Open Mic April 27

I’m not con­vinced that the Cyber Intel­li­gence Shar­ing (CISPA) bill passed by the House would make us any safer.  “Vol­un­tary” infor­ma­tion shar­ing to avoid reg­u­la­tions being imposed on busi­nesses is nei­ther vol­un­tary nor reg­u­la­tion free.  If Google is giv­ing the gov­ern­ment carte blanche access to my infor­ma­tion, that’s not being “secure in [my] person[s], house[s], papers, and effects, against unrea­son­able searches and seizures.“
 
First, I think CISPA is an undue inva­sion into our pri­vacy, even with the Rogers/​Ruppersberger Amend­ment lim­it­ing gov­ern­ment use of cyber infor­ma­tion to only 1) cyber­se­cu­rity; 2) pros­e­cu­tion of cyber­se­cu­rity crimes; 3) pro­tec­tion  from death or seri­ous bod­ily harm; 4) pro­tec­tion of minors from child pornog­ra­phy; and 5) national secu­rity, and the Abash Amend­ment restrict­ing access to library records, med­ical records, gun sales, and tax infor­ma­tion.  With “cloud” com­put­ing and more and more of people’s pri­vate lives being stored online, the “restric­tions” are out-​​dated almost as soon as they are writ­ten.  The gov­ern­ment shouldn’t be able to see my pri­vate infor­ma­tion from the pri­vate com­pa­nies with which I inter­act with­out a war­rant and just cause. 
 
Sec­ond, I never buy it when someone–especially the government–says to just give them every­thing and they’ll ignore what they’re not sup­posed to see.  Yeah, right.  Well-​​intentioned amend­ments or not, the gov­ern­ment would have far too much access into infor­ma­tion that should remain pri­vate.  At some point, some­one will bend the rules with an “ends jus­ti­fies the means” excuse.  No, if the Feds wanna read my email, they should have to get a war­rant first.
 
Third, what if they stum­ble across other “ille­gal” behav­ior that doesn’t hap­pen to fall under the restricted areas of library records and gun pur­chases?  For exam­ple, if you crack a few too many online jokes about smok­ing weed, do they pass off a tip to nar­cotics enforce­ment? What if you live in Cal­i­for­nia, or another state where “med­ical mar­i­juana” is legal?  Are they vio­lat­ing your med­ical infor­ma­tion or not? Or maybe they’re sift­ing through finan­cial records (not restricted) and find “sus­pi­cious” trans­fers of funds, but those fund trans­fers had noth­ing to do with the 5 approved areas of con­cern?  Do they pass that tip along too? 
 
Fourth, the infor­ma­tion glut can cause more prob­lems than it solves.  Even with smart-​​filtering, they’ll get thou­sands more false-​​positives that they will waste resources try­ing  to chase down, all with­out prob­a­ble cause for even see­ing the infor­ma­tion. You might say some­thing innocu­ous in a Face­book chat that some­how trig­gers an alert, and sud­denly the FBI (and maybe CIA) are sift­ing through your life.  (Maybe Dad cracks jokes about his naked baby tak­ing a bath which trig­gers a child porn alert?)  No.  Not cool.  And while they’re wast­ing time with you, they’ll miss the real threats.
 
And that’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure I can come up with a fifth, sixth, and even sev­enth objec­tion if I think a lit­tle more…  Where’s Ron Paul to be scream­ing about inva­sion of pri­vacy and indi­vid­ual lib­erty when you need him?

Regard­ing RCP’s clas­si­fi­ca­tion as Likely vs. Lean vs. Toss-​​Up, it looks like they’re using a com­bi­na­tion of cur­rent polling infor­ma­tion and past per­for­mance (and prob­a­bly just some “gut feel”), because the num­bers don’t like up exactly with the cur­rent polling mar­gins.
 
On the Obama side, with excep­tions as noted:
– All of the “Leans Obama” states are between +9 and +12 for Obama
– All of the “Likely Obama” states are +13 or bet­ter for Obama
– The excep­tions:
Maine “Leans D” but polling at +18 for Obama
New Mex­ico “Lean D” but polling at +16 for Obama.
Con­necti­cut is “Likely D” but  only polling at+9 for Obama.

All of the Toss-​​Ups are between +4 for Rom­ney and +8 for Obama.
 
On the Rom­ney side, with excep­tions as noted:
– The “Leans Rom­ney” states are all between +6 and +12 for Rom­ney
– The “Likely Rom­ney” states are mostly +13 or bet­ter for Rom­ney
– The excep­tions:
Ten­nessee (+5.3), South Dakota (+6), Texas (+7), and Ken­tucky (+8) also get “Likely Rom­ney” despite polling lower than most of the “Lean” states.

BTW, the new quote of the week regard­ing tuition is almost exactly the same thing my Dad says all the time when he wants to com­plain about my broth­ers’ edu­ca­tion costs.  Sup­pos­edly, when Dad went to school, he could work part time (20 hours per week) at min­i­mum wage and make enough to cover tuition (<$1000), room, board, and books. He doesn’t usu­ally men­tion that he also had a car and cash left over for movies and dates, but I know these things based on the sto­ries about how he and Mom met…  He grad­u­ated debt free, is quite proud of it, and doesn’t hes­i­tate to let his kids know how “irre­spon­si­ble” we are if we can’t do the same.  Hate to say it, Dad, but tuition prices have risen a bit since then.
 
Cur­rently, 20 hours per week at min­i­mum wage (~$5800-$7500, depend­ing how many weeks) won’t even cover the tuition at most state uni­ver­si­ties. If I recall, the aver­age in-​​state cost in 2008 was almost $13,000, which does not include room, board, books, etc, and most uni­ver­si­ties have hiked rates even fur­ther since then. Room, board, and books are about another $10,000 per year, so a part-​​time minimum-​​wage job doesn’t even cover a third of the annual cost of a col­lege edu­ca­tion at a state insti­tu­tion, let alone the ridicu­lous costs at a pri­vate insti­tu­tion where tuition aver­ages more than $25,000 per year. Even work­ing full-​​time 40 hrs per week for all 52 weeks ($7.25*40*52=$15,080) won’t cover the cost of a year of school, and that doesn’t leave much time for study­ing or attend­ing classes.
 
Grad­u­at­ing debt free just isn’t an option for most stu­dents unless Mommy and Daddy already have enough saved to cover the costs them­selves, and that isn’t likely to hap­pen unless Mommy and Daddy are in the top income quin­tile already.

@Michael

I’m par­tic­u­larly dis­ap­pointed that the util­ity com­pa­nies are opposed to man­dated min­i­mum secu­rity stan­dards. The state of cyber­se­cu­rity in the util­i­ties is shameful.

Indeed. And the alleged pur­pose of CISPA was to avoid reg­u­lat­ing busi­nesses. It’s like Con­gress is say­ing, “Just share every­thing with us, and we’ll take care of it.”  Really, and that will make us safer or improve pri­vacy?  More likely, they’ll find out about a cyber­at­tack after the fact. It may give them eas­ier access to infor­ma­tion for find­ing the per­pe­tra­tors, but noth­ing they couldn’t get with a war­rant already, espe­cially after the attack.
 
What’s needed are decent secu­rity pro­to­cols that pre­vent an attack, and that’s not accom­plished by giv­ing some­one else (whether gov­ern­ment or oth­er­wise) essen­tially unhin­dered access to the data.

@rgbact
 
I wouldn’t mind a bit of rail­ing at the costs of col­lege, espe­cially the out-​​sized com­pen­sa­tion pack­ages that some coaches get.  But, then again, a win­ning foot­ball or bas­ket­ball pro­gram often brings in more rev­enues, so to a school it may be worth the cost. 
 
I think some of the prob­lem is that some states are kick­ing in less and less of the cost, so the schools have to pass that cost on to their stu­dents. (Cal­i­for­nia comes to mind, as one exam­ple.)  I don’t know of any pro­fes­sors that I would con­sider “over­paid” based on their edu­ca­tion, expe­ri­ence, and pres­tige, so that’s not the prob­lem.  How­ever, changes in state fund­ing can’t be the whole pic­ture, because pri­vate uni­ver­sity tuition also has risen rapidly. We’re look­ing at 7–10% tuition hikes com­pared to 2–3% infla­tion rates com­pounded over sev­eral years.  Are the endow­ments shrink­ing that much?  I’ve done a lit­tle look­ing, but those num­bers are hard to find.

@Michael
Per­haps I’m exag­ger­at­ing a bit because I don’t like the law. Of course cause analy­sis can help pre­vent futurre attacks, assum­ing that analy­sis is acted upon.  The prob­lem (as I see it) is that there are already plenty of things they could do to improve secu­rity before an  attack, but they’re avoid­ing these things because they “don’t want to increase reg­u­la­tion.”  So, even if there’s superb root cause analy­sis post fact, what assur­ances do I have that any lessons learned will actu­ally be acted upon?  Or will more fear of reg­u­la­tion par­a­lyze them…
 
 

@Mainer

Pretty tough sit­u­a­tion when peo­ple can’t get jobs because they do not have the required train­ing or edu­ca­tion and the work they can get does not allow them to make enough money to get the training.

Absolutely.
 

@Michael
 
Com­par­a­tive num­bers are dif­fi­cult to find, but I was able to find this study that com­pared 1970 salaries to 1990 salaries in 1990 dol­lars. A sur­pris­ing ele­ment to me was that pro­fes­sors at pri­vate insti­tu­tions were on aver­age paid less than those at pub­lic insti­tu­tions, though the gap had almost closed by 1990, and the trend lines were sim­i­lar.  From what I gather, salaries for pro­fes­sors in 1970 were at a rel­a­tive high, then dropped to a rel­a­tive low in 1980, then climbed back to almost the same 1970 level by 1990.  The paper sug­gests that such trends are nor­mal and cycli­cal, and based on recent salary trends at the Uni­ver­si­ties that I am aware of, pro­fes­sor salaries have been rel­a­tively flat or falling for about a decade now.
 
So, while tuitions are climb­ing at 7%, pro­fes­sor salaries have cer­tainly not kept pace. Assum­ing my math is right, the “aver­age” pro­fes­sor in 1970 would prob­a­bly be mak­ing about the same in inflation-​​adjusted dol­lars as a pro­fes­sor today.

@DC
 
I don’t know about the women in the study, but if a woman takes a pay hit for tak­ing mater­nity leave, then that pay hit is com­pounded after she returns to the work­force, because once you get behind, it’s nearly impos­si­ble to catch up with­out chang­ing careers.  If 5 years after mater­nity leave she’s $5K behind, then after 10 years maybe $7K, and the dif­fer­ence just keeps get­ting greater.  Same thing hap­pens to mil­i­tary reserves return­ing from being called up to active duty, btw.  They come back at “the exact same pay” that they had when they left, which puts them a cou­ple of years behind their peers salary-​​wise.  Most com­pa­nies struc­ture raises based on per­cent­ages rather than fixed amounts, (i.e. 5% instead of $2000), which means the per­cent­ages com­pound over time.
 
The other aspect (which is more to Max’s point) is whether women should be compensated/​encouraged to breast­feed for six months as is rec­om­mended by pedi­a­tri­cians because of the mul­ti­tudi­nous health ben­e­fits for both mother and child.  Unfor­tu­nately, this is one of those things where there really is a dif­fer­ence in the sexes, because fathers don’t have the option of doing the 6 months of breast-​​feeding on behalf of their wives.  Even if the mother keeps work­ing and daddy stays home, the mother is still the one who needs a break every few hours to go pump milk.  The ques­tion we should ask is whether we want to penal­ize women dis­pro­por­tion­ately for the bio­log­i­cal require­ments of bring­ing forth healthy mem­bers of the next gen­er­a­tion.  The 6 months of breast­feed­ing now might save thou­sands of dol­lars in allergy treat­ments and other med­ical care that won’t be needed later.  Might even save mil­lions in breast can­cer treat­ments that Mom avoids.  But because Mom makes that choice for her and her baby’s future health, she takes a big hit on her life­time earn­ings and future Social Secu­rity ben­e­fits.  For those on the mar­gins, it becomes a choice she can’t afford to make, which actu­ally ends up cost­ing all of us more in the long run.

Any­one else see the Obama campaign’s new “For­ward” video?
 
What do folks think?  Effec­tive?  Lame?  Inspir­ing? Dis­mal?  Will it only rev up the already com­mit­ted Obama sup­port­ers, or does it have per­sua­sive poten­tial? 
 
I’m sure that most Democ­rats will love the recap of Obama accom­plish­ments and the reminders of how far we’ve climbed back since the bot­tom of 2008, but I can also already hear the Repub­li­can jokes that  sug­gest he’s had the coun­try in Reverse for the past three years, and now he wants to go Forward…