Because it’s my blog, and so I get to.
Gene Malcolm (@spike012002) has a tweet up:
Next, Japanese businessman will start wearing business suits. When will this cultural appropriation end?
There also is a joke wandering the rounds:
Q: What’s the difference between Los Angeles and yogurt?
A: One of them has a living culture.
Which makes me wonder, in the context of Malcolm’s tweet: between LA and yogurt, which is inflicting cultural appropriation?
Equifax took six weeks to get around to bothering to tell us about it so we individual consumers could begin to take our own corrective and defensive action. That’s unconscionable, Equifax isn’t alone in delaying telling us about hacks into personal information those companies are holding for us, and it’s giving impetus to legislation that would force companies to disclose such hacks much sooner. One such proposed bill is Congressman Jim Langevin’s (D,RI) reintroduction of the Obama era’s Personal Data Notification and Protection Act.
I don’t like regulations, but one here is necessary. The hacks aren’t exposing company property; they’re exposing individual personal property entrusted to the company. Companies have an obligation to safeguard that personal property, and that obligation is strongly expanded by a company’s demand for that personal property as a condition of doing business with it.
Companies don’t want to be embarrassed…[by] having to disclose when people’s data is leaked….
People don’t want to be harmed by those leaks or by delays in finding out their data have been leaked. I’m trying to weight the one against the other in my balance. Oh, wait….
Under this proposed legislation, Equifax would have had to disclose its breach within 30 days….
No, there’s no need for any delay, indeed, delay simply compounds the damage that can be done to us individuals. As Christopher Mims put it at the end of his piece at the link,
When Equifax was breached, hackers got birthdates, Social Security numbers, and other hard facts about most of us. This data has the power to ruin our financial lives….
Any delay, let alone 30 days, is far too long to be held defenseless against that. The legislation’s proposed 30 days are forever in today’s information and financial world, an entire month within which hackers could work their nefarious ends without our being able to defend against those ends. Equifax, et al., should be required to disclose on the day the hack is discovered and then to keep us current on developments with frequent updates that, at the least, explain what’s being done about the hack to reduce the likelihood of a subsequent hack, what’s being done to mitigate the damage to us of the present hack, why the hack wasn’t discovered sooner, and what’s being done to speed discovery for next times.
We need to be able to act in our defense, too.
And contra the attitudes of those who defend delay, we Americans are not too stupid to understand what we’re being told—so long as it’s prompt and truthful—and we can make good use of the information which, aside from our being better able to defend ourselves, would let us see quickly what companies develop a history of exposing our personal information and so are unworthy of our business.
Ri Yong Ho, northern Korea’s Foreign Minister and spokesman for Baby Kim, appears to have let the cat out of the bag. Responding to President Donald Trump’s series of remarks about northern Korea and Baby Kim during the week, Ri said
He [Trump] committed an irreversible mistake of making our rockets’ visit to the entire US mainland inevitable all the more[.]
Notice that. Ri isn’t only responding to Trump’s current position. All the more is the key phrase here. Northern Korea’s intent all along, its motivation for developing nuclear weapons and delivery systems, has been to attack us; otherwise, there is nothing than which to be all the more.
Just like Iran vis-à-vis Israel.
Germany has been struck by a wave of hackers from the People’s Republic of China as the PRC moves to steal from cutting-edge manufacturers.
The German government
is now moving to shield companies from state-backed hackers and criminal gangs, offering to pay to harden the defenses of Germany’s most vulnerable firms.
This is a start, but it’s insufficient.
Hacks like this, originating as they do from a fundamentally autocratic nation, can only be taken as state-sanctioned, if not outright -directed, as such they are overt acts of aggression, and so they require commensurately serious responses.
Germany—and the US where we’re hacked against—need to engage in sterner, more concrete responses to the PRC’s hacks. Such responses should include sanctions against PRC companies in the same or similar industries as the hacked companies that range from punitive tariffs to barring those companies from doing business in Germany or the US to blocking their access to deutschmarks and dollars. Further responses should include cyber attacks against PRC companies in the same or similar industries as the hacked companies with goals ranging from temporarily blocking their operations to permanently damaging them.
Here are some stats regarding Obamacare’s impact on our poor, courtesy of The Wall Street Journal.
More than one in three of taxed [via the individual mandate penalty] households earned less than $25,000, which is roughly the federal poverty line for a family of four.
And
More than 75% of penalized households made less than $50,000 and nine in 10 earned less than $75,000.
And
Fewer families paid the tax in 2015 than in 2014, yet government revenues increased to more than $3 billion from about $1.7 billion, as the financial punishment for lacking coverage increased.
Never mind that these honest Americans can’t afford what Obamacare has on offer, they still have to pay the tax. Never mind that what is on offer is so bad they won’t buy it; they’d rather pay a tax they can ill afford.
This is what Senator John McCain (R, AZ) has said he prefers to Graham-Cassidy, never minding that the Arizona governor (for whom McCain claims great admiration) has strongly endorsed the bill. This is what Senator Rand Paul (R, KY) has said is better than a bill that repeals much of the funding for Obamacare and sends it instead to the States so they can set up their own health insurance/health coverage plan markets—including State-level Obamacare, if that’s their preference—never minding that States’ Rights has been part of his mantra since his first Senate election campaign. This is what Senator Lisa Murkowski (R, AK) seems to want to preserve over Graham-Cassidy‘s elimination of her State’s exploding premiums and imploding plan provider participation. This is what Senator Susan Collins seems to want to preserve, never minding Maine’s governor endorsement of the bill.
The WSJ pointed out that
…the point of this coercion was to substitute the government’s political preferences for individual judgment….
Just as these four Senators are substituting their own political preferences for the individual judgments of their constituents—whom the four are betraying with their support for Obamacare over Graham-Cassidy.
Remember this for the coming primary election season.