Starbucks is sharply raising its total compensation for its employees in the Seattle area. Total compensation from wages and stock options is going up some 5% to 15%. Carefully buried in the very last paragraph of The Seattle Times piece is this little nugget:
Last July, Starbucks raised its prices 3.5 times as much in Seattle as in the rest of the country. It raised the price of its typical coffeeshop purchase across the U.S. by 1%, but in Seattle by 3.5%.
Hmm….
That’s the meme of Federal Reserve Board Governor Daniel Turillo, the Fed’s reputed point man for regulation. Turillo is claiming that
the lessons of the 2008 financial crisis won’t be complete without better regulation of short-term funding both inside and outside the banking system.
Naturally, the regulatory point man is going to see everything as a regulatory need.
OK, since more regulations are the solution, here’s a suggestion.
How about some regulations prohibiting the Federal government and the Federal Reserve Bank from using credit and lending as social engineering tools?
Regardless of what one might think about the FBI’s decision to let ex-Secretary of State and Democratic Party Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton escape prosecution over her handling of State Department emails on her unsecured personal email server, you’d think the hoo-raw over the matter for all this time at least would prompt State to take seriously Department handling of emails.
You’d think wrong.
State’s Inspector General has issued a report that, in its totality, shows that the State Department just doesn’t care about national secrets, to the point of not even troubling itself to shut down unused email accounts. This despite repeated “suggestions” that they do just that.
The report, titled Management Assistance Report: Inactive Accounts Within the Department of State’s Active Directory, has this in its opening paragraphs.
Acting on behalf of the Office of Inspector General (OIG), Office of Audits, Williams, Adley & Company-DC, LLP (Williams Adley), an independent public accounting firm, evaluated whether the Department disabled inactive AD user accounts in accordance with its internal policies. … The Department’s AD account policy states that Department officials should disable inactive user accounts after 90 or more days.
Nope.
Of the 40,794 domestic AD accounts tested for this audit, Williams Adley found 2,601 (6.4%) had not been disabled after 90 days of inactivity. Of the 2,601 inactive accounts, 1,932 (74%) accounts were inactive for more than 1 year….
This has been an ongoing passive-aggressive resistance problem [SBU means “Sensitive but Unclassified;” its line-out in the original means the indicated paragraph has been completely declassified so the public can see it].
(SBU) OIG reported a similar deficiency in its FY 2015 Federal Information Security Management Act audit report.
And
(SBU) In its 2014 report on AD, OIG stated that the deficiencies it identified with AD Rights Management primarily occurred because IRM had not established a governance structure or strategy to ensure that AD Rights Management was implemented and managed consistently.
The report concludes with these two tidbits tied back to an earlier recommendation [Emphasis within the paragraphs added by me.]
Recommendation 1: (SBU) OIG recommends that the Bureau of Information Resource Management amend the “Program Management Plan for PIV Login to OpenNet Deployment” to address the identification and removal process of mailbox, service, and terminated user accounts.
Management Response (April 2016): (SBU) IRM non-concurs with this recommendation. The Program Management Plan for PIV Login was created to deploy and implement PIV domestically and overseas. Now that IRM has completed that goal, the plan has been completed and does not lend itself to amendment.
In other words, State considers complying—to set out instructions for complete removal of these accounts—to be too much like work.
Recommendation 2: (SBU) OIG recommends that the Bureau of Information Resource Management implement the new guidance from the “Program Management Plan for PIV Login to OpenNet Deployment,” once amended in response to Recommendation 1 of this report.
Management Response (April 2016): (SBU) IRM non-concurs with this recommendation. The Program Management Plan for PIV Login was created to deploy and implement PIV domestically and overseas. Now that IRM has completed that goal, the plan has been completed and does not lend itself to amendment.
Again, that’s just too much like work.
The State Department needs a complete housecleaning, including a complete turnover of non-Foreign Service personnel.
Elections have consequences.
In a Wall Street Journal piece about Italy’s banks in general, are these two items that illustrate both the Nanny State nature of Italy and the cultural differences in attitudes toward personal responsibility among the various constituent nations of the EU. The backdrop includes the EU’s rule, enacted in 2014, that requires banks across the EU that face bankruptcy to have the banks’ stakeholders (as the WSJ calls them)—shareholders, bond holders, and depositors (but only some of those last…)—to take the losses first and foremost. The backdrop also includes the trouble Italy’s banks, in particular, are in:
17% of banks’ loans are sour. That is nearly 10 times the level in the US, where, even at the worst of the 2008-09 financial crisis, it was only 5%. Among publicly traded banks in the eurozone, Italian lenders account for nearly half of total bad loans.
What to do, then?
The Italian government has sought EU permission to inject €40 billion [$52 billion] into its banks to stabilize the system.
…
Rome argues that bending this rule would be a small price to pay for erecting a firewall against possible bank contagion stemming from Brexit.
Because those responsible for a bank’s business strait shouldn’t have to bear the burden—taxpayers should have to pony up, too.
Rome has criticized the EU’s new banking regime and doesn’t want to use “bail-in” rules that prescribe the order in which stakeholders must bear losses for winding down an ailing bank, in part because of the peculiarities of the Italian banking system. About €187 billion of bank bonds are in the hands of retail investors, whose holdings would be wiped out by a bank resolution under the new rules.
Because personal responsibility—on the part of everyone in the society—should be waivable at convenience.
Other nations of the EU—Germany, for instance—demur from this exception-making and from this walking-away from responsibility of those involved. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, referring to that 2014 rule:
We worked to set down certain rules about bank resolution and bank recapitalization. We can’t do everything again every two years.
Stick to the rules and hold those stakeholders responsible—as they are—in other words.
Add to this, the Italian government’s direct responsibility for a failing system of handling bankruptcy:
One reason for the low valuations [of bad loans] is the enormous difficulty in unwinding a bad loan in Italy. Italy’s sclerotic courts take eight years, on average, to clear insolvency procedures. A quarter of cases take 12 years.
This sort of basic difference on the nature of responsibility is a major part of why the EU as its comported will fail, and it’s the sort of thing that underlies Great Britain’s citizens’ decision to Leave.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court is considering exactly that.
The state’s highest court is set to rule on whether such algorithms, known as risk assessments, violate due process and discriminate against men when judges rely on them in sentencing.
No. Even when sentencing a criminal, where his crime is substantially similar to other criminals’ crimes, the key is that substantial part. No two crimes really are alike, no two criminals really are identical, even the criminal convicted today is not the same man he was when he was convicted—even of a substantially similar crime yesterday—history has happened. One size cannot fit all, even here; sentencing must be unique.
And that sentence must be handed down by a judge or, in many jurisdictions (and my personal favorite), a jury. It takes a human to assess the man, and it especially takes a human to assess his likelihood of recidivism or rehabilitation. It takes a human, or a collection of us, to assess the man’s potential redeemability and his likelihood of redemption.
Computers have none of the comprehension, conscience, intuition, or moral capacity that are so critical to such judgments. Even a computer’s risk assessment must be suspect, as the inputs cannot include everything a human or that collection of humans that is a jury sees when they assess the man’s record and look into the eyes of the man standing before them.
Aside from the principle of the question, the particular tool in question in the case before the Wisconsin Court is badly flawed.
…a widely used tool called COMPAS, or Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, a 137-question test that covers criminal and parole history, age, employment status, social life, education level, community ties, drug use, and beliefs.
The assessment includes queries like, “Did a parent figure who raised you ever have a drug or alcohol problem?” and “Do you feel that the things you do are boring or dull?” Scores are generated by comparing an offender’s characteristics to a representative criminal population of the same sex.
Tests, questionnaires, surveys, and the like are extremely easy to game, and any lawyer worthy of his pro bono fee is fully capable of coaching his client to game this one.
Computers shouldn’t sentence humans; humans should sentence humans. And it shouldn’t be done on the basis of input-limited machine-calculated predictions of the future, in any event. It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.