Dispatches from District 48
Posts tagged ‘security’
Some people's RSS feed got a bunch of random comments from 4 years ago in them today. Not sure why. Been tweaking around with the site and site security, but can't imagine what caused it. Hopefully it was a one-time WordPress brain-fart, because I am really not in the mood to debug some messy problem right now.
So, why do we have all these "dirty" coal plants? Market failure? Industry greed? Nope -- Carter-era government policy. For you younger folks, here is a law you may have never heard of:
The Powerplant and Industrial Fuel Use Act (FUA) was passed in 1978 in response to concerns over national energy security. The 1973 oil crisis and the natural gas curtailments of the mid 1970s contributed to concerns about U.S. supplies of oil and natural gas. The FUA restricted construction of power plants using oil or natural gas as a primary fuel and encouraged the use of coal, nuclear energy and other alternative fuels. It also restricted the industrial use of oil and natural gas in large boilers.**
In other words, all new fossil fuel-powered boilers had to be coal-fired (which in a year or so, after Three Mile Island, translated to all new boilers since nuclear was essentially eliminated as an option). Yes, this may seem odd to us in an era of so much environmental concern over coal, but something coal opponents don't tell you is that many of the exact same left-liberal-government-top-down-energy-policy types that oppose coal today lobbied hard for the above law several decades ago. Here is a simplified timeline:
1. Government energy policy sets price controls that create artificial shortages of oil and gas
2. Government-created shortages of oil and gas lead to this law, with government demanding that all new fossil fuel-powered electric plants and boilers be coal powered.
3. Government mandates on coal use create environmental concerns, which lead to proposals for taxes and bans on coal power.
4. The need for government action against coal is obviated by a resurgence of oil and gas supply once government controls were removed. However, in response, government beings to consider strong controls on expansion in oil and gas production (e.g. fracking limits).
** I got involved with this because I worked in an oil refinery in the 1980's. We had to get special exemptions to run our new boilers on various petroleum products (basically byproducts and waste products of the refining process). Without these, the law would have required we bring in coal to run our oil refinery furnaces.
Breaking news from California:
The Workers' Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau (WCIRB) made it official and submitted a mid-year filing for a 9.1% increase in the pure premium advisory rate that Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones approved less than six months ago. The proposed July 1 increase follows the 37% increase that Jones approved for January 1 that was hidden by the change in benchmarks for pure premium rates that was made at his request....
The Bureau insists that an increase of this magnitude is necessary to combat the continued deterioration in the claims experience, as well as an uptick in claim frequency in the 2010 accident year. Much of the increase will also go to pay for the higher loss adjustment expenses carriers are incurring fighting liens and litigating permanent disability claims. Projected ALAE costs are up to $11,403 per indemnity claim for the 2011 accident year compared to $10,698 the year before.
A 9.1% increase a half year after a 37% increase is just crazy. This tends to confirm three issues I have written about before:
This is an interesting perspective on why Blackberry / RIM may not be dead yet. After a weekend trying to futz with iPhone access to Gmail and a failed iPhone OS upgrade, I am sympathetic to the enterprise argument that modern iOS and Android smart phones may be lacking in the security and stability that corporations want. There is still an enterprise market out there -- after all, IBM completely left most of the sexy and high-profile consumer markets but still does about hundred billion in sales each year at a respectable 15% profit margin.
If Medicare is really an insurance program, than as I wrote last week, the premiums are absurdly low. And this isn't even a rich-poor transfer issue - the premiums are too low for everyone. See the bar chart about halfway down on this page at the NY Times. Here is a screenshot:
Take Social Security first. Taxes come fairly close to covering benefits, with some rich-poor redistribution. These numbers look sensible (leaving aside implied annual returns on investment and whether the government should be running a forced retirement program at all) -- the main reason social security is bankrupts is that in the years when premiums exceeded benefits, Congress raided and spent the funds on unrelated things.
Medicare, though, is a huge problem. Even for high income folks, premiums cover only 43% of the expected benefits (I am not sure how they treat present values and such, but again lets leave that aside, I don't think it affects the underlying point). Assuming we end up with some rich-poor transfer, it looks to me that premiums are low by a factor of three.
Everyone seems to think Medicare is a great deal. Of course it feels that way -- premiums are only covering a third of the costs. There is no way we can have intelligent debate on these programs when the price signals are corrupted. Its time to triple Medicare premiums.
The most frequent customer service fail we have in our company is when an employee, thinking they are doing me some kind of favor, go nuts on a customer trying to enforce some trivial rule or trying to collect the last $5 our company might be owed.
It is astronomically hard to train people to use their judgement the same way I would in a customer situation. This is particularly true when ego gets involved, when the employee feels like they have somehow taken a ego hit, with the customer "winning" and them "losing." I once had an employee drive out of the park we were operating and chase a woman down the road over a misunderstanding about whether $5 had been paid correctly. Incredible. Unfortunately, I have found no amount of training can fix judgement this bad, and the only thing I know how to do is fire them as fast as possible so they can't do any more harm.
I have always supposed this over-zealousness was a general human train, but in certain am-I-crazy moments, I wonder if somehow I am preferentially selecting for this kind of nuttiness. Apparently not:
A Hawaii couple’s 3-year-old daughter was taken away from them for 18 hours after they were arrested for forgetting to a pay for two $5 sandwiches.
“This is unreal this could happen to a family like ours,” Nicole Leszczynski told Hawaii’s KHON.
The outing-turned-nightmare happened Wednesday while the family was shopping at a local Safeway.
“We walked a long way to the grocery store and I was feeling faint, dizzy, like I needed to eat something so we decided to pick up some sandwiches and eat them while we were shopping,” Leszczynski told the news station.
Leszczynski, who is 30-weeks pregnant, her husband, Marcin, and daughter Zophia bought $50 worth of groceries — but forgot about their two chicken salad sandwiches.
“It was a complete distraction, distracted parent moment,” Leszczynski told KHON.
As the family left, they were stopped by store security, who asked for their receipt.
“I offered to pay, we had the cash. We just bought the groceries,” Leszczynski told the station.
Instead, the expectant mother told KHON that the Safeway manager called police. They were taken to the main Honolulu police station where they were booked for fourth degree theft. Then Zophia was taken into custody by Child Protective Services.
I will say that I think the public agencies we replace in operating these parks are generally worse at this than we are, simply because so many of their employees have law enforcement certifications. Dealing with customer service issues using law enforcement officers is often a recipe for bad outcomes.
Transparency and accountability are always loved by those out of power but seldom by those in power. Thus we hear a lot about them on the campaign trail, and then suddenly, once folks are in office, silence. Two examples today.
First, this unbelievably anti-democratic and egregious proposal
A proposed rule to the Freedom of Information Act would allow federal agencies to tell people requesting certain law-enforcement or national security documents that records don't exist—even when they do.
Under current FOIA practice, the government may withhold information and issue what's known as a Glomar denial that says it can neither confirm nor deny the existence of records.
The new proposal—part of a lengthy rule revision by the Department of Justice—would direct government agencies to "respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist."
The second story is in the same spirit, of using secrecy to avoid scrutiny and accountability
Sometime in 2012, I will begin the ninth year of my life under an FBI gag order, which began when I received what is known as a national security letter at the small Internet service provider I owned. On that day in 2004 (the exact date is redacted from court papers, so I can’t reveal it), an FBI agent came to my office and handed me a letter. It demanded that I turn over information about one of my clients and forbade me from telling “any person” that the government had approached me....
For years, the government implausibly claimed that if I were able to identify myself as the plaintiff in the case, irreparable damage to national security would result. But I did not believe then, nor do I believe now, that the FBI’s gag order was motivated by legitimate national security concerns. It was motivated by a desire to insulate the FBI from public criticism and oversight.
I am sympathetic to the OWS hatred for bailouts and crony capitalism, but struggle to understand how they intend to fix the consequences of the exercise of government power in the private world with yet more exercise of government power in the private world.
Apropos of very little, I found this bit from Matt Taibi funny (emphasis added)
1. Break up the monopolies. The so-called "Too Big to Fail" financial companies – now sometimes called by the more accurate term "Systemically Dangerous Institutions" – are a direct threat to national security. They are above the law and above market consequence, making them more dangerous and unaccountable than a thousand mafias combined. There are about 20 such firms in America, and they need to be dismantled
I am pretty sure that, by definition, a single industry cannot have 20 monopolies.
Though I share the same concern, my solution is to just let them fail. Right now, the cost of capital for these large companies is lower than the cost of capital for smaller companies because, even though many of them have far worse balance sheets than smaller banks, investors feel they have too big to fail protection. Let a few fail and have the cost of capital shoot up for larger companies and you can be pretty damn sure they market itself will break up these companies.
In some ways it reminds me of the market premium given in the 1960's to multi-industry conglomerates like ITT. When the capital markets made their cost of capital low, everyone tried to copy their conglomerate strategies. When these strategies started failing and companies like RJ Reynolds found their diversification into shipping and shower curtains was a business disaster, capital dried up for these Frankenstein monsters and most of them were broken up. All without a hint of government intervention, either to save them or kill them.
Its telling that no one on the Left or with OWS who gives this advice for financial institutions takes their own advice with, say, auto companies. GM should have failed and likely been broken up as well.
I simply cannot believe that the President of the US just ordered an American citizen killed, without trial or due process, and the country just yawns. And in some cases, cheered. Are we really going to make the Fifth Amendment, along with the Fourth, the Ninth, and the Tenth, another "just kidding" passage? Its amazing that the same kids that marched against Nixon's abuse of power have decided this is perfectly OK.
I suppose I expect Republicans to pile on for this kind of security-state garbage, but an awful lot of Democrats are sitting on their hands as well, just because it was their guy in the Oval office pulling the trigger. Kudos to a few souls on the left like Glenn Greenwald and Kevin Drum who, however subdued in comparison to their reaction had it been Bush, called out their party's leader for this bit of horror. Greenwald makes the point to fellow Lefties - how would you feel if Rick Perry or Michelle Bachman had this power?
This latter is a good test I ask folks all the time. Those who advocate for statist powers generally imagine folks like themselves wielding these powers. But how realistic is that in a Democracy where power shifts every 8-10 years or so? I ask folks all the time to picture their worst political enemy, and then imagine that person with the power they advocate.
This is like the third one in just a few weeks:
Solyndra, a major manufacturer of solar technology in Fremont, has shut its doors, according to employees at the campus.
"I was told by a security guard to get my [stuff] and leave," one employee said. The company employs a little more than 1,000 employees worldwide, according to its website....
Solyndra was touted by the Obama administration as a prime example of how green technology could deliver jobs. The President visited the facility in May of last year and said "it is just a testament to American ingenuity and dynamism and the fact that we continue to have the best universities in the world, the best technology in the world, and most importantly the best workers in the world. And you guys all represent that. "
The federal government offered $535 million in low cost loan guarantees from the Department of Energy. NBC Bay Area has contacted the White House asking for a statement.
Beyond the whole green jobs boondoggle, trying to compete at low-cost manufacturing of a commodity product in California of all places is simply insane.
Via Kevin Drum, from Dylan Matthews
Second, the president should do more to help the American worker. He should establish a jobs program. Do the simple math: We are spending more than $110 billion annually in Afghanistan. Stop it. Or scale it back to the sort of covert operations and drone war that is warranted. Savings? Perhaps about $100 billion—per year. Use that money to create up to 5 million jobs at $20,000 each....Just as FDR did during the Great Depression, put these Americans to work in states, counties, schools, parks.
Even Drum considers this unrealistic, though for the wrong reasons (i.e. the evil Republicans in the House would never let us do it). I have a series of thoughts on this
By the way, I think wars are a total economic waste and drag on the nation. Dedicating scarce resources to blowing stuff up is the worst possible use of capital. However, diverting this into politically correct, politician-selected make-work projects is not really a lot better.
From Radley Balko, this is just staggering:
Federal employees’ job security is so great that workers in many agencies are more likely to die of natural causes than get laid off or fired, a USA TODAY analysis finds.
Death — rather than poor performance, misconduct or layoffs — is the primary threat to job security at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Small Business Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Office of Management and Budget and a dozen other federal operations.
The federal government fired 0.55% of its workers in the budget year that ended Sept. 30 — 11,668 employees in its 2.1 million workforce. Research shows that the private sector fires about 3% of workers annually for poor performance . . .
The 1,800-employee Federal Communications Commission and the 1,200-employee Federal Trade Commission didn’t lay off or fire a single employee last year. The SBA had no layoffs, six firings and 17 deaths in its 4,000-employee workforce.
When job security is at a premium, the federal government remains the place to work for those who want to avoid losing a job. The job security rate for all federal workers was 99.43% last year and nearly 100% for those on the job more than a few years . . .
White-collar federal workers have almost total job security after a few years on the job. Last year, the government fired none of its 3,000 meteorologists, 2,500 health insurance administrators, 1,000 optometrists, 800 historians or 500 industrial property managers.
The nearly half-million federal employees earning $100,000 or more enjoyed a 99.82% job security rate in 2010. Only 27 of 35,000 federal attorneys were fired last year. None was laid off.
Forgetting for a minute the adverse selection and incentive problems from preferentially attracting folks who want to work in an environment without any accountability for performance, how can an institution that is running $1 trillion over budget not have any layoff either?
I want bother to except this, you really need to see the post in its entirety. Popehat looks at 98 pages of Colorado state regulations on day care centers. The breadth and depth of the regulations, down to exactly how many of what type blocks kids should have to play with, is just amazing.
This is job security for life for a bunch of bureaucrats. If we require all this stuff, we need regular reporting don't we, on compliance. And inspections. And a detailed licensing and application process. And ten years from now, when all the day care centers are closed or cost too much, we will need extensive government programs to provide subsidized day care.
I am really sorry I read George Will's column this morning. It is to depressing for words. He discusses how Congress has, to my eye, un-Constitutionally delegated legislative power to the IPAB, an unaccountable organization that can basically write any law it wants regarding health care as long as it nominally can be justified as affecting costs (the only power Congress has is to vote such laws down, and it can only do so if it substitutes laws with equivalent cost savings).
Just to give one a flavor of just how undemocratic the folks were who crafted Obamacare, check this provision out:
Any resolution to abolish the IPAB must pass both houses of Congress. And no such resolution can be introduced before 2017 or after Feb. 1, 2017, and must be enacted by Aug. 15 of that year. And if passed, it cannot take effect until 2020. Defenders of all this audaciously call it a “fast track†process for considering termination of IPAB. It is, however, transparently designed to permanently entrench IPAB — never mind the principle that one Congress cannot by statute bind another Congress from altering that statute.
So, for the rest of eternity, there is theoretically only a single 31-day window six years hence when this board can be abolished. Of course, I am not sure future Congresses can be bound in this way, but it shows you the heart of a dictator possessed by the folks who wrote this law.
By the way, not always a big fan of Justice Scalia, but there is little doubt he is smart and this dissent written 12 years ago certainly was prescient
“I anticipate that Congress will find delegation of its lawmaking powers much more attractive in the future. . . . I foresee all manner of ‘expert’ bodies, insulated from the political process, to which Congress will delegate various portions of its lawmaking responsibility. How tempting to create an expert Medical Commission . . . to dispose of such thorny, ‘no-win’ political issues as the withholding of life-support systems in federally funded hospitals.â€
Postscript: Could the IPAB pass nanny-type rules under the justification they could reduce health care expenditures? For example, what if the IPAB said that mandatory motorcycle helmets would reduce doctor spending, would that automatically become law? How about limits on salt or fatty foods? Many current dystopic novels begin with growth in government power, sometimes of one agency, due to security fears over terrorism (e.g, the movie V). I bet I could write a good one with the core being the IPAB.
National security letters strike me as one of the worst Constitutional abuses to come out of the last 10 years, which is saying a lot given the post-9/11 theories of executive authority from torture to indefinite detention to even ordering people killed.
The national security letters deserve particular scrutiny because they evade the Fourth Amendment while building in a prior restraint on speech that prevents recipients from challenging the letters or even complaining about them. This is self-sustaining policy -- ie policy that prevents the dissemination of information that might prove it is a threat or a failure -- at its worst.
The Justice Department's inspector general revealed on March 9 that the FBI has been systematically abusing one of the most controversial provisions of the USA Patriot Act: the expanded power to issue "national security letters." It no doubt surprised most Americans to learn that between 2003 and 2005 the FBI issued more than 140,000 specific demands under this provision -- demands issued without a showing of probable cause or prior judicial approval -- to obtain potentially sensitive information about U.S. citizens and residents. It did not, however, come as any surprise to me.
Three years ago, I received a national security letter (NSL) in my capacity as the president of a small Internet access and consulting business. The letter ordered me to provide sensitive information about one of my clients. There was no indication that a judge had reviewed or approved the letter, and it turned out that none had. The letter came with a gag provision that prohibited me from telling anyone, including my client, that the FBI was seeking this information. Based on the context of the demand -- a context that the FBI still won't let me discuss publicly -- I suspected that the FBI was abusing its power and that the letter sought information to which the FBI was not entitled.
Anyone want to bet how many of these things really are national security related, and how many are related to other investigations (particularly drugs)?
There are zillions of people involved in these major investigations. There is no good argument against adding one more who is in on the secret - ie a judge - and a lot of reasons to do so.
This soooo reminds me of Dave Barry's Interview years ago with reason.
The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office busted two guys -- one of whom was an elementary school music teacher -- last month who allegedly used Craigslist to try and have sex with a dog, and the sheriff seems to think it's becoming a trend -- despite it only happening once.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio earlier this week wrote a letter to Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster alerting him of his office's findings and advising him to re-examine security policies on the website to make sure people don't use it to coordinate sex with animals -- again, despite it only happening one time that the sheriff knows about.
Here is the quote from Barry's interview: And here is my post on it
John wrote about it and he got into the usual thing where he immediately got to the question of whether or not you can have sex with dogs. The argument was that if it wasn't illegal to have sex with dogs, naturally people would have sex with dogs. That argument always sets my teeth right on edge....
I got a few letters, mostly pretty nice. One or two letters saying, "Here’s why it wouldn’t work to be a libertarian, because people will have sex with dogs." Arguments like, "Nobody would educate the kids." People say, "Of course you have to have public education because otherwise nobody would send their kids to school." And you’d have to say, "Would you not send your kids to school? Would you not educate them?" "Well, no. I would. But all those other people would be having sex with dogs."
I have to agree with Glen Reynolds that this is an awesome quote, from a member of the teacher's union in Denver:
That’s your problem. You’re an entrepreneur, so you don’t work. You don’t know what work is until you get into an educational area.
Yep, some day I will have to stop loafing around and take on a brutal assistant principal job somewhere. All I have to worry about is that every dollar I own (and more) is invested in my business and could disappear at any time if I make a mistake. Thank God I don't have to sit around all day worrying whether the doctor that hands out no-questions-asked disability rulings will still be practicing when I am 45 and ready to retire.
I call this the "Dallas / Dynasty" perception of business, that businessmen just grab a phone call or two, go to a power lunch, and then head home to the mansion.
Update: Apparently this is a common misconception about entrepeneurs
The average number of working hours per week of a successful starting entrepreneur is seventy. This catches the typical American dreamer by surprise.
Nor do teachers spend all of their time at school in the classroom. In fact, teachers spend fewer hours actually instructing students than many recognize. Stanford's Terry Moe worked with data straight from the nation's largest teacher union's own data - and found that the average teacher in a department setting (that is, where students have different teachers for different subjects) was in the classroom for fewer than 3.9 hours out of the 7.3 hours at school each day.
With several hours set aside at school for course-planning and grading, it strains plausibility that on average teachers must spend more hours working at home than do other professionals.
Not to mention, of course, summer vacation, Christmas break, spring break, fall break.... Oh, and the fact that they have lifetime job security because in public schools they can't be fired for even the most egregious incompetance
Here is the next bit of news I bet we will hear: One of the victims or his/her families will sue Safeway, whose only involvement in the crime was that it had offered the parking lot as a location for Ms. Giffords constituent meeting. Increasingly, though, the tort system is not about justice, but about finding deep pockets somehow tangentially connected to a tragedy. I will bet that some lawyer right now is crafting a suit based on Safeway's inadequate security, poor judgement in allowing the meeting on their property, failure to warn customers of the potential dangers of attending such a political meeting, etc. etc.
One aspect of the TSA debate I find hilarious as a libertarian is that we get to see yet another example of partisans switching sides on an issues based on whose team is in the White House. Since when have Republicans had this deeply held concern about liberty and privacy vs. security against terrorism. And now leftie Kevin Drum steps up to say that all the extract screening makes sense (to my college roommate Brink Lindsey: Sorry, but the whole liberaltarian thing is a myth. When in power, they seem to act just as authoritarian on social and civil rights issues as Conservatives).
Anyway, Drum is certainly not full-bore backing the TSA, but he does write
I hate the TSA screening process. Everyone hates the TSA screening process. You'd be crazy not to. It's intrusive, annoying, and time-wasting. It treats us all like common criminals even though most of us are just ordinary schlubs trying to get on a plane and go somewhere.
But guess what? The fact that you personally are annoyed "” you! an educated white-collar professional! "” doesn't mean that the process is idiotic. I've heard it called "security theater" so many times I'd be rich if I had a nickel for each time it popped up in my browser, but although the anti-TSA rants are often cathartic and amusing, they've never made much sense to me. All the crap that TSA goes through actually seems pretty clearly directed at improving the security of air travel.
The point is not, as implied by Drum, that current TSA screening isn't protection against certain types of threats. Let's be generous and assume that the TSA's screening, generally concocted in a barn-door approach after someone tries a particular approach, is effective at catching the threats it is designed to catch.
The point is that nearly anyone with a room temperature IQ can think of 20 ways to attack an airplane that is not covered by the screening. If there are, say, a hundred imaginable threats, how much privacy do you want to give up to protect yourself from 35 of them?
For example, you know what is in the cargo hold below your seat? The US Mail. You know how much screening is performed on the US Mail? Zero. How hard would it be to wire up a package with a bomb and an altimeter, or perhaps just a noise sensor, and send it off airmail. They screen the crap out of your bags and body and then throw them on the plane right next to a bunch of anonymous, unscrutinized cargo. And that is just one example.
Private companies often come running to the government to protect themselves from competition. Sometimes they are successful, and get government licensing and certification requirements that help create barriers to entry that protect incumbents (if incumbents are lucky, they will actually get to control the licensing and certification board and testing process).
But whether or note private companies have the political muscle to get this kind of protection, the government almost always protects itself whenever it embarks on any sort of quasi-commercial enterprise. The ban on first class mail delivery competition is one example (as an aside, when email began making an end run around this ban, the USPS actually made a [fortunately failed] play to be the monopoly email provider). In Denver, there was a story a while back that after they built a new toll road, they added traffic lights and lowered the speed limit on a parallel free road to drive more people to the toll road.
Carpe Diem brings another example:
"When the old arena for the Orlando Magic opened 21 years ago, it was common for Parramore neighborhood residents who lived nearby to charge Magic fans and concert-goers to park on their property. But five weeks ago, the Orlando City Council approved standards that will likely keep most Parramore homeowners from profiting on parking near the Orlando Magic's new $480 million Amway Center (pictured above).
Among other things, property owners must pay a $275 application fee and provide a business tax receipt. Lots must have an attendant, signs, proper lighting and a paved, gravel or grass surface free of potholes or ruts. City officials also recommend hiring security. Even when all those requirements are met, temporary parking lots are allowed only during an event expected to draw at least 5,000 attendees. So far, five applications have been approved, but all are for large properties such as churches, not homeowners.
The city, meanwhile, has doubled its event-parking rate to $20 at the two garages closest to the Amway Center; elsewhere, event parking at city garages and lots is $10."
The last sentence explains the first two. They are trying to charge an above market price for parking, so must constrain supply to avoid being undercut.
Everyone seems to know who Gloria Allred is, though I have never heard of her. Apparently she is opposed to Meg Whitman getting elected (I am not even sure - is Whitman running for Senator or Governor?). But her approach is weird. She attacks Whitman for not identifying and firing an illegal immigrant fast enough. There is no way for this accusation to be true given the timeline Allred outlines unless Ms. Whitman's illegal immigrant maid at some point farbricated or falsified documents. In specific, Allred is claiming Whitman did not act fast enough when the Feds sent her a letter saying there was a problem with her maid's social security number. Implicit in all this is that Whitman's maid must have fabricated documentation and as a minimum provided a false or stolen social security number.
OK, all normal team pepsi - team coke political BS, except for this: Whitman's maid is Allred's legal client. Allred, in order to publicly score points on Whitman, is hanging her own client out to dry by as much as admitting her client engaged in identity theft. The maid's lawyer is complaining that her client was not fired fast enough. Unbelievable. Is this the true state of legal ethics today? And not a mention of this obvious ethical issue in the AP story.
I had not realized that some Federal employees did not have to participate in Social Security. Intriguingly, this fact was raised by people who were defending government pay as not being excessive -- they said something like, "well, some workers don't even get Social Security." Via Bryan Caplan
Some government employees don't participate in Social Security. How does that change the benefits picture?
[T]hat's irrelevant because they're neither paying nor receiving benefits. If you follow Social Security, you know it pays a low rate of return... [N]ot to participate in Social Security is actually a benefit, because they're keeping more.
I agree. Not participating in Social Security is a huge benefit. The implicit return on "premiums" paid by you and your employer is typically below zero. In other words, if you took your social security taxes and stuffed them in a mattress, you would get a better return. As I wrote in the link above
as a retirement program, [social security] is a really, really big RIPOFF. Ever worker in this country is being raped by this retirement plan. In fact, it is the worst retirement program in the whole country:
- As we see above, it pays a negative rate of return
- It is not optional "“ you go to prison if you choose not to participate
- Unlike a private annuity contract, the government can rewrite your benefits level any time, and you have to take it. In fact, my statement says "Your estimated benefits are based on current law. Congress has made changes to the law in the past and can do so at any time. The law governing benefit amounts may change because, by 2040, the payroll taxes collected will be enough to pay only about 74 percent of scheduled benefits."
- There are no assets backing this annuity!! An insurance company that wrote annuities without any invested assets backing them would be thrown in jail faster than Jeff Skilling. The government has been doing it for decades.
One substantial problem with the TSA that is seldom discussed is that in the switch from using private security to government agents to screen passengers, there was always going to be a temptation by the Feds to expand the airport screening from narrowly a search for weapons that might endanger an airplane to a catch-all crime search point. Here is an example of the latter:
That same screener started emptying her wallet. "He was taking out the receipts and looking at them," she said.
"I understand that TSA is tasked with strengthening national security but [it] surely does not need to know what I purchased at Kohl's or Wal-Mart," she wrote in her complaint, which she sent me last week.
She says she asked what he was looking for and he replied, "Razor blades." She wondered, "Wouldn't that have shown up on the metal detector?"
In a side pocket she had tucked a deposit slip and seven checks made out to her and her husband, worth about $8,000.
Her thought: "Oh, my God, this is none of his business."
Two Philadelphia police officers joined at least four TSA officers who had gathered around her. After conferring with the TSA screeners, one of the Philadelphia officers told her he was there because her checks were numbered sequentially, which she says they were not.
"It's an indication you've embezzled these checks," she says the police officer told her. He also told her she appeared nervous. She hadn't before that moment, she says.
She protested when the officer started to walk away with the checks. "That's my money," she remembers saying. The officer's reply? "It's not your money."
At this point she told the officers that she had a good explanation for the checks, but questioned whether she had to tell them.
"The police officer said if you don't tell me, you can tell the D.A."
Spain's Dr. Gabriel Calzada "” the author of a damning study concluding that Spain's "green jobs" energy program has been a catastrophic economic failure "” was mailed a dismantled bomb on Tuesday by solar energy company Thermotechnic.
Says Calzada:
Before opening it, I called [Thermotechnic] to know what was inside "¦ they answered, it was their answer to my energy pieces.
Dr. Calzada contacted a terrorism expert to handle the package. The expert first performed a scan of the package, then opened it in front of a journalist, Dr. Calzada, and a private security expert.
The terrorism consultant said he had seen this before:
This time you receive unconnected pieces. Next time it can explode in your hands.
Dr. Calzada added:
[The terrorism expert] told me that this was a warning.
The bomb threat is just the latest intimidation Dr. Calzada has faced since releasing his report and following up with articles in Expansion (a Spanish paper similar to the Financial Times). A minister from Spain's Socialist government called the rector of King Juan Carlos University "” Dr. Calzada's employer "” seeking Calzada's ouster. Calzada was not fired, but he was stripped of half of his classes at the university. The school then dropped its accreditation of a summer university program with which Calzada's think tank "” Instituto Juan de Mariana "” was associated.
Additionally, the head of Spain's renewable energy association and the head of its communist trade union wrote opinion pieces in top Spanish newspapers accusing Calzada of being "unpatriotic" "” they did not charge him with being incorrect, but of undermining Spain by daring to write the report.
Wow, I am sure those in Arizona who are clambering for more border support from President Obama will back off now that they hear this:
U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Rob Daniels says officers at the Douglas port of entry stopped a tractor-trailer coming from Mexico for further inspection on Friday.
Officers found the tractor-trailer was loaded with papier-mache items, including 108 piñatas in the likeness of Disney characters on their way to Thornton, Colo.
Officers seized the shipment for violation of intellectual property rights.
You will be happy that national security has been protected
Assistant port Director Eli Villareal says the piñatas may seem innocent, but shipments of illegal merchandise on a national scale can undermine the U.S. economy and "is a vital element in national security.
