Lose Your iPhone…

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…and lose your data, along with access to your financials. For instance,

thieves who stole [one man’s] iPhone 14 Pro at a bar in Chicago wanted to drain cash from his bank account and prevent him from remotely tracking down the stolen phone. They used his passcode to change [his] Apple ID password. They also enabled a hard-to-find Apple security setting known as the “recovery key.” In doing so, they placed an impenetrable lock on his account.

The thieves got his passcode by shoulder-surfing and watching him tap in his passcode before they stole his phone. And Apple can’t help him: without the recovery key, there’s nothing they can do. In addition to the money stolen, the man has lost the only copies of eight years of photos of his young daughters, which he was storing exclusively on his cell phone.

And this example:

After [a man’s] iPhone 13 Pro was stolen from a Boston bar in August, [he] said he spent hours on the phone with Apple customer support trying to regain access to over a decade of data.

Again, Apple was helpless to help without that now thief-altered recovery key.

The recovery key business is specific to Apple’s iPhones, and it’s irrelevant to my questions here. My questions apply to Android phones and other kinds of cell phones just as much.

My first question is this: when the cell phone owner was in any sort of public place—bar, office, park, etc, what was that cell phone doing anywhere but in the owner’s hot little hand or in an interior pocket? Leaving the cell phone out on a counter or a bar or a park bench, even if the owner is right there, is the same as taping a “Free for the Taking” sign on the phone.

My second question is this: convenience comes with a price, and these theft victims provide examples of the price to be paid for that convenience: the loss of those precious personal items, the loss of years of personally important data, or the loss of company or other business data and correspondence (whether text or email), the loss of the moneys in the various financial accounts to which the owner has given cell phone access, and on and on. Why are these data kept on cell phones at all? Why are they not, at the least, backed up on a separate device—a laptop, for instance, or the company’s desktop back at the office or in the home office?

There’s no excuse for the theft, but there’s no excuse, either, for the personal laziness that magnifies the outcome of the theft.

Ban Assault Weapons

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President Joe Biden (D) wants to ban assault weapons completely.

His Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Director Steve Dettelbach, testifying under oath before a House Appropriations subcommittee, flat refused to say what an assault weapon was when asked by Congressman Jake Ellzey (R, TX).

…if Congress wishes to take that up, I think Congress would have to do the work, but we would be there to provide technical assistance. I, unlike you, am not a firearms expert to the same extent as you maybe, but we have people at ATF who can talk about velocity of firearms, what damage different kinds of firearms cause, so that whatever determination you chose to make would be an informed one.

Weasel words. You define the term, Dettelbach said, we’ll “help.” After all, he could have provided his own definition; those same experts could have advised him as he prepared for his testimony.

Biden wants to ban, and his ATF honcho—the man and the agency responsible for “regulating” the weapons us American citizens choose to keep and bear—refuses to say what it is that this administration would ban.

The obvious, and only logical, conclusion from this deliberate obfuscation is that Biden and his fellow Progressive-Democratic Party syndicate members intend to ban all of our firearms.

Progressive Idiocy

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The New York City Council is striking again. These wonders are pushing their cutely named Choose 2 Reuse bill, which

aims to improve sustainability in the restaurant business, but would add some friction to a customer experience that is typically defined by its convenience. Consumers would be asked to later return their reusable food containers, knives, forks, and chopsticks either through delivery or logistics partners who come to pick them up or in person via receptacles at participating restaurants. The bill doesn’t require reusable beverage containers.

It’s interesting that the City Council excludes beverage containers. There was a time when beverage containers—soda bottles, for instance—could be returned for a return of a deposit paid when the (sodas) were sold, a practice that enabled more than a few boys and girls to earn a bit of extra money by collecting up the bottles and doing the return. And there never was a problem cleaning the then-glass bottles for reuse, nor was there a liability problem arising from the reuse of inadequately cleaned bottles.

That sort of thing fell into disfavor when tin, and later aluminum, cans proved easier and cheaper to manufacture (and wend their way through the bottling process)—and far from being one-use disposable, they could be recycled through a different chain.

Now NYC is bent on reverting to that greater cost—never minding that one-use food containers for takeout are easily manufactured for breakdown and return to the soil when disposed of in landfills. Or in many jurisdictions, converted to mulch for DIY gardeners. Or recycled for yet other non-food related uses.

Now, in addition to the added costs inflicted on restaurants and consumers alike, the Wonders of the Council also want to expose the city’s restaurants to liability through suits centered on real or imagined food poisoning from allegedly inadequately cleaned-for-reuse containers and utensils. Even stipulating that utensils would no longer be included (presumably by restaurant choice; nothing in the proposed bill suggests this)—requiring consumers to use their own—the containers would need to be made sturdy enough to survive the restaurant’s dishwashers—or to survive the consumers’ dishwashers, should they be offered a discount for doing the cleaning for the restaurant. And which the restaurant would have no guarantee that the consumer had cleaned the containers well enough to meet the government standards imposed on the restaurant.

BlackRock Misses Again

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The Woke BlackRock, and especially its CEO Larry Fink, are not just wide of the mark, they’ve missed the target altogether. Not only does the company push its intrinsically racist and sexist “diversity, equity, inclusion” ideology onto those companies in which it invests—often for the sole purpose of the push; investment quality being irrelevant—now it’s been caught out applying its racism and sexism in its internal hiring practices.

America First Legal Foundation sent a letter Tuesday to the New York District Office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to demand an investigation into the asset management giant for allegedly “engaging in unlawful employment practices in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
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“This program is just one piece of a long-term practice of BlackRock to use unlawful discriminatory employment practices to build its workforce,” the complaint stated. “Indeed, BlackRock has affirmatively and repeatedly represented to its shareholders, to its investors, and to the Securities and Exchange Commission, that its employment practices are infused with facially unlawful considerations of race, color, sex, and/or national origin.”

AFL added in a separate communication,

The odious and illegal practice of hiring based on immutable characteristics like race is a flagrant attack on civil rights that harms all Americans[.]

I’ll go further: it’s an insult to those minorities and women; BlackRock and Fink are saying that minorities and women are intrinsically inferior, inherently too stupid, to be able to compete without the special treatment and coddling that is preferential, DEI-based hiring.

There’s no doubt that there remains a disparity, especially in STEM environments, between white hiring into good-paying jobs and minority and women hiring into those jobs. But that disparity won’t be cured by preferentially hiring minorities and women; they still too often aren’t qualified for the positions, so they fail and set the program, and the hiring company, back.

The correction for the disparity lies in a factor that’s at the foundation of our nation: equal opportunity. That equality of opportunity doesn’t currently exist in our education system (among other milieus); see for a canonical example, the Baltimore, MD, school system’s failure and subsequent coverup by those responsible.

If BlackRock and similar entities put the money and energy they’re currently committing to push wokeness into improving our educational system (without the Woke…foolishness) and getting our children taught—from pre-K through high school—science, technology, engineering, and math, along with American history, Civics (and more of this than a single semester in junior high), Western Civilization, logic, and literature, with equal emphasis on inner city schools and wealthy district schools, those disparities would disappear in a generation.

 

The letter itself can be read at the first link above.

Funding PRC Research

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Senator and Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Ranking Member Roger Marshall (R, KS) and his staff have released their Muddy Waters report concerning the origin of the Wuhan Virus—which he concludes happened via two likely leaks from the PRC’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab not equipped to do virus research at the depth to which it was handling the Wuhan Virus. One of the conclusions of his report is that the US government was funding gain-of-function research in that lab.

I have a couple of thoughts.

Marshall said about the PRC research,

That’s why we’ve been calling for a halt in all viral gain-of-function research until we get the guardrails around it.

I disagree with that. We should do viral gain-of-function research on a variety of viruses, but we should do it in our labs, where we have absolute control over the research and its findings as well as the quality and ability of the labs in which the research is done. We should be doing the research for a couple of reasons: one is that our enemies—vis., the PRC—are doing it, and we need to understand the altered viruses and how to counter them when those enemy nations use them against us. The other reason is that these viruses do cross-over from animals to humans sometimes, and whether they do this naturally—which is quite rare—or altered viruses accidentally leak from a lab, we need to understand them and how to counter them.

My other thought concerns this remark by Marshall, regarding American funding for PRC virus research:

If we’re funding it, then they need to conform to our rules, and we need American boots on the ground[.]

Certainly. However, aside from the fact that the PRC won’t agree to American presence in their labs in any useful way, we shouldn’t be funding PRC research on viruses at all. We shouldn’t be funding PRC research on any biological research. We shouldn’t be funding any PRC research, of any kind, at all.