Privacy

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Here is why more needs to be done to protect our privacy—primarily by us, but with Government’s assistance. Below is an example, quoted from a bulletin board I follow. The author is talking about an investment during a time of coronavirus disruption of supply chains, but the subtext should be obvious.

re: GOOG
They don’t build physical widgets in Wuhan that might get hard to obtain…the ad biz will probably keep on rolling.
We just bought 2 new Android smartphones and 1 new Android tablet. Coming from a dumb-phone flip phone and a Kindle.
Google [Alphabet, which owns Google] OWNS that market. You cannot even download/install an app without having a google account. And every time you do something, Google prompts you to set up a payment method. No way to say “Hell no, never.” The choices are: google play card, credit card, debit card, and “skip for now, maybe later”.
So, clever me, I created a dummy google/gmail account. And logged in so I could install some free apps from Google Play. Fine.
But within 2 days it somehow associated my wife’s gmail account with the Android tablet. And she has NEVER touched that tablet. Now every time I go to use it, it asks me which account I want to log into—the dummy account or her account.
Google OWNS that market.
—————
Near as I can figure out, her name is on our Amazon Prime account. And our Sony Bluray player and our Roku smart TV are both registered to Amazon Prime Video—so obviously in her name.
Now, we do not get cell phone coverage at our house, so all our external internet network access goes through our internet ISP. And the way that works is that, to the internet, every device in our house has the same IP address.
So something managed to figure out that her gmail account was associated with our external IP address, and also that same IP address was associated with the Amazon Prime Video account, and that her gmail account is accociated with that Amazon account. Therefore every device in our house that contacts the external internet has some sort of connection to her gmail address.
At home, the Android smartphones and the tablet can only access the internet via our internal network, on WIFI, since we get no cell coverage. So if somebody puts all these pieces together it is easy to figure out the connections.
Google managed to figure it all out. Took them 2 days.

Heads up.

Because It’s Time Again

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Especially on this day….

I got fired from my job because I kept asking my customers whether they would prefer “Smoking” or “Non-smoking.”
Apparently the correct terms are “Cremation” and “Burial.”

An Englishman and an Irishman go to a bakery. The Englishman steals three buns and puts them into his pockets and leaves. He says to the Irishman: “That took great skill and guile to steal those buns. The owner didn’t even see me.”
“That’s just simple thievery,” the Irishman replied. “I’ll show you how to do it the honest way and get the same results.”
The Irishman then proceeded to call out the owner of the bakery and says: “Sir, I want to show you a magic trick.” The owner was intrigued so he came over to see the magic trick.
The Irishman asked him for a bun and then he proceeded to eat it. He asked two more times and after eating them again the owner says: “Okay my friend, where’s the magic trick?”
The Irishman then said: “Look in the Englishman’s pockets.”

A Priest and a Rabbi walk into a bar; the Minister ducked.

“Hey, I’ve got a great new joke for you,” the barman says.
The NSA agent smiles. “Heard it.”

A grasshopper walks into a bar, bartender says, “Hey we have a drink named after you.”
Grasshopper says, “Really? You have a drink named Larry?”

The past, present, and future walk into a bar.
It was tense.

A Frenchman walks into a bar with a cat on his shoulder.
The cat is wearing a little baseball cap.
“Hey, that’s neat,” says the bartender. “Where did you get that?”
“France,” the kitty says, “they’ve got millions of them!”

Infinitely many mathematicians walk into a bar.
The first says, “I’ll have a beer.”
The second says, “I’ll have half a beer.”
The third says, “I’ll have a quarter of a beer.”
Before anyone else can speak, the barman fills up exactly two glasses of beer and serves them. “Come on, now,” he says to the group, “You guys have got to learn your limits.”

Knock, knock
Who’s there?
To.
To who?
No, to whom.

Q: What has four legs and one arm?
A: A happy pit bull.

And finally,

What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?

Paying Their Fair Share

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Progressive-Democrats, including their Presidential candidates, are fond of saying the Evil Rich aren’t paying their fair share in taxes; they should pay more.  Those same Progressive-Democrats also carefully decline to say what that fair share should be, other than their “more.”

Here’s a graph of what those Evil Rich do pay, compared with the income those same Evil Rich earn, courtesy of the Center of the American Experiment:

Notice that. That’s even after those Evil Rich have taken all the adjustments to their top line income that our tax code allows them to take, including the Progressive-Democrats’ much disliked preferential tax treatment for capital gains and interest income.

The graph shows the rates for the top 50%.  The top 10% pays a skosh over 70% of all income taxes paid Uncle Sugar, while earning only a bit under 48% of the private sector’s income.

Ninety per cent, seventy per cent—in what way are these not the Evil Rich’s fair share, much less more than their fair share?  Especially compared to those bottom 50% who earn a bit over 10% of the private sector’s income, but pay only 3%?

The Progressive-Democrats won’t say. The only conclusion is that they consider the fair share to be “all of it.”

The Right Answer

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) is outraged. Outraged, he says.

It is outrageous that the wealthiest corporate executives in America get unlimited, special tax privileges on hundreds of millions of dollars in savings, while ordinary workers can only get tax deferment of up to $19,500 on their 401(k)s[.]

Of course, the (Democratic) Socialist’s answer is to raise taxes on those executives’ savings, their executive retirement and deferred compensation accounts.  He wants to “sharply curb” the tax benefits associated with those accounts. Because, after all, there comes a time when they’ve made enough money. And they didn’t earn that money, anyway; they had help.

Never mind that however earned, it’s certainly not Government’s money; it’s still the earner’s money. Never mind that Government has no business dictating to any of the citizens who employ it how much “enough” is.

Never mind, either, that yeah, they did earn the money. They took the risks—exacerbated by excessive Government regulation—they put in the time and sweat. And the help they had—their employees, not Government—were well paid. Even the low/no skill minimum wage worker was well paid for the value of his work—those, that is, who were able to stay employed or to find work in the first place after Government minimum wage diktats priced them out of low/no skill required jobs.

No, the right answer does not include capping the success of the most successful or increasing the tax bite on those most successful.  Success isn’t capped just on the Evil Rich, though.  The success on all of us is capped: that tax deferment limit doesn’t only apply to our 401(k)s; there are even more draconian caps on our 403(b)s, our Traditional IRAs, our Roth IRAs.  Those caps are not the right answer, either; they’re part of the same error.

Capping success, though, is all this (Democratic) Socialist and his Progressive-Democratic Party confreres know to do.

The right answer, the non-socialist answer, the free market capitalist answer, is to stop capping success.  Leave off the attempts to confiscate the proceeds of executive success and eliminate the caps on the tax deferability of the contributions the rest of us make to our savings and retirement accounts. The money in those accounts and the money we could contribute additionally, were those caps eliminated, also is not Government’s money. It’s ours.

And so is our success.

Full stop.

Campaigning Against a Burgeoning Economy

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In an op-ed in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, Alan Blinder outlined several lines of attack that Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidates could campaign against our present burgeoning economy (the stock market dislocation notwithstanding, as even Blinder acknowledges is irrelevant).

Here is just one of Blinder’s several…misconceptions:

[S]he [Judy Shelton] argued in these pages last September that the Fed should “pursue a more coordinated relationship with both Congress and the president.” Oh my.

Well, of course the Federal Reserve Bank, the Congress, and the President should coordinate so as to not be working at cross purposes. Coordination in no way puts the Fed’s independence at risk.

Beyond that, no President is capable of threatening the Fed’s independence. That independence is statutorily mandated, it’s not a creation of any Executive Order.

Oh my, indeed.

Read the whole piece, at the link, to see the rest of Blinder’s foolishnesses.