Category Archives: politics

He Said He’s Sorry

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…and that makes it all better.

Doug Hodge, ex-CEO of PIMCO, wrote an apologia­—I won’t call it an apology—for his participation in the Rick Singer-operated college admissions scandal in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal.

I have to wonder, though, just how sincere Hodge’s missive is, or whether he wrote it as part of his sentence—for how many hours of community service does this piece count? Or did he write it in return for the short jail term he got (nine whole months for a nearly one million of dollars fraud).

And: words of regret for the shame I have brought upon…my children, but not a syllable for the larger damage he’s done them: his statement, by his actions, that he had no confidence in their own abilities; his going-in assumption, demonstrated by those actions, that he considered them just not good enough to get into a good school without cheating.

No, it doesn’t make anything all better.

Disappointing

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Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV) is defending his vote to convict President Donald Trump during the impeachment and trial fiasco of the last several weeks. In the course of that defense, Manchin says he wanted to see more information from Trump and his defenders. In the course of that, he tweeted [emphasis added]:

I’ve read the transcripts thoroughly & listened to the witnesses under oath. Where I come from a person accused defends themselves with witnesses and evidence. Where I come from a person accused defends themselves with witnesses and evidence.

No, Senator Manchin.  Where I come from—the United States of America—a person accused doesn’t have to do that; it’s on the accuser to prove his accusations.

Full stop.

Manchin should know better.

Markets in Internet Domains

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ISOC, which owns the .org Internet domain, wants to sell the address to a company called Ethos, which wants to go into a for-profit business managing Internet domains or Internet addresses. ICANN has to approve the sale before it can go through.

The free market competition that would result from the sale and others like it is supposed to knell the end of the Internet. The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board likes the idea.

They’re both wrong, and they’re both being hysterical about it.

ICANN, and ISOC, come to that, have done a fine job of managing the domains within their purview. I’m not sure that’s a thing needing fixing, so I’m spring-loaded against the sale of any their domains to Ethos or any other organization.

Competition? Of course. Let Ethos generate its own domain or suite of domains to compete with the .org domain. Let Ethos and other private enterprises create their own domains or suites of them to compete with the existing ICANN-overseen domains like .com, .edu, .[whatevs].

Simply passing a domain from one manager to another does nothing for competition; that’s just a game of Two-Card Monte.

In Which Illinois Got It Right

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Back in 2008, Illinois passed a law barring companies from collecting customers’ personal biometric information without their prior permission. Companies in Illinois also were required to develop a policy, and make it readily available, that laid out how those biometric data would be stored and when they would be destroyed.

Facebook was accused of violating that law when it decided to use its facial recognition technology to analyze users’ photos in order to create and store “face templates.” Users’ faces are plainly biometric data in this context, the data were taken by Facebook without the owners’/users’ permission, and in 2015, folks sued Facebook over its misbehavior.

Now comes a reckoning of sorts.

Facebook has agreed to settle a $550 million lawsuit brought on behalf of millions of Illinois users who claim the social network’s automated tagging feature powered by facial recognition technology violates their biometric privacy rights.

Good law, and mostly good outcome.

But maybe the class action group shouldn’t have settled. Settlements only bind the parties to the suit and are only as good as the promises of those parties. Facebook has a long history of finding ways to weasel-word around the terms of its settlements, violating their spirit if not their letter.  Court judgments, though, are permanent, binding on all parties to the suit, and binding also on everyone else within the court’s jurisdiction.

We’ll see on this one, but Illinois got this one right with its law.

Protections through Cuts

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That’s how President Donald Trump’s budget proposal represents support for his campaign commitment to protect programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

[The proposal] targets $2 trillion in savings from mandatory spending programs, including $130 billion from changes to Medicare prescription-drug pricing, $292 billion from safety-net cuts—such as work requirements for Medicaid and food stamps—and $70 billion from tightening eligibility access to federal disability benefits.

Medicare is threatened with bankruptcy nearly as badly as is Social Security, but that doesn’t mean Medicare would disappear—only that benefit payouts would be reduced to what payroll tax revenues could support, rather than what’s currently available from those tax revenues plus earnings and principle from its trust funds.

By tightening eligibility requirements and by requiring actual work, efforts toward being able to gain work, or doing forms of community service benefits those who actually need the benefits would be preserved.

The same situation exists for Medicaid: these State-run programs threaten the fiscal health of those States, and Federal transfers to those States, far from helping them, do nothing but reduce the States to dependencies of the Federal government.

One item in the proposed budget with which I disagree with Trump concerns the VA.

Winners in Mr Trump’s budget include the Department of Veterans Affairs, with a 13% increase next year….

This is a waste of money. The VA has repeatedly shown itself incapable of taking care of our veterans with any generality or reliability.  The VA needs to be completely disbanded and its budget (this year with that 13% increase) and putative future budgets converted to vouchers for our veterans so they can get the medical care and financial support they need at the time they need it from doctors, clinics, and hospitals that suit them.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.