The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Illinois ban on taping police is unconstitutional

Just now:

The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from the Cook County state's attorney to allow enforcement of a law prohibiting people from recording police officers on the job.

The justices on Monday left in place a lower court ruling that found that the state's anti-eavesdropping law violates free speech rights when used against people who tape law enforcement officers.

The law set out a maximum prison term of 15 years.

Last May, a federal appeals court in Chicago ruled that the law “likely violates” the First Amendment and ordered that authorities be banned from enforcing it.

Good. Since it only takes four justices to grant certiorari, this means that at least six of them agreed with the 7th Circuit. It was a bad law, and shame on Anita Alvarez for attempting prosecutions based on it.

New variety of northern bear?

Via Sullivan, a new variety of bear has appeared in Canada because of climate change:

One such sign [of environmental pressure on bears] is the emergence of a new creature in the polar bear’s range, first spotted in the wild in 2006 near Sachs Harbour, Northwest Territories. It’s got a long neck like a polar bear, but it’s smaller. It lies and behaves like a polar bear, but it has shoulder humps. The new creature has hairy paw soles like a polar bear, but its hair is mostly solid, with only patches of hollow hair.

As caribou migration routes have moved North, grizzlies have followed and started mating with polar bears. Not only have they produced hybrid young, but those young are fertile. Polar bears and grizzlies only diverged about 150,000 years ago and haven’t developed many genetic differences, despite quite dramatic visual dissimilarities. Second-generation hybrids have now been confirmed in the wild.

This kind of thing isn't new, but we don't often see it with large predators. On the other hand, about 30,000 years ago, another large predator moved into a cousin species' territory as the earth warmed up, and interbred, and went on to invent blogs.

It's not a skills gap; it's a wage gap

Via Krugman, economist Adam Davidson explains why businesses can't find the right people:

And yet, even as classes like Goldenberg’s are filled to capacity all over America, hundreds of thousands of U.S. factories are starving for skilled workers. Throughout the campaign, President Obama lamented the so-called skills gap and referenced a study claiming that nearly 80 percent of manufacturers have jobs they can’t fill. Mitt Romney made similar claims. The National Association of Manufacturers estimates that there are roughly 600,000 jobs available for whoever has the right set of advanced skills.

Eric Isbister, the C.E.O. of GenMet, a metal-fabricating manufacturer outside Milwaukee, told me that he would hire as many skilled workers as show up at his door. Last year, he received 1,051 applications and found only 25 people who were qualified. He hired all of them, but soon had to fire 15. Part of Isbister’s pickiness, he says, comes from an avoidance of workers with experience in a “union-type job.” Isbister, after all, doesn’t abide by strict work rules and $30-an-hour salaries. At GenMet, the starting pay is $10 an hour. Those with an associate degree can make $15, which can rise to $18 an hour after several years of good performance. From what I understand, a new shift manager at a nearby McDonald’s can earn around $14 an hour.

The secret behind this skills gap is that it’s not a skills gap at all. I spoke to several other factory managers who also confessed that they had a hard time recruiting in-demand workers for $10-an-hour jobs.

Krugman summarizes:

Almost always, it turns out that what said business person really wants is highly (and expensively) educated workers at a manual-labor wage. No wonder they come up short.

[T]his dovetails perfectly with one of the key arguments against the claim that much of our unemployment is “structural”, due to a mismatch between skills and labor demand. If that were true, you should see soaring wages for those workers who do have the right skills; in fact, with rare exceptions you don’t.

Or as my dad has always said, "You get what you pay for."

All the stuff I've sent to Instapaper

Starting before 8am with an international conference call usually means I'll have a full day. Fortunately there's Instapaper, which lets me shove all the interesting things I find during the day onto my Android pad for tomorrow's bus ride to work.

So far today:

And...now back to work.

Why you shouldn't read emails right before going to bed

Because you might learn things neatly summed up in the headline "Petraeus Apparently Most Mentally Balanced Individual in His Own Scandal" "(From the Times …)":

Ms. Kelley, a volunteer with wounded veterans and military families, brought her complaint to a rank-and-file agent she knew from a previous encounter with the F.B.I. office, the official also said. That agent, who had previously pursued a friendship with Ms. Kelley and had earlier sent her shirtless photographs of himself, was “just a conduit” for the complaint, he said. He had no training in cybercrime, was not part of the cyber squad handling the case and was never assigned to the investigation.

But the agent, who was not identified, continued to “nose around” about the case...

Later, the agent became convinced — incorrectly, the official said — that the case had stalled. Because of his “worldview,” as the official put it, he suspected a politically motivated cover-up to protect President Obama. The agent alerted Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, who called the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, on Oct. 31 to tell him of the agent’s concerns.

Says Josh Marshall:

So basically this entire scandal both at the outset and in the denouement was driven by Freakshow FBI Agent X who both wanted to bed the victim of the alleged harassment and also decided that the FBI was covering up it’s investigation of the Tampa socialite to protect President Obama. And this because of his “worldview”. Please let us meet this awesome example of American law enforcement.

Now, I understand why David Patraeus lost his security clearance and, thus, his job, because of this affair. I also agree with commentators (including one of my co-workers) who said, "he resigned because of an affair? Really?" I don't think there's anything simple about the DCI conducting an affair using a pseudo-anonymous account on GMail that someone could discover without resorting to Bond-esque espionage.

But I think our nation's top law-enforcement agency, the FBI, deserve props for deciding that an investigation of a top political official that turned up nothing criminal should be announced only after one of the most divisive elections of the last 50 years. Law enforcement should not ever be political. We're a nation of laws, not men, as many have observed. Patraeus acted stupidly, but not criminally, and he's given up his career for it. Let him go quietly into the night.

As for the petty, partisan little man that broke the law to use Patraeus's resignation for political gain, he deserves the undying scrutiny of the U.S. Attorney for whatever district he lives in.

And full disclosure: I believe strongly that the DCI needs to give up certain things upon taking office, including GMail, Facebook, and bits on the side. I have no problem with human failings; but I object in the strongest terms to people in certain offices—Director of Central Intelligence and President of the United States included—engaging in any kind of personal deceit. Professional deceit? No problem with DCI or POTUS; that's part of the job. But Bill Clinton disappointed me deeply, and now, so did David Patraeus. And that's even before we talk about illegal drone strikes.

Was last Tuesday a close shave? Occam says "no"

Talking Points Memo has some smart readers. One of them crystallized the debate about whether the Romney campaign's shock after losing was genuine, or a ploy to inoculate themselves against the wrath of their donors:

There’s an old rule of political research: never ascribe to conspiracy what can be more easily explained by stupidity. Was the Romney campaign brilliant masterminds of a coordinated PR strategy to make themselves look stupid? Or we’re they just stupid?

Occam’s razor says the latter.

For background, read Josh Marshall's angst about how the Romney campaign could have missed the facts so completely, even though the campaign ran on a platform of denying evidence that disagreed with them.

The Romney campaign's software epic fail

Politico's Burns & Haberman explain:

[ORCA] was described as a mega-app for smartphones that would link the more than 30,000 operatives and volunteers involved in get-out-the-vote efforts. PBS profiled it a few days before the election. The app was created and managed by the Romney campaign and was kept a secret among a close circle in Boston, according to POLITICO sources.

It's been reported the system crashed at 4 p.m., but multiple sources familiar with the war room operation said it had actually been crashing throughout the day. Officials mostly got information about votes either from public news sources tracking data, like CNN.com, or by calling the counties for information, the source said. Officials insisted the day after the election that they had still believed they were close, and that they had hit their numbers where they needed to, even as Fox News and other outlets called the race.

The post links back to a Romney volunteer's description of how ORCA failed in the field:

On one of the last conference calls (I believe it was on Saturday night), they told us that our packets would be arriving shortly. Now, there seemed to be a fair amount of confusion about what they meant by "packet". Some people on Twitter were wondering if that meant a packet in the mail or a pdf or what. Finally, my packet arrived at 4PM on Monday afternoon as an emailed 60 page pdf. Nothing came in the mail. Because I was out most of the day, I only got around to seeing it at around 10PM Monday night. So, I sat down and cursed as I would have to print out 60+ pages of instructions and voter rolls on my home printer. ... They expected 75-80 year old veteran volunteers to print out 60+ pages on their home computers? The night before election day? From what I hear, other people had similar experiences. In fact, many volunteers never received their packets at all.

Now a note about the technology itself. For starters, this was billed as an "app" when it was actually a mobile-optimized website (or "web app"). For days I saw people on Twitter saying they couldn't find the app on the Android Market or iTunes and couldn't download it. Well, that's because it didn't exist. It was a website. This created a ton of confusion. Not to mention that they didn't even "turn it on" until 6AM in the morning, so people couldn't properly familiarize themselves with how it worked on their personal phone beforehand.

The project management antipatterns are apparent: Blowhard Jamboree, Smoke and Mirrors, Throw It Over the Wall, and basic Project Mismanagement, for starters. I haven't seen the code, but I can't imagine the management and deployment problems didn't lead to design and construction problems as well.

We software professionals have learned, through painful experience, that software developers have a better understanding of how to develop software than corporate executives. Go figure. Since Mitt Romney ran as a father-knows-best, authoritarian candidate, it should surprise no one that the people he hired couldn't run a software project.

Chicago electricity aggregation passes

Voters in the City of Chicago (including me) passed a referendum giving the city the authority to negotiate electricity prices on behalf of everyone. Implementation will be swift:

The timing of the deal is important because Chicagoans stand to save the most money over Commonwealth Edison's rate between now and June 2013, when ComEd's prices are expected to drop because pricey contracts they entered into years ago will expire. The timeline has Chicagoans moving to the new supplier in February 2013.

Michael Negron, deputy chief of policy and strategic planning for the mayor's office, said electricity suppliers have shown great interest in snagging Chicago's service. Nearly 100 people packed a conference Monday for the city's "request for qualifications" process. The bidders ranged from multi-billion corporations to smaller providers from all over the country, he said. Industry analysts say the deal could be worth hundreds of millions of dollar to the winning supplier or suppliers.

Residents and businesses may opt out of the scheme and negotiate supply prices separately. As readers of this blog know, I'm desperate for lower prices, and eagerly looking forward to my electric bills next year after the new rate deal hits right after I shut down the Inner Drive Technology Worldwide Data Center.

Consequences of the GOP losses in Illinois

Not only did the Republican Party lose 3 U.S. House seats in suburban Chicago, they also lost enough Illinois General Assembly seats to give the Democrats veto-proof majorities in both its chambers. Crain's sounds the alarm:

[T]he challenges we face are enormous and vexing.

To meet them, we need a viable, capable and credible opposition party. Put another way: We need Republicans to rethink their very reason for being. In the near term, that means the national GOP needs representatives and, eventually, candidates to come forward with serious policy proposals that have appeal beyond the party's ultra-conservative base. We need pragmatists who are ready to cooperate with Democrats to do the people's work. We need less of a fixation on the social issues that divide us and more of an emphasis on ideas and solutions to our shared problems as a state and as a nation.

As long as they're not raging extremists, I think having a thoughtful opposition helps any policy-making body. Olympia Snowe never bothered me much, for example. If that was the Republican Party (instead of, say, Michele Bachmann), I think the U.S. would be better off.

Also of note in local races, Joe Walsh not only lost his seat by a convincing margin, but he spent more money than anyone else in the state:

[I]n the three top Chicago-area congressional races, those who spent the most money — or had the most spent on their behalf — lost.

In each case, that was the Republican candidate.

The worst bang for the buck?

Tea Party Republican Joe Walsh. Each vote he won on Tuesday cost $70.

Walsh’s challenger, Tammy Duckworth, was a relatively good investment. Duckworth’s totals meant $39 a vote with $4.7 million in spending and 120,774 votes.

Thanks to the right-wing bonanza of Citizens United, this was the most expensive election in history, starting with the two Presidential campaigns spending about $800m each. Yes, readers in the UK: just the top line of the ballot cost us one thousand million pounds. Can you imagine the effects of even a tenth of that amount—£100m—on a political campaign in the UK?