and now run by the Freedom of the Press Foundation. The first instance of this system was named StrongBox and is being run by the New Yorker. To further add to the naming confusion, Aaron Swartz called the system DeadDrop when he wrote the code.Aaron Schwartz, of course, was the security expert driven to suicide by a District Attorney aiming to bring the full weight of the law down to crush anyone putting large organization's copyrighted material at risk.
Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.It has been a simply terrible year for Barack Obama, a year of disaster following disaster. From gun control to immigration to the Middle East and Syria to the Government Shutdown, nothing has worked out like he had planned. The ancient Greeks wrote of hubris, the pride that goeth before a fall (indeed, they wrote of little else). The fall was a direct result of the foolish pride. So with Agamemnon, so with Oedipus, so with the great surviving ancient plays. This theme was picked up in the Enlightenment, with Milton's Samson Agonistes and thence to philosophy down through Nietzsche.
- Thomas Jefferson, words inscribed on the (closed) Jefferson Memorial
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| Samson pulling down the Temple |
With winged expeditionGet the popcorn. This is fixin' to be good.
Swift as the lightning glance he executes
His errand on the wicked, who surprised
Lose their defence, distracted and amazed.
- John Milton, Samson Agonistes
Wow. You can watch the interview at the link.Last week, Dodgers ace Clayton Kershaw came back on three days’ rest (gasp!) to start the team’s decisive Game 4 win over Atlanta in the NLDS. 48 years ago today, Dodgers ace Sandy Koufax pitched a complete game shutout in Game 7 of the 1965 World Series in the team’s 2-0 win over the Minnesota Twins -- on just two days’ rest. Koufax faced Twins’ ace Jim Kaat, also returning to the rubber on two days’ rest for this critical Game 7.
...Koufax admitted to Scully that he struggled with his curveball, so he had to rely on his fastball. No problem. The World Series MVP twirled a complete game gem, allowing three hits, three walks and striking out 10 Twins to lead the Dodgers to their fourth World Series title. It was the perfect capper to a Cy Young Award-winning season in which Koufax led the National League in wins (26), complete games (27), ERA (2.04) and innings pitched (335 ⅔). Oh, he’d also pitched a perfect game in September.
