Month: September 2017

Corporate Welfare Commission Decides Cheap Solar Panels Are Bad

Big corporations tend to be very friendly with big government because big government can help them monopolize their market. While this process of monopolization is bad for consumers, neither the government nor the corporations that have allied themselves with it give a damn. For example, solar power has become increasingly viable over the years thanks to cheap solar panels. However, these cheap panels are being produced overseas, where the lack of government restrictions makes it more viable to make cheap products. To compensate domestic solar panel manufacturers for the restrictions it put in place, the Corporate Welfare Commission, sometimes mistakenly referred to as the International Trade Commission (ITC), has ruled that overseas panels are a threat to domestic manufacturers:

On Friday, the International Trade Commission (ITC) sided with bankrupt solar panel manufacturer Suniva, voting 4-0 that cheap imported solar panels and modules have harmed domestic panel manufacturers.

The commission now has until November to send recommendations on remedies to President Trump, who will be responsible for either setting a tariff on imported solar materials or finding some other remedy. Given Trump’s promises to bolster American manufacturing, it’s likely that he’ll favor restrictions on solar panel imports.

I’m sure the ITC will settle on a tariff because the other remedy, removing government created restrictions from domestic manufacturers, is unthinkable. What does this mean for consumers? It means us consumers will be paying more for solar panels. This is a bit ironic since the government dumped so much money into encouraging manufacturers to make solar panels affordable in the first place. But what government giveth, government taketh away. It may favor cheap solar panels today and oppose them tomorrow.

APFS and FileValut

Apple released macOS High Sierra yesterday. Amongst other changes, High Sierra includes the new Apple File System (APFS), which replaces the decades old Hierarchical File System (HFS). When you install High Sierra, at least if your boot drive is a Solid State Drive (SSD), the file system is supposed to be automatically converted to APFS. Although Apple’s website says that FileVault encrypted drives will be automatically converted, it didn’t give any details.

I installed High Sierra on two of my systems last night. One was a 2012 MacBook Pro and the other was a 2010 Mac Mini. Both contain Crucial SSDs. Since they’re third-party SSDs I wasn’t sure if High Sierra would automatically convert them. I’m happy to report that both were converted automatically. I’m also happy to report that FileVault didn’t throw a wrench into the conversion. I was worried that converting a FileVault encrypted drive would require copying files from one encrypted container to a new encrypted container but that wasn’t necessary.

If you’re installing High Sierra on a FileVault encrypted drive, the conversion from HFS to APFS won’t take a noticeably greater amount of time.

Posing for Rockets and Bombs

Football season has started. I only know this because a bunch of people were once again arguing about the proper way to pose when that Rockets and Bombs song plays before the gladiatorial event commences.

How is this still a thing? How can people bring themselves to care deeply about how somebody else poses for a song? If you want to standup for Rockets and Bombs, then by all means do so. If you want to sit down, then do so. If somebody else doesn’t want to do the same thing as you, it won’t impact your life in any way whatsoever so don’t concern yourself with them.

When Being Arrested is Enough to Land You in Prison

A man is currently sitting in prison because he was arrested. Mind you, he wasn’t found guilty of anything but being arrested violated a condition of his parole so he’s not rotting in a cage again:

In March 2016, a year after Smith’s arrest, prosecutors dismissed the other charge against Smith — the drug crime — after the man who claimed the package of pot pleaded guilty, court records show.

“Your case is dismissed,” a judge told Smith, according to the transcript. “That’s the end of that, so, for you.”

The problem: Smith’s arrest was a violation of his parole. Such violations can send him back to prison. It doesn’t matter that the charges were dropped. And the ultimate arbiter of whether Smith violated his parole isn’t the judge or prosecutor, but the Tennessee Board of Parole. And that group of seven people, all appointed by the governor, has decided to keep Smith in prison.

Just another day in the freest country on Earth.

The whole point of parole (ideally, not in practice though) is to release individuals who haven’t demonstrated themselves to be dangerous on the condition that they behave themselves. However, including the stipulation that a parolee avoid being arrested takes control away from them because, as we all know, a law enforcer can arrest you for any damned reason they please. As the old saying goes, you might avoid the charge but you won’t avoid the ride.

But Wait, There’s More

Equifax already displayed a staggering level of incompetence but like a Billy Mays commercial there’s more:

The official Equifax Twitter account encouraged people to visit a knock-off website that mocks the company’s security practices instead of the site the company created to warn of a massive data breach. That recent breach exposed personal details for as many as 143 million US consumers.

In a tweet on Tuesday afternoon, an Equifax representative using the name Tim wrote: “Hi! For more information about the product and enrollment, please visit: securityequifax2017.com.” The message came in response to a question about free credit monitoring Equifax is offering victims. The site is a knock-off of the official Equifax breach notification site, equifaxsecurity2017.com. A security researcher created the imposter site to demonstrate how easy it is to confuse a legitimate name with a bogus one. The Equifax tweet suggests that even company representatives can be easily fooled. The tweet was deleted late Wednesday morning, more than 18 hours after it went live.

It’s almost as if large credit agencies like Equifax aren’t held accountable for screwing up and therefore aren’t motivated to do an effective job. Weird.

Statists continue to claim that government is necessary to deliver justice when large corporations like this screw up. However, I’m still waiting to see the government do anything more than give a corporation like this a minor slap on the wrist for fuck ups of this magnitude. Hell, I’m still waiting to see the government give Equifax a stern talking to over this series of amateur mistakes. As far as I can tell, government seems exists primarily to protect large corporations like this from competitors that would currently be tearing it apart if there was a free market.

NSA Told to Sod Off

After the National Security Agency (NSA) was caught cryptographic algorithms to enhance its surveillance abilities, trust for the agency fell to an all time low. This distrust lead the International Standards Organization (ISO) to reject two encryption algorithms recently submitted by the NSA:

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – An international group of cryptography experts has forced the U.S. National Security Agency to back down over two data encryption techniques it wanted set as global industry standards, reflecting deep mistrust among close U.S. allies.

In interviews and emails seen by Reuters, academic and industry experts from countries including Germany, Japan and Israel worried that the U.S. electronic spy agency was pushing the new techniques not because they were good encryption tools, but because it knew how to break them.

The NSA has now agreed to drop all but the most powerful versions of the techniques – those least likely to be vulnerable to hacks – to address the concerns.

The dispute, which has played out in a series of closed-door meetings around the world over the past three years and has not been previously reported, turns on whether the International Organization of Standards should approve two NSA data encryption techniques, known as Simon and Speck.

This is an appropriate response. The NSA has a track record of manipulating standards organizations in order to make its surveillance apparatus more effective. In security trust is everything. Since the NSA has proven itself to be untrustworthy, it only makes sense to reject any proposals from the agency.

Collectivizing Individual Action

The War on Some Drugs is justified by collectivizing individual action. According to its proponents, drug usage is a societal problem. They try to justify this claim by using other forms of collectivism. For example, proponents of the drug war will claim that drug usage costs “us” fantastic amounts of money in healthcare-related expenses. However, they can only make that claim because the government has collectivized a significant portion of the healthcare market. If the healthcare market were a free market, drug users would be left footing the expenses for their habit.

The drug war’s current hot topic is illegal opioid usage. In an attempt to make illegal opioid usage look like a societal problem, proponents of the drug war are now claiming that opioid usage has lowered the average life expectancy in the United States:

The problem is so bad, in fact, that the epidemic is dragging down the entire country’s life expectancy—by 2.5 months. That’s according to a new analysis by CDC researchers who published Tuesday in JAMA.

The problem with this statistic is that it’s completely meaningless.

Drug usage isn’t a communicable disease like plague or the flu. A drug user can’t transmit the effects of the drugs they’re using to you. Like them, you have to make a conscious decision to use drugs. If my neighbor down the street decides to use heroine, my life expectancy isn’t impacts in any way whatsoever. But if enough people actually realized that, the government would have a difficult time drumming up popular support for its very profitable war.

Minneapolis Police Not Using Body Cameras

The City of Minneapolis spent millions of dollars to equip its law enforcers with body cameras. It also created a policy of when its law enforcers are supposed to turn their body cameras on. That policy lacked any real consequences for officers who didn’t follow it. In an absolutely shocking turn of events, it turns out that Minneapolis law enforcers are willing to suffer the lack of consequences for not following the city’s policy:

Minneapolis police officers frequently fail to turn on their body-worn cameras, a City Council member said Monday, a day before the release of an audit detailing their use.

That was among findings of a two-month examination of the department’s body camera program, said Council Member Linea Palmisano, who reviewed the report over the weekend. It shows that most of the problems stem from a lack of accountability for officers who don’t activate their cameras when responding to calls or turn them off without explanation, she said.

“There’s some people who never have it on,” said Palmisano. “This is a very expensive program, and there isn’t oversight of this, and there isn’t governance.”

This is what happens when you put the foxes in charge of holding themselves accountable to the chickens. Body cameras have the potential to catch police officers behaving badly but that potential will remains unrealized so long as the officers wearing them get to decide when to turn them on. I feel pretty safe in saying that policy changes won’t make any difference. There is too much precedence for law enforcers disobeying policies and getting away with it.

Until the decision of when to turn on body cameras and control over any recorded video is taken away from law enforcers, those cameras will only serve to collect evidence against individuals who law enforcers want to see prosecuted.

Deploying the Slave Catchers

A higher up in the Spanish government heard the disconcerting (to him) sound of shackles breaking. Worried that some of his slaves were making a break for it, he deployed his slave catchers to restore order:

Spanish national police have stormed ministries and buildings belonging to Catalonia’s regional government to put a stop to the region’s independence referendum.

The Guardia Civil, which acts with the authority of Madrid’s interior ministry, is searching for evidence regarding the planned 1 October referendum on Catalan independence, which Spain’s Constitutional Court has declared illegal.

In the early hours of the morning armed officers arrived at various Catalan ministries, including the economy department, foreign affairs department, and social affairs department, Spanish media reports.

At least twelve Catalan officials are said to have been arrested, including the chief aide to Catalonia’s deputy prime minister, Josep Maria Jové. The arrests come as the mayors of Catalan towns who back the referendum were yesterday questioned by state prosecutors.

For those of you who haven’t been following the situation in Catalonia, the region has been wanting to declare itself independent on Spain for quite some time. This makes sense since Catalonia is the largest part of Spain’s economy and if you’ve looked at the economic situation in Spain, you know that the government there is desperate for successful people to exploit.

Unfortunately, Spain is doing everything in its power to ensure that the only way Catalonia will gain its independence is through civil war. The question will be whether the Catalonians want to pay that high of a price to break away from the boat anchor that is currently dragging them down.