Author Archives: eehines

I Will Be Brief

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But the climate-funding industry mavens still will not enjoy this. Steven Koonis, Hoover Institution Senior Fellow and one of five authors of a Department of Energy report on climate—what really is known and not known about our changing climate—had these points in his Sunday Wall Street Journal op-ed:

  • Elevated carbon-dioxide levels enhance plant growth, contributing to global greening and increased agricultural productivity.
  • Complex climate models provide limited guidance on the climate’s response to rising carbon-dioxide levels. Overly sensitive models, often using extreme scenarios, have exaggerated future warming projections and consequences.
  • Data aggregated over the continental U.S. show no significant long-term trends in most extreme weather events. Claims of more frequent or intense hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and dryness in America aren’t supported by historical records.
  • While global sea levels have risen about 8 inches since 1900, aggregate U.S. tide-gauge data don’t show the long-term acceleration expected from a warming globe.
  • Natural climate variability, data limitations and model deficiencies complicate efforts to attribute specific climate changes or extreme events to human CO2 emissions.
  • The use of the words “existential,” “crisis” and “emergency” to describe the projected effects of human-caused warming on the U.S. economy finds scant support in the data.
  • Overly aggressive policies aimed at reducing emissions could do more harm than good by hiking the cost of energy and degrading its reliability. Even the most ambitious reductions in U.S. emissions would have little direct effect on global emissions and an even smaller effect on climate trends.

It’s long past time to stop funding that industry and shift the funding to energy production while maintaining environmental damage controls. Environmental damage: not from atmospheric CO2 or too many jet aircraft contrails, for instance, but from damages as the acid rain of mercury-laden fossil fuel smoke (nearly completely eradicated); from the disposal of lithium batteries at the end of their battery car lifetimes; and from the tailings from mining the likes of lithium, copper, and cobalt to make those batteries and battery cars.

The Short and Sweet of It

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Government debt is ballooning globally, but this short post centers on US government debt.

Over the past two decades, governments went on a debt binge, fueled by low interest rates. Now that rates have risen, investors worry that Western governments aren’t willing to make politically difficult decisions to curb public spending….

Of particular interest to me is that this has gone on in extreme parallel (to coin a phrase) in the US. In the years (too many of them) following the Panic of 2008, the US Fed kept interest rates, via its benchmark rate setting artificially suppressed, holding them down almost all the way to zero. That fueled the borrowing, since payments on the debt were so cheap. (The heavily negative impact on fixed-income Americans holding, as their primary income source, corporate and government debt instruments was of no mind to the Fed or to the administrations then in power.)

Federal spending needs to come down, certainly, but that’s made harder to do (the primary impediment is political timidity) at the higher interest rates currently extant.

Therein lies the rub. The Fed’s benchmark rates currently are at, or a skosh below, the rates historically consistent with the Fed’s 2% target inflation rate. The current push to lower them even further, globally as well as here at home, is mistaken. That won’t reduce borrowing; it’ll only increase it, partly to roll existent debt and partly to “take advantage of” the lower rates to increase net borrowing.

No. It’s time for the Fed to be quiet and sit down, leaving its benchmark rates at their current level. The only thing for the Fed to say publicly about rates is to announce in clear, no uncertain terms—no Fed speak—that it’s going to sit down and be quiet, and leave its benchmark rates at their current levels. It’ll be costly and slow for existing debt to be paid down, but our economy will recover to even greater prosperity on the other side. The cost of not sitting tight at current levels will be even greater in the long run of burgeoning debt that ends up so great it cannot be repaid, except with inflation destroyed dollars.

John Maynard Keynes once said that in the long run, we’ll all be dead (so who cares, went his subtext). But our children and grandchildren will be living in today’s long run. We should care today.

Corporate Cybersecurity Training

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It isn’t very effective, apparently.

To measure the effectiveness of different methods of cybersecurity training, the authors [of a study] divided employees into four groups. After each attack, each group received a different training method: one received generic tips about avoiding phishing attacks, a second received an interactive Q&A on cybersecurity, a third was informed about the specific methods used in the most recent attack, and the fourth received an interactive Q&A that also included details about the most recent attack. A fifth group was also created, and the employees in that group received no training.
The authors found that on average, employees who received training of any sort had only a 1.7% lower failure rate than employees who had no training.

The authors’ solution?

The study’s takeaway for organizations, says [lead author Grant] Ho, is to rely on measures other than training, like phishing-detection software that automatically eliminates the need for employees to detect phishing attacks.

Software aids are important in this milieu, but the weak link remains the human. Software aids by themselves are insufficient.

There needs to be more to the training than just a slide presentation and some lectures, or in the present case, “interactive” Q&As. The training sessions need to be plussed up, a lot, but that can’t be the end of it. Schools and responsible companies run fire drills that run to completion with evacuation of the building and head counts and roll calls while the evacuees are gathered up at their assigned evacuation points. So it must be with cybersecurity training. Simulated cyber attacks (phishing, social engineering, etc) attacks should be run against a rotating collection of employees to test their training and their responses to the attacks. Those simulations should be run some weeks after the training and more frequently than those fire drills, and they should not use IT-ginned up attacks, either; they should use serious real-world attacks, altered only to get them targeted to the collection of employees being tested.

Beyond that, there needs to be teeth attached to the training and to employees’ failure to take the training seriously.

There are three outcomes from this. One is an empirical assessment of the quality of training, its durability, and identification of weaknesses in the training program, which then can be corrected (not given up on). A second results from those teeth: once management is satisfied with the training quality, employees still falling for the attacks should be terminated. They’re too great a risk to the company.

The third outcome is a very great increase in the cyber safety of the company and of its employees (with a follow-on: those employees will be better able to maintain security in their homes’ cyber environment). The added training and testing will incur costs to the company, but the risk of the far greater cost of a cyber breach—both direct and indirect through liability—is too great to ignore.

Willful Ignorance

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Or preferring her Newspeak Dictionary definitions over those in actual American English dictionaries.

That’s Arizona Progressive-Democrat Representative Yassamin Ansari’s view. In response to the hue and cry over her terming illegal aliens members of her constituency, she had this:

So, I didn’t realize this was such a controversy until the right-wing media started attacking me for using the word, so I Googled the word constituent. The definition of constituent is somebody who is part of a community, doesn’t matter what their legal status is,

She Googled for the definition of “constituent.” She could have consulted an actual dictionary of the American English language, but she chose not to. ‘Course, if she had, she would have seen her narrative collapse around her. This is what Merriam-Webster, for instance, has to say about the American English meaning of the term:

constituent
1 : a member of a constituency
pledged to help her elderly constituents

Following that first and thus primary definition over to constituency, we get this first and primary definition:

constituency
1 a : a body of citizens entitled to elect a representative (as to a legislative or executive position)
the governor’s liberal constituency

Citizens. Not illegal aliens. Even the second part of that first definition lends no support for Ansari’s Newspeak definition:

b : the residents in an electoral district
The senator’s constituency includes a large minority population.

Since illegal aliens are not legally resident, they are outside even the residents of an electoral district.

Inconvenient facts are, to a Party member, inconvenient.

Tipped Wages or Not?

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McDonald’s is insisting that every restaurant—especially fast food restaurants—should be required to do away with tip-based wages and pay servers at least the Federal-level minimum wage. There are a couple of major disingenuosities in the surrounding argument.

McDonald’s Chief Executive Chris Kempczinski:

Right now, there’s an uneven playing field,

because casual-dining restaurants, bars, and other establishments to pay below the typical minimum wage to tip-earning workers. If he thinks so, he should push for getting his restaurant able to similarly pay his workers rather than demanding that others kowtow to his business model.

Kempczinski went on:

If you are a restaurant that allows tips or has tips as part of your equation, you’re essentially getting the customer to pay for your labor[.]

This is an especially blatant bit of disingenuousness. The customer already is paying for the restaurant’s labor. The customer also is paying for the restaurant’s cooking, food and food preparation inputs, rent, management salaries, every cost the restaurant incurs. Those costs are included in the prices the restaurant puts on its menu. Tipping is just a customer-facing line item on the bill.

This is nothing but a regulated business manager venally and self-servingly trying to capture the regulators and impose added costs on his smaller and weaker competitors.