Year: 2016

The Reality of Private Internet Service Providers

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The DC Court of appeals just overturned the FCC ruling invalidating state bans on municipally owned internet service providers:

Federal regulators just suffered a major setback in their efforts to help cities build Internet services that compete with large providers such as Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

 In a federal-court decision Wednesday, the Federal Communications Commission was told that it doesn’t have the power to block state laws that critics say hinder the spread of cheap, publicly run broadband service.

Rather ironically, the feel good story of the day is how a cooperative of rural communities in Minnesota jsut put together their own high speed internet services.

These services are both better and cheaper than the commercial alternatives:

Seven years ago, Winthrop, Minnesota, population 1,400, decided it needed an internet upgrade.

Most local residents were served by companies like Mediacom, which Consumer Reports consistently ranked among the country’s worst internet providers. Slow connection speeds made work difficult in local schools and businesses, but farmers outside of town, who increasingly rely on connectivity to do business, experienced the worst of it.

Fourteen miles from Winthrop, in Moltke Township, population 330, one soybean- and wheat-farming family reported its sluggish DSL connection often made it impossible to upload reports to business partners.

Organizers in Winthrop knew they were too small to fund a major internet infrastructure-building project on their own, so they reached out to other neighbors, the town of Gaylord, population 2,305.

And the towns attracted 25 more municipal allies.

Today, in this sparsely populated swath of Minnesota, a grassroots, member-owned cooperative spanning more than 700 square miles and four counties is poised to expand high-speed broadband access — without relying on federal funding. After seven years of development led by local leaders and volunteers, RS Fiber, now in its first phase of construction, is expected to deliver high-speed broadband internet to more than 6,000 rural households by 2021. And unlike companies like Mediacom, the co-op is owned by local customers who have a say in rates and how it’s operated.

………

Once complete, the RS Fiber network is expected to match the 1 gigabit top speeds of cities like Cedar Falls, a milestone that would make southern Minnesota the envy of rural America. According to recent data, only 55 percent of rural residents have access to broadband internet faster than even 25 Mbps (compared to 94 percent of urbanites). Moreover, the investment already holds promise for boosting the local economy. In May 2015, the Minnesota College of Osteopathic Medicine announced plans to set up services in an old school building in Gaylord — a decision officials said was because of RS Fiber’s infrastructure investment.

US internet performance has been lagging since the 1990s because the mantra of unleashing the market has led to monopoly providers and monopoly rents, which in turn leads to higher prices and lack of investment in infrastructure.

From a business perspective, it makes sense for the ISPs to suck wet farts from dead pigeons.

From a societal perspective it is a disaster.

The Report on the Baltimore Police is Out

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And in news that surprise no one, the Baltimore PD is revealed to be a thoroughly racist organization:

As a black man and a lifelong resident of this city, Ray Kelly has been stopped by the police more times than he can count. And as a community organizer who tried to document police bias after the death of Freddie Gray, Mr. Kelly, 45, had always expected that a federal investigation would uncover a pattern of racial discrimination.

Even so, the scathing report that the Justice Department unveiled here on Wednesday — a data-rich indictment of how Baltimore police officers have for years violated the Constitution and federal law by systematically stopping, searching (in some cases strip-searching) and harassing black residents — gave him a jolt.

“Hearing the actual numbers, like on the traffic stops, is blowing my mind,” Mr. Kelly said.

Release of the 163-page report, at a packed City Hall news conference here, was another wrenching moment of self-examination in this majority black city. Even as Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and the police commissioner, Kevin Davis, accepted the findings — both vowed to turn the Baltimore Police Department into a ‘‘model for the nation’’ — there was relief, but also rage and skepticism among black residents here who wondered if anything would change.

………

In one stark statistic after another, the department’s report helped validate the experiences of Mr. Brown, Mr. Kelly and countless others in poor African-American neighborhoods who regard the police as an occupying force. Many wanted to know what took so long.

………

In Baltimore, a city that is 63 percent black, the Justice Department found that 91 percent of those arrested on discretionary offenses like “failure to obey” or “trespassing” were African-American. Blacks make up 60 percent of Baltimore’s drivers but account for 82 percent of traffic stops. Of the 410 pedestrians who were stopped at least 10 times in the five and a half years of data reviewed, 95 percent were black.

You can read the full report here.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz Explores New Frontiers in Lame

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Remember when I wrote that Debbie Wasserman Schults had agreed to debates with primary challenger Tim Canova?

Now we learn that the Congresswoman has defined agreeing to debate as one 15 minute long joint appearance. After the introductions and opening statements, that leaves time for ……… well ……… nothing:

Last week, Debbie Wasserman Schultz told Sun Sentinel Editor, Rosemary O’Hara, that she was in debate discussions with me. That statement was a complete fabrication. In fact, Wasserman Schultz and no one from her campaign has ever responded to the debate challenge that I made back in April.

Days ago, I tried again in an open letter and by email to Wasserman Schultz and her staff to suggest a series of two-hour debates. Again, I never received any reply. Instead, Jim Defede of WFOR CBS 4 Local News sent an invitation to both candidates to debate on his Sunday morning 8:30am talk show, Facing South Florida. At 4pm, my campaign learned that Wasserman Schultz said she “scheduled” a debate.

After four months of dodging debates and running scared, Wasserman Schultz now wants to schedule a 15 minute debate? If she believes one 15 minute debate is sufficient to defend her record, it shows she’s learned nothing from her failures in scheduling debates at the DNC before her shameful resignation. In April, I proposed a series of real debates, and that’s still my hope, that the voters will get the benefit of hearing us discuss the issues in more than one debate of at least two-hours each to cover a wide range of issues of importance to all of us.

Great googly moogly.

DWS has got to be the lamest politician in Florida, and considering that Jeb “Miss Congeniality” Bush and Rick “Governor Batboy” Scott are Florida politicians, that’s saying a lot.

I so hope Tim Canova wins the primary.

Damn! The NORML Tinfoil Hat Fits!

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One of the under-reported facts in the DNC email leaks was that the alcohol lobby was working aggressively with the DNC to foreclose any move toward legalization:

The WikiLeaks release of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is causing quite a stir for Hillary Clinton after some of the messages appeared to show the supposedly neutral committee favoring her presidential campaign over that of primary rival Bernie Sanders.

But the emails also contain a juicy tidbit for followers of the increasingly prominent debate about marijuana legalization.

One message sent to DNC Finance Director Jordon Kaplan shows that the alcohol industry is spending money to get members of Congress to pay attention to marijuana-impaired driving.

………

While the excerpt from a public email newsletter is not exactly a secret like the internal DNC messages are, it is a revealing window into the alcohol industry’s apparent concern over the marijuana policy reform movement’s increasing success.

Pro-legalization advocates have long speculated that as criminalization and stigma disappear, many adults will choose to use marijuana instead of drink alcohol, which could lead to diminishing profits for beer, wine and liquor manufacturers and sellers.

The Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America’s website calls marijuana policy a “key issue” and its annual convention last year featured a panel titled, “Everything You Need to Know about Marijuana Legalization.” A press release said the session would cover “how marijuana legalization could impact another socially sensitive product: beverage alcohol.”

………

WSWA represents companies in the middle of the three tiers: Distributors who buy alcohol from producers and then place it into retail establishments where consumers shop.

“Without a similarly robust system, the marijuana market could present the potential for illicit and unregulated activity akin to that which occurred with alcohol prior to and during Prohibition,” the group’s site says. “Accordingly, WSWA stands ready to serve as a resource for states in explaining the merits of the three tier system as a systematic and effective regulatory framework.”

So WSWA isn’t necessarily opposed to legalization. It just seems to want to be the middleman between producers and retail sellers — and to grab a piece of the profits along the way.

So not a surprise.

And the Arms Race Begins

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Facebook creates ad blocker proof ads, and the ad blockers block those ad blocker proof ads.

I use an Adblock plus.

Ads frequently serve up malware.

I also serve ads at my site.

I understand the moral ambiguity here:

As you may have noticed over the last few days — I sure did — Facebook recently incorporated a sneaky change to the way its ads are displayed that disguised them as ordinary content and circumvented ad blocking software in browsers. Ads crowded the streams of even the most vigilant users.  But this hell on earth was not to last: two days and change later, the Adblock Plus community has found a way to block them again.

Expect more back and forth on this.

My standard disclaimer the ads on my site apply:

Also, please note, this should be in no way construed as an inducement or a request for my reader(s) to click on any ad that they would not otherwise be inclined to investigate further. This would be a violation of the terms of service for Google™ Adsense™.

The General Case of Saroff’s Rule

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Let me remind you of what I call  Saroff’s Rule, “If a financial transaction is complex enough to require that a news organization use a cartoon to explain it, its purpose is to deceive.”

Well, a recent paper by economists from MIT, ASU, and UCSD shows that complexity more generally appears to have deception as its primary purpose:

Economist George Akerlof has spent much of his celebrated career thinking about how trickery and deceit affect markets. His most famous insight, which won him the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics, is that when buyers and sellers have different information, lack of trust can cause markets to break down. In those models, no one actually ends up getting tricked — everyone is perfectly rational, so even the possibility of getting cheated causes them to stay prudently out of the market. But in his book “Phishing for Phools,” written with fellow Nobelist Robert Shiller, Akerlof goes one step further. Much of the actual, real-world economy, he says, involves trickery and deception.

………

A recent paper by economists Andra Ghent, Walter Torous and Rossen Valkanov may shed some light on the question. Ghent and her co-authors look at mortgage-backed securities, which figured prominently in the crisis. They try to measure how complex various products were, using measures like the number of pages in the prospectus, the number of tranches in the security and the number of different types of collateral.

That allowed the researchers to see whether more complex products fared better or worse in the years before the crisis. Using Bloomberg data, they look at private-label, mortgage-backed securities issued between 1999 and 2007. They then look forward in time, to see which products defaulted and which ones experienced more foreclosures in the mortgage pools that they used as collateral.

It turns out that complexity was a bad sign. More complex deals experienced higher default rates and more foreclosures on their collateral. So if you were an MBS buyer from 1999 to 2007, the rational thing to do would have been to demand a higher interest rate on a more complex security.

Except that didn’t happen. Ghent et al. found that complexity had no correlation with the yields on MBS. That means that although more complex products were riskier on average, buyers didn’t recognize that fact. The authors also carefully exclude the possibility that complex deals commanded higher prices because they were specially tailored to individual buyers’ needs — in fact, most products contained the same types of collateral, but the complex ones were just of lower quality.

………

Interestingly, Ghent and her coauthors find that credit-ratings companies tended to give higher grades to more complex products. That implied the credit raters were willing to trust issuers when figuring out what was actually in the products got too hard. Maybe it’s human nature to trust our counterparties more when things get too complicated. Or maybe the ratings companies’ well-known bad incentives took over when complexity and opacity made their misbehavior harder to observe.

I will go a step further than the economists do (45 page PDF), the words “fraud” “corruption” and “crime do not occur in the paper, and suggest that this complexity is present because of a deliberate and specific intent to deceive investors, and that the credit rating agencies were willfully blind to this because it made the money.

To paraphrase Paul Volker, no useful innovations have come from banks since the introduction of the automatic teller machine.

Reinstate the principle you can only buy insurance on things when you have a direct interest in their continued existence.

It’s a principle that was made law by the Marine Insurance Act of 1746, and worked until people decided that things like naked credit default swaps were an essential innovation.

Reinstate that.

Put derivatives at the back of the bankruptcy queue, not the front.

Put a Tobin tax on financial transactions.

Shut it down.

Shut it all down.

It’s a Self Licking Ice Cream Cone

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The DEA has decided to keep classifying Marijuana as a Schedule 1 Drug, which means that they claim that it has no therapeutic value.

It also means that a large portion of the DEA’s budget, the part that is driven by its anti-pot activities, remains safe.

How convenient:

For the fourth consecutive time, the Drug Enforcement Administration has denied a petition to lessen federal restrictions on the use of marijuana.

While recreational marijuana use is legal in four states and D.C., and medical applications of the drug have been approved in many more, under federal law, it remains a Schedule 1 controlled substance, which means it’s considered to have “no currently accepted medical use” and a “high potential for abuse.”

The gap between permissive state laws and a restrictive federal policy has become increasingly untenable in the minds of many doctors, patients, researchers, business owners and legislators.

For instance, last fall, a Brookings Institution report slammed the federal government for “stifling medical research” in the area of marijuana policy. As a Schedule 1 drug, it’s much harder for researchers to work with marijuana than with many other controlled substances. The American Academy of Pediatrics has called on the government to move marijuana into Schedule 2 to facilitate more research into medical uses.

Perhaps this determination should be made by an organization whose budget is not contingent on it remaining illegal.

Linkage

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Artificially induced buzzes in history:

Remember When I Suggested That Some Hillary Supporters Were a Bit ……… Hinky?

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Well, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell, who wants very much to be the next CIA Director, who recently endorsed Hillary Clinton, is calling for the assassination of Russians and Iranians in Syria:

Former acting CIA Director Michael Morell said in an interview Monday that U.S. policy in Syria should be to make Iran and Russia “pay a price” by arming local groups and instructing them to kill Iranian and Russian personnel in the country.

Morell was appearing on the Charlie Rose show on PBS in the wake of his publicly endorsing Hillary Clinton on the New York Times opinion pages.

Clinton has expressed support for increased military intervention in Syria against Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian government. Iran and Russia are backing Assad.

“What they need is to have the Russians and Iranians pay a little price,” Morell said. “When we were in Iraq, the Iranians were giving weapons to the Shia militia, who were killing American soldiers, right? The Iranians were making us pay a price. We need to make the Iranians pay a price in Syria. We need to make the Russians pay a price.”

Morell said the killing of Russians and Iranians should be undertaken “covertly, so you don’t tell the world about it, you don’t stand up at the Pentagon and say ‘we did this.’ But you make sure they know it in Moscow and Tehran.”

Morell also proposed that U.S. forces begin bombing Syrian government installations, including government offices, aircraft and presidential guard positions. The former acting CIA director said that he wanted to “scare Assad.” Morell clarified that he wasn’t actually calling for Assad’s assassination.

………

Morell’s endorsement of Clinton was quickly seen as a sign that he was interested in a role in a possible Clinton administration. He wrote that Clinton would be a “highly qualified commander in chief” and a “strong proponent of a more aggressive approach” to the conflict in Syria.

………

This weekend, Hillary Clinton touted Morell’s endorsement on her Twitter page:

“She will deliver on the most important duty of a president—keeping our nation safe.” —Michael Morell on Hillary https://t.co/zmI3BOCH9Y

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) August 7, 2016

Anyone can say that they endorse you, but the fact that you are touting the endorsement of this Fruitloop does engender confidence in your judgement.

When Donald F%$#ing Trump can make an argument that he is the peace candidate, you are doing something seriously wrong.

The Internet of Things Got Hacked Again, Things that go Buzz in the Night Edition

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In news of the coming tech utopia, a network enabled sexual aid has been hacked, and even in the unhacked condition, it sends personal data back to the manufacturer.

The Internet of Things That Can Be Hacked grows daily. Lightbulbs, trucks, and fridges all have computers inside them now, and all have been hacked by someone. But at least you don’t put those inside your body.

Two years ago, someone had the good idea to put a bluetooth connection inside a vibrator, and the We-Vibe 4 Plus was born. The vibrator can connect with a smartphone app that its makers say “allows couples to keep their flame ignited – together or apart”: that is, it can be controlled remotely, while, say, making a video call.

The consequences of a wrong number are left to reader’s imagination.

But at the Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas, two independent hackers from New Zealand, who go by the handles goldfisk and follower, revealed that the way the vibrator speaks with its controlling app isn’t really secure at all – making it possible to remotely seize control of the vibrator and activate it at will.

In their talk, Hacking the Internet of Vibrating Things, Follower argued that despite titters at the back of the room, the security of a sex toy should be taken seriously. “The company that makes this vibrator, Standard Innovation: They have over 2 million people using their devices, so what’s at stake is 2 million people.”

“A lot of people in the past have said it’s not really a serious issue,” he added, “but if you come back to the fact that we’re talking about people, unwanted activation of a vibrator is potentially sexual assault.”

Potentially worse still, the pair discovered that the app itself was phoning home, letting the manufacturer discover some very intimate information about users.

(emphasis mine)

I want no part of this brave new world.

Seriously? Boasting About an Endorsement from John f%$#ing Negroponte?

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It appears that the latest endorsement for Hillary Clinton from the “Guilty of Crimes Against Humanity” crowd is in, and her campaign is crowing about John Negroponte’s Endorsement, probably because Henry Kissinger was busy:

In her continuing tour of the dingier side of the 20th Century American diplomatic elite, Hillary Rodham Clinton picked up the endorsement on Wednesday of one John Negroponte. ………

 ………

 Well, that’s special, isn’t it? And what did Negroponte do while serving “in numerous diplomatic and national security positions starting in 1960”? I’m glad you asked.

 In the 1980s, he served as the U.S. ambassador to Honduras. In addition to (at best) covering for that country’s murderous autocrats, he also served the Reagan Administration by helping to turn Honduras into a staging area for American-trained death squads in places like El Salvador and Guatemala. (Remember, Eugene Hasenfus was flying out of a base in Honduras when he got shot down over Nicaragua, which is when the Iran-Contra criminal enterprise began to unravel.)………

 In any case, the essential Robert Parry has been dogging this story for nearly 40 years now. From In These Times:

Given the human rights records of the Honduran military and the Nicaraguan contras who set up shop in Honduras during Negroponte’s tenure as ambassador in the early ’80s, he will have no moral standing as a public official who repudiates abusive interrogation techniques and brutal counterinsurgency tactics. Indeed, some cynics might suggest that’s one of the reasons Bush picked him. Negroponte’s work in Honduras means, too, that he will come to his new job with a history of forwarding inaccurate intelligence to Washington and leaving out information that would have upset the upper echelon of the Reagan-Bush administration. For his part, Negroponte, who is now 65, has staunchly denied knowledge of “death squad” operations by the Honduran military in the ’80s.

 In 1983, in another move that helped the Honduran military and the contras, the Reagan-Bush administration closed down the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) office at the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, just as Honduras was emerging as an important base for cocaine transshipments to the United States. “Elements of the Honduran military were involved … in the protection of drug traffickers from 1980 on,” is how a Senate Foreign Relations investigative report, issued in 1989 by a subcommittee headed by Sen. John Kerry, put it. “These activities were reported to appropriate U.S. government officials throughout the period. Instead of moving decisively to close down the drug trafficking by stepping up the DEA presence in the country and using the foreign assistance the United States was extending to the Hondurans as a lever, the United States closed the DEA office in Tegucigalpa and appears to have ignored the issue.” It’s unclear what role Negroponte played in shutting down the DEA office in Honduras during his time as U.S. ambassador, but it is hard to imagine that a step of that significance could have occurred without at least his acquiescence.

 ………

 “Given what we know about the extent and nature of Honduran human rights abuses, to say that Mr. Negroponte was less than forthcoming in his responses to my questions is being generous,” said Dodd. “I was also troubled by Ambassador Negroponte’s unwillingness to admit that—as a consequence of other U.S. policy priorities—the U.S. Embassy, by acts of omissions, end[ed] up shading the truth about the extent and nature of ongoing human rights abuses in the 1980s. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights had no such reluctance in assigning blame to the Honduran government during its adjudication of a case brought against the government of Honduras [in 1987],” [Senator Christopher] Dodd said.

Hillary Clinton has been completely captured by they dysfunctional, immoral, and incompetent foreign policy consensus that has been mismanaging our foreign policy since the 1960s.

This The Best and the Brightest crap really needs to end.

It has produced nothing but death and misery and failure.

When You Manufacture Terrorism, You Create Terrorism

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In 2015, at a “Draw Muhammad” cartoon contest in (where else) Texas, 2 gunman opened fire, and were shot to death by police.

If you are wondering how they managed to plan this, wonder no more. Not only did the FBI know about it, the TBI was actively encouraging them so as to create a more media friendly arrest:

Days before an ISIS sympathizer attacked a cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, he received a text from an undercover FBI agent.

“Tear up Texas,” the agent messaged Elton Simpson days before he opened fire at the Draw Muhammad event, according to an affidavit (pdf) filed in federal court Thursday.

“U know what happened in Paris,” Simpson responded. “So that goes without saying… No need to be direct.”

That revelation comes amidst a national debate about the use of undercover officers and human sources in terrorism cases. Undercover sources are used in more than half of ISIS-related terror cases, according to statistics kept by the George Washington University Program on Extremism, and civil liberties advocates say some of those charged might not have escalated their behavior without those interventions.

“It would certainly be inappropriate for an FBI undercover agent or cooperating witness to provoke or inspire or urge a person to commit an act of violence,” Michael German, a former FBI agent now at the Brennan Center for Justice, told The Daily Beast. “I could imagine an undercover agent thinking it was just the hyperbolic rhetoric they are participating in, and it wasn’t an intent to go to Texas and do harm.

………

Press officers for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Ohio, the Cleveland FBI Office, and the Department of Justice declined to comment beyond the affidavit. FBI spokeswoman Carol Cratty hung up on The Daily Beast after being asked about the “tear up Texas” text.

But shortly after that exchange, Simpson and his accomplice, Nadir Soofi, drove up to the contest and opened fire on police officers, injuring one of them slightly. Both men were killed in the altercation, but Hendricks would remain free for another year.

Hendricks’s arrest means that every major U.S. attack was linked to FBI investigation before it happened, Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told The Daily Beast.

This is not just an organization doing its job well, this is an organization actively sabotaging its own efforts in an attempt to generate bogus statistics.

The FBI truly is the misbegotten child of J. Edgar Hoover, and it is completely broken.

A Bit of Excitement Today

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Walking to work from the Metro, there was a veritable fleet of trucks parked around the Hippodrome theater.
It turns out that they were filming some scenes from the Kevin Spacey series House of Cards.
They were setting up when I came into work, and shutting down when I was on my way home.

Posted via mobile.

My Money Is This Being the NSA

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A highly sophisticated malware has been discovered more than 5 years after its release into the wild.

It’s level of sophistication indicates that it was produced by a state actor:

Security experts have discovered a malware platform that’s so advanced in its design and execution that it could probably have been developed only with the active support of a nation-state.

The malware—known alternatively as “ProjectSauron” by researchers from Kaspersky Lab and “Remsec” by their counterparts from Symantec—has been active since at least 2011 and has been discovered on 30 or so targets. Its ability to operate undetected for five years is a testament to its creators, who clearly studied other state-sponsored hacking groups in an attempt to replicate their advances and avoid their mistakes. State-sponsored groups have been responsible for malware like the Stuxnet- or National Security Agency-linked Flame, Duqu, and Regin. Much of ProjectSauron resides solely in computer memory and was written in the form of Binary Large Objects, making it hard to detect using antivirus.

Because of the way the software was written, clues left behind by ProjectSauron in so-called software artifacts are unique to each of its targets. That means that clues collected from one infection don’t help researchers uncover new infections. Unlike many malware operations that reuse servers, domain names, or IP addresses for command and control channels, the people behind ProjectSauron chose a different one for almost every target.

 “The attackers clearly understand that we as researchers are always looking for patterns,” Kaspersky researchers wrote in a report published Monday. “Remove the patterns and the operation will be harder to discover. We are aware of more than 30 organizations attacked, but we are sure that this is just a tiny tip of the iceberg.” Symantec researchers, in a report of their own, said they were aware of seven organizations infected.

 Jumping air gaps

 Part of what makes ProjectSauron so impressive is its ability to collect data from computers considered so sensitive by their operators that they have no Internet connection. To do this, the malware uses specially prepared USB storage drives that have a virtual file system that isn’t viewable by the Windows operating system. To infected computers, the removable drives appear to be approved devices, but behind the scenes are several hundred megabytes reserved for storing data that is kept on the “air-gapped” machines. The arrangement works even against computers in which data-loss prevention software blocks the use of unknown USB drives.

………

The main purpose of the malware platform was to obtain passwords, cryptographic keys, configuration files, and IP addresses of the key servers related to any encryption software that was in use. Infected groups include government agencies, scientific research centers, military organizations, telecommunication providers, and financial institutions in Russia, Iran, Rwanda, China, Sweden, Belgium, and possibly in Italian-speaking countries.

I don’t know the specific targets, but the locations appear top indicate that the source of the hack is somewhere in the Fort Mead-DC-Langley axis.

The Term Here is Eating Our Seed Corn

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It appears that Colony Collapse Disorder, which has been decimating bees across the nation, is not just an issue with a specific type of insecticide, but a more general consequence of chemical intensive farming:

As we’ve written before, the mysterious mass die-off of honey bees that pollinate $30 billion worth of crops in the US has so decimated America’s apis mellifera population that one bad winter could leave fields fallow. Now, a new study has pinpointed some of the probable causes of bee deaths and the rather scary results show that averting beemageddon will be much more difficult than previously thought.

Scientists had struggled to find the trigger for so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that has wiped out an estimated 10 million beehives, worth $2 billion, over the past six years. Suspects have included pesticides, disease-bearing parasites and poor nutrition. But in a first-of-its-kind study published today in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists at the University of Maryland and the US Department of Agriculture have identified a witch’s brew of pesticides and fungicides contaminating pollen that bees collect to feed their hives. The findings break new ground on why large numbers of bees are dying though they do not identify the specific cause of CCD, where an entire beehive dies at once.

 When researchers collected pollen from hives on the east coast pollinating cranberry, watermelon and other crops and fed it to healthy bees, those bees showed a significant decline in their ability to resist infection by a parasite called Nosema ceranae. The parasite has been implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder though scientists took pains to point out that their findings do not directly link the pesticides to CCD. The pollen was contaminated on average with nine different pesticides and fungicides though scientists discovered 21 agricultural chemicals in one sample. Scientists identified eight ag chemicals associated with increased risk of infection by the parasite.

Most disturbing, bees that ate pollen contaminated with fungicides were three times as likely to be infected by the parasite. Widely used, fungicides had been thought to be harmless for bees as they’re designed to kill fungus, not insects, on crops like apples.

“There’s growing evidence that fungicides may be affecting the bees on their own and I think what it highlights is a need to reassess how we label these agricultural chemicals,” Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the study’s lead author, told Quartz.

This is going to get ugly, and I expect to see a collapse of some bee pollinated crops, most likely almonds, before we actually start applying some common sense regulation to the industry.

This Says Something Interesting About American Management

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Though I haven’t quite figured out what.

The CIA has released a WWII manual on sabotage, and it appears to describe life in modern American businesses frighteningly accurately:

In 1944, the CIA’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), distributed a secret pamphlet that was intended as a guidebook to citizens living in Axis nations who were sympathetic to the Allies.

The “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” declassified in 2008 and available on the CIA’s website, provided instructions for how everyday people could help the Allies weaken their country by reducing production in factories, offices, and transportation lines. 

………

See if any of those listed below — quoted but abridged — remind you of your boss, colleagues, or even yourself.

Organizations and Conferences 

  • Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
  • Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.
  • When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committee as large as possible — never less than five.
  • Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
  • Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
  • Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
  • Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable”and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.

Managers 

  • In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers.
  • Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw.
  • To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions.
  • Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
  • Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, pay checks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.

Employees

  • Work slowly.
  • Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can.
  • Do your work poorly and blame it on bad tools, machinery, or equipment. Complain that these things are preventing you from doing your job right.
  • Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skillful worker.

I’m sure that my dad, who spent much of his professional life as a consultant in management and organization, is familiar with these hallmarks of a dysfunctional organization.

I’m also wondering just how surprised he is that these behaviors are indistinguishable from deliberate sabotage.

Corbyn Just Scored Some Major Wins

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He just won a court case over voting rights for members and his supporters slate swept the elections for Labour’s executive committee:

Jeremy Corbyn has consolidated his grip on the Labour party after he won the first round of the latest high court battle over the rules of the leadership contest – and his supporters swept the board in elections to the party’s ruling National Executive Committee.

After another day of twists and turns in the fierce battle for the future of the party, some of Corbyn’s critics among Labour MPs were privately saying his position now appeared unassailable.

The next step by the Blairites and their ilk will be to actively sabotage the next election, because they will keep the Tories in power forever to keep their privileged positions within the party.

Cyber Currencies’ Fatal flaw

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You can never be sure that someone won’t come after your assets via the blockchain.

When you realize that almost every square inch of the earth (Antarctica excepted) was stolen at some point, and the same applies to most assets in the modern world.

With Bitcoin and its ilk, there is no statute of limitations:

An interesting little observation by Izzy Kaminska over in the FT about a problem that Bitcoin faces. It’s a legal problem that leads to an economic one. And the problem Bitcoin faces is one that is based upon the very existence of the blockchain itself. There’s a good reason that all functioning economic systems have something akin to a market ouvert rule, or something like squatters’ rights. Note that I say something like, not exactly either of those rules. For example, if you find money in the street then you can’t and shouldn’t just keep it. But if you hand it in to the police, no one then claims if for some period of time, then it does become yours. No, you can’t just move into someone elses’ house and insist that it belongs to you. But move in for long enough (the time period varies) and no one complains or does anything and it becomes yours. You don’t get title when you buy stolen goods. But something you bought in good faith, in an open marketplace, does become yours eventually. Even if it had been stolen some point further down the ownership chain.

 The reason for these rules, and yes they vary across places and concerning different specific items, is that at some point we’ve got to give up on historic unfairnesses and or illegalities and just get on with the current allocation of scarce resources. We just don’t want to wall off something that may or may not have been stolen in, say, 1820, from being put to use today. We almost certainly would want to make sure that something stolen yesterday was returned to its rightful owner. But at some point between those two dates we’ve got to have a cut off point.

………

And that’s where Bitcoin has the problem, in that very existence of the blockchain:

The first relates to the ongoing legal recourse rights of Bitfinex victims. Even though they may have lost their right to pursue Bitfinex for compensation, they are still going to be entitled to track the funds across the blockchain to seek recourse from whomsoever receives the bitcoins in their accounts. That’s good news for victims, but mostly likely very bad news for bitcoin’s fungible state and thus its status as a medium of exchange.

Just one successful claim by a victim who tracks his funds to an identifiable third party, and the precedent is set. Any exchanges dealing with bitcoin in a legitimate capacity would from then on be inclined to do much stronger due diligence on whether the bitcoins being deposited in their system were connected to ill-gotten gains. This in turn would open the door to the black-listing of funds that can not prove they were originated honestly via legitimate earnings.

Of course, people should not steal things. And yet for a currency to work it has to be possible to take the currency at its face value. Thus it may well be that the bank robber paid you for his beer with stolen money but you got it fair and square and thus the bank doesn’t get it back as and when they find out. Another way to put this is that the crime dies with the criminal. And yet the blockchain upends all of that. Because every transaction which any one bitcoin has been involved in is traceable.

The problem with cyber currencies and the rest of the internet enabled Libertarian-Utopian is that they believe that computer code developed over a few months can somehow trump contract law and record keeping that has been developed over the past 1000+ years.

Ask yourself, what happens if you have a fruit tree with branches that cross a property line.  Who owns the fruit on those branches?

It is very complicated.

In some places, the branches, and fruit, belong to the property owner over whose property it extends.

In others, it belongs to the property owner of the location of the trunk, but  the owner of the property can prune branches over their yard and dig up roots under the yard.

In some places, it belongs to one person when it on the branch, and another when the fruit falls.

In some places, a landowner can sue for trespass for branches over their yard.

This is just a fruit tree.

Recording property transactions are far more significant, and potentially far more complex, and we saw what happened when the banks decided to create MERS to “streamline” fraud real estate transactions.

I’m an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit, * but is clear to me that the people behind these efforts have only the vaguest idea of how society works, and how long it took to get society works.

*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

Tweet of the Day

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The anti-Trump surprise candidate is a former CIA agent and Goldman Sachs guy who does TED talks, he’s going to take votes away from HIllary

— Will Menaker (@willmenaker) August 8, 2016

Seriously, for all the big deal that people are making about his candidacy today, it’s about as useful as tits on a bull.

Note also that Evan McMullin has already dropped his time with the Vampire Squid from his online resume ……… Like that’s gonna make a difference.

H/t  naked capitalism