The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Once more, with policy

Paul Krugman points out, one more time, that we haven't solved the root problems that led to our 5+-year recession:

Suppose you’re a hedge fund manager, getting 2 and 20 — fees of 2 percent of investors’ money, plus 20 percent of profits. What you want to do is load up on as much leverage as possible, and make high-risk, high return investments. This more or less guarantees that your fund will eventually go bust — but in the meantime you’ll have raked in huge personal earnings, and can walk away filthy rich from the wreckage.

What brings this to mind is a new Center for Public Integrity report on the lifestyles of the rich and infamous — finance honchos who brought down their companies and much of the world economy with them. So, Lehman’s Dick Fuld gets to ruminate on what went wrong in his Greenwich mansion or his 40-acre ranch, or maybe his 5-bedroom house in Florida. Jimmy Cayne of Bear Stearns plays bridge from his $25 million apartment in the Plaza Hotel. And so on down the line.

So it really was heads they win, tails we lose, with all the incentives being to take maximum risks and let the taxpayers clean up the mess.

Luckily, it won’t happen again, because we’ve had comprehensive financial reform. Right? Right?

As one commenter wrote, "The Occupy Wall Street folks were on to something."

AP: Syria to join UN Convention on Chemical Weapons

If the AP report is true, this is a complete win for the President:

Assad is now agreeing to preserve and strengthen that norm. He’s agreeing to sign the treaty banning chemical weapons — a treaty Syria has been one of the lone holdouts against. He’s creating a situation in which it would be almost impossible for him to use chemical weapons in the future, as doing so would break his promises to the global community, invite an immediate American response, and embarrass Russia.

This is, in many ways, a better outcome than the White House could have hoped for. Punishing Syria may or may not have actually reinforced the norm against chemical weapons — particularly if the strikes went bad and the American people punished members of Congress who voted for them. But Syria joining the treaty against chemical weapons definitely, almost definitionally, reinforces the ban.

This we call "diplomacy." And it's good to see when it works.

Institutional failure in Internet security

Security guru Bruce Schneier has two essays in the Guardian this week. The first explains how the US government betrayed the Internet:

By subverting the internet at every level to make it a vast, multi-layered and robust surveillance platform, the NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. The companies that build and manage our internet infrastructure, the companies that create and sell us our hardware and software, or the companies that host our data: we can no longer trust them to be ethical internet stewards.

I have resisted saying this up to now, and I am saddened to say it, but the US has proved to be an unethical steward of the internet. The UK is no better. The NSA's actions are legitimizing the internet abuses by China, Russia, Iran and others. We need to figure out new means of internet governance, ones that makes it harder for powerful tech countries to monitor everything. For example, we need to demand transparency, oversight, and accountability from our governments and corporations.

Unfortunately, this is going play directly into the hands of totalitarian governments that want to control their country's internet for even more extreme forms of surveillance. We need to figure out how to prevent that, too. We need to avoid the mistakes of the International Telecommunications Union, which has become a forum to legitimize bad government behavior, and create truly international governance that can't be dominated or abused by any one country.

He followed up today with a guide to staying secure against the NSA:

1) Hide in the network. Implement hidden services. Use Tor to anonymize yourself. Yes, the NSA targets Tor users, but it's work for them. The less obvious you are, the safer you are.

2) Encrypt your communications. Use TLS. Use IPsec. Again, while it's true that the NSA targets encrypted connections – and it may have explicit exploits against these protocols – you're much better protected than if you communicate in the clear.

There are three other points, all pretty simple.

How to lie with statistics, UK-style

I'm a big fan of the Ed and Dave show, also known as Prime Minister's Questions, which C-SPAN airs live when the House of Commons is in session. Today's game included a series of set pieces in which Conservative MPs had batting practice with the PM who hit a bunch of pop-ups that any competent infielder should have caught.*

Unfortunately, Ed Milliband leads the Labour Party right now, and—continuing the metaphor into extra innings—his side of the house play like Cubs.

Here's a typical exchange:

Christopher Pincher (Tamworth) (Con):
Since we last met there has been a spate of good economic news, both in Tamworth and around the country. Unemployment is down and the economy is growing. Manufacturing is up, exports are up and construction is up. Is it not time for those who still propose it to stop messing around, give it up and abandon plan B?

The Prime Minister:
My hon. Friend makes an important point. We have had welcome news over the summer: exports are up 5.8% on a year ago, business confidence is at its highest level since January 2008, consumer confidence is up and all the figures on construction, manufacturing and services are going in the right direction. We must not be complacent—these are early days—but it is because of the tough decisions that this Government took that we can now see progress.

We ought to remember that Labour Members told us that unemployment would go up, but it has come down, and that the economy would go backwards, but it has gone forwards. It is time for them to explain that they were wrong and we were right.

OK, since the Labour Party couldn't explain why the Conservatives were wrong, let me try. It's great that the UK's economy has improved in the last six years, but it could have grown faster without the Tory Party's emphasis on cutting the deficit. A lot faster. In fact, Tory policies probably delayed the recovery by 18 months to two years.

My larger point is this: neither side got it right. But to quite literally sit there and take it seems like bad politics. Especially since we got this exchange right at the end of Questions:

John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab):
Is it not the case that real wages have fallen by nearly £1,500 a year since the right hon. Gentleman became Prime Minister?

The Prime Minister:
Of course we live in tough times because of the incredible mess we have had to clear up from the Opposition. I have to say that the Opposition complaining about the economy and living standards is like the arsonist complaining to the fire brigade. It is this Government who are turning the economy around, and that is the way we will get living standards up.

Shit and fried eggs, you've got half a million more people in work since 2010, but they're all earning less money? And the Labour MPs have no response? (At least two other Labour back-benchers got in some facts about the profiteering of free—i.e., charter—schools and the £3.3 bn in energy company profits coinciding with an average £300 per-household increase in energy costs. I've indirectly experienced those high energy costs, too.)

Also towards the end, an old reactionary Tory hawk, Dr. Julian Lewis, trashed the Tories' coalition partners, causing nearly all of them to walk out of the House during the session. Oh, not by himself; I think most of them left when Cameron suggested that the Conservatives would rule alone after the next election that the Lib-Dems had had enough.

Oy. At least we've got nearly two years before the next election, giving the Tories a lot more time to screw people. I hope the Labour Party figures out how to win some matches before May 2015.

* Can I use a baseball metaphor when discussing the UK? Of course I can.

Forgot to post this

As London continues to suffer with perfect weather this weekend, I'm taking a moment to get in from the cool sunny breezes and small cumulus clouds obscuring almost 10% of the sky. Yesterday the temperature soared to an unimaginable 24°C, causing Londoners to seek solace by standing outside pubs in groups drinking lagers. Today things have cooled off to more realistic levels (19°C right now), but the sun continues to make Londoners miserable and wait the restoration of normal weather.

Anyway, I've been meaning to post this map, which shows the U.S. population by race—one dot per person. Here's Chicago:

The yellow area south and west of the Loop are mostly African-Americans; you can see the abrupt change where the Austin neighborhood meets Oak Park on the west side. White people are blue dots, so purple-ish areas are well-integrated, while bluer areas are not.

Other parts of the country have different stories. Play with the map and take a look.

Great news in tax law

The IRS has (correctly, I believe) ruled that legally-married couples get to file joint returns. All legally-married couples:

All legally married same-sex couples will now be recognized for U.S. federal tax purposes the same way as their heterosexual counterparts, the Obama administration said on Thursday.

As expected after a landmark Supreme Court ruling in June, the U.S. Treasury and Internal Revenue Service said:

“The ruling applies regardless of whether the couple lives in a jurisdiction that recognizes same-sex marriage or a jurisdiction that does not recognize same-sex marriage.”

I believe there was no other possible result under the Internal Revenue Code now that DOMA is dead, but I'm glad that the IRS saw fit to underscore the point.

Two years for law school

Former law professor Barack Obama makes the case:

“This is probably controversial to say, but what the heck, I’m in my second term so I can say it,” Obama said during a stop at the State University of New York at Binghamton. “I believe, for example, that law schools would probably be wise to think about being two years instead of three years because [….] in the first two years young people are learning in the classroom.”

In the third year, he said, “they’d be better off clerking or practicing in a firm, even if they weren’t getting paid that much. But that step alone would reduce the cost for the student.”

He continued: “Now, the question is, ‘Can law schools maintain quality and keep good professors and sustain themselves without that third year?’ My suspicion is, is that if they thought creatively about it, they probably could.”

The remarks apparently were made off-the-cuff, and no further details were available from the White House. But experts said the notion – although not new itself, as American law schools were two-year endeavors through the 19th century – is gaining traction.

Wow, I wish there had been a two-year plan when I was a law student. For one thing, 1998 would have been a lot more fun for me. I found some of my third-year courses interesting, and in a couple of cases (Wills, Copyright) genuinely useful. But I'd already decided by third year that I had no intention of practicing.

If I'd actually wanted to practice law after earning my JD, then my third year would have been worse than useless. I may have made other choices—clinics instead of content courses, for example—but I'd still have spent a lot of money without gaining a lot of practical experience.

States change their minds about USA/AMR merger

Last week the Justice Department and several states, including Texas and Florida, sued to stop the American—US Airways merger. Today a couple of them realized their error:

Political and business officials in Florida, Texas and North Carolina are asking the U.S. to reconsider its suit to block the proposed merger of American Airlines and U.S. Airways, saying the combined company would benefit their local economies.

Florida, Texas and North Carolina...are home to large hubs for both airlines.

American Airlines, which sought Chapter 11 protection in late 2011, is one of the largest private employers in Miami-Dade County. The carrier operates around 70 percent of the flights at the Miami airport, making it a dominant hub for flights to and from Latin America. Local officials have long promoted Miami as the “Gateway to the Americas.”

Yeah, I didn't understand that four of the six states who joined the Justice Department suits (these three plus Arizona) contain four of the five largest hubs of the two airlines—including the airlines' headquarters (American in Texas and US Airways in Arizona).

Even though I thought there would be a challenge to the merger, after I thought about how the challenge actually went down, it didn't make any sense. Obviously the people who depend on American and US Airways for their livelihoods agree.

Bike-sharing NIMBYs

Chicago has recently rolled out a several hundred DIVVY bike sharing stations, similar to the Citi Bike scheme in New York. For a small annual fee, or a moderate per-hour charge, you can take a bike from any DIVVY bike station and ride it to any other station within two hours. (The two-hour time limit keeps the bikes in circulation.) The city has a hundred or so stations now, with a couple thousand bikes.

Of course, not everyone is happy about the bikes, which help cut pollution, reduce traffic and noise, and are greenhouse-negative. A three-unit condo association near Wrigley Field sued the city yesterday because they don't want Those People on their block:

David Kolin and his wife, Jeannine Cordero, learned Tuesday that the area in front of their North Side condo building soon would be home to a Divvy bike-sharing station, one of hundreds the Chicago Department of Transportation is installing across the city.

"We don't think it's appropriate in a residential area to have this thing set up," said Kolin, an attorney. "It's not a very attractive thing to have. It's led to crowds already."

"It's hideous," added Cordero, also a lawyer. "It's less than 20 steps from our front door."

"We are aware of the request from a few residents to relocate the Divvy station away from their building on Pine Grove Avenue near Addison Street," CDOT spokesman Pete Scales said in a statement. "This residential street location was determined to be the safest for customers near the busy intersection of Addison and Lake Shore Drive. It is located in the public way, close to the curb on the street, and not on any private property."

It would have to be a pair of attorneys, wouldn't it? You don't like the bike rack on the city street in front of your house...why?

All I can say is, Mr Kolin and Ms Cordero: STFU.