Tag: You Can’t Cure Stupid

Government Databases

Every politician needs a boogeyman. The Democrats have decided that Russia is their boogeyman while Republicans have decided that immigrants are their boogeyman. While the Democrats pursue their boogeyman by claiming every Republican is a secret Russian agent, the Republicans have been working to ramp up harassment of immigrants. One method the Republicans have decided on is releasing private data on immigrants in the country:

Over the last month, the Trump administration has waged a war on the rights of immigrants and foreigners — including by issuing a policy that strips away basic privacy protections that have been provided by Democratic and Republican presidents for decades.

This policy shift was tucked into Trump’s immigration enforcement executive order released on January 25. It could let the Trump administration release the names and private information of non-U.S. citizens — including refugees, college students, tourists, and people here on work visas. The new policy could also make it easier for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to obtain information from other agencies that can be used to detain or deport people.

If the government didn’t have the data in the first place it wouldn’t be able to release it.

That’s the lesson people should be taking away from this. Government databases are always dangerous. Sure, they sound like a jolly good idea when your team is in power, especially if the databases are being used to store information about people you don’t like. But when the team you don’t like gets into power they’re granted access to every existing database, including those containing information about yourself and people you like.

If you’ve ever supported the government keeping data on people; whether it be on motorists, gun owners, or anybody who holds an ideology that you don’t agree with; then this recent development is the inevitable result of what you wanted.

Is Your Child’s Toy a Snitch

The Internet of Things (IoT) should be called the idiotic attempt to connect every mundane device to the Internet whether there’s a good reason or not. I admit that my more honest version is a mouthful but I believe it would remind people about what they’re actually buying and that could avoid fiasco like this:

Since Christmas day of last year and at least until the first week of January, Spiral Toys left customer data of its CloudPets brand on a database that wasn’t behind a firewall or password-protected. The MongoDB was easy to find using Shodan, a search engine makes it easy to find unprotected websites and servers, according to several security researchers who found and inspected the data.

The exposed data included more than 800,000 emails and passwords, which are secured with the strong, and thus supposedly harder to crack, hashing function bcrypt. Unfortunately, however, a large number of these passwords were so weak that it’s possible to crack them, according to Troy Hunt, a security researcher who maintains Have I Been Pwned and has analyzed the CloudPets data.

When you buy something you should ask yourself what the benefits and costs are. People often make the mistake of thinking that the cost is purely the amount you have to pay at the store. But there are always other hidden costs. In the case of these IoT stuffed animals one of the costs is brining a surveillance apparatus into your home. Sure, most people probably aren’t too worried about toy manufacturers having a bug in their home. But another cost is the risk of the remotely accessible surveillance device being accessed by an unauthorized party, which is what happened here.

The sordid history of security failures that plagues the IoT market should be considered whenever you’re buying an IoT product.

Everybody Wants Honesty Until They Get It

What happens when the police in a city are brutally honest about their intentions? People get upset:

CATLETTSBURG — An Eastern Kentucky police chief has removed large decals with the Punisher skull and “Blue Lives Matter” from eight police cars after a backlash following the publication of a Herald-Leader story.

The Catlettsburg Police department, which employs eight full-time and two part-time officers for a population of about 2,500, featured the images on the hoods of its 2013 and 2017 Ford Interceptor sedans and sport-utility vehicles, assistant police chief Gerry Hatzel said. The stylized skull was from “The Punisher” comic book series.

The Punisher is one of my favorite anti-heroes. He’s a no nonsense dude who straight up kills evildoers. Considering the way police act today, I can see why The Punisher would be an idol to them. Of course, The Punisher goes after bad guys whereas American police officers spend a vast majority of their time going after people who haven’t harmed anybody.

Still, I appreciate that the officers put a symbol on their cars that blatantly stated their intentions. But I understand that most people don’t appreciate such honesty so I would have expected this kind of outrage.

Let the Hunger Games Begin

The Minneapolis Institute of the Arts (MIA) had the pleasure of hosting a fight between some protesters and some people accused of being neo-Nazis:

A shoving match broke out in a most unlikely place, the typically serene Minneapolis Institute of Art, where three people who appeared to be neo-Nazis fought with several others in another group of activists, a witness said Sunday.

Security guards arrived at the mayhem Saturday afternoon on the museum’s third floor, broke up the confrontation and had one of the reputed neo-Nazis on the floor, said museum visitor Will Bildsten.

A friend of Bildsten’s said he saw punches thrown during the fracas.

Normally I wouldn’t share a random story about two groups getting into a scuffle in a museum. But the comments I’ve been hearing about this warrant some comment from me.

As you might expect, a lot of people have been cheering the activists who engaged the accused neo-Nazis. This is all part of the “Is it okay to punch a Nazi,” trend. One side believes violence is an unacceptable response to somebody exercising their free speech, regardless of how vile that speech is. The other side thinks people have a moral obligation to use force against anybody advocating fascism. It’s the second group I want to pan right now.

Why do I have a moral obligation to violently attack advocates of fascism but not advocates of Marxism–Leninism? In fact, many of the people demanding Nazis be violently attacked wherever they are are advocates of Marxism–Leninism. There is no meaningful difference between the two groups other than one is for national socialism while the other is for international socialism and they use different ways of labeling groups they want to wipe out.

Fascists want to wipe out Jews, Marxist–Leninists want to wipe out kulaks. Fascists want to wipe out people who aren’t white, Marxist–Leninists want to wipe out people who aren’t proletariats. Fascists want to wipe out opponents to fascism, Marxist-Leninists want to wipe out counter-revolutionaries. What’s especially interesting is that these different labels are often applied to the same groups of people. Jews are frequently labeled kulaks and bourgeois, for example.

All I’m asking for is some goddamn consistency. Those who are against using violence in response to any form of speech are already acting consistently. But if you believe it’s okay to punch a fascist then you should be equally fine with punching a Marxist-Leninist. Both philosophies are equally vile.

The Dumbest Thing You’ll Read All Day

I don’t think there’s anything I can add to this to make it more ridiculous:

Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) on Wednesday cautioned that a nuclear weapon could enter the U.S. under the cover of marijuana.

“We sometimes used to make the point that if someone wanted to smuggle a dangerous weapon into America, even a nuclear weapon, how would they do it?” he said on CNN. “The suggestion is, maybe we’ll hide it in a bale of marijuana. There are national security implications here for a porous border.

I guess smuggling nuclear warheads into the country on rockets was a bit expensive.

Insurance. You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

Some health insurance companies have started pilot programs where customers can receive a discount for wearing a fitness tracker and sharing the data with the company. This seems like a pretty straight forward idea. But according to Bloomberg it’s a sinister ploy:

Think about what that means for insurance. It’s meant to be a mechanism to pool risk — that is, to equalize the cost of protecting against unforeseen health problems. But once the big data departments of insurance companies have enough information — including about online purchases and habits — they can build a minute profile about each and every person’s current and future health. They can then steer “healthy” people to cheaper plans, while leaving people who have higher-risk profiles — often due to circumstances beyond their control — to pay increasingly unaffordable rates.

Whenever health insurance companies up I’m forced to explain what insurance is. I shouldn’t have to do this but nobody seems to know what it means.

Insurance is a way for multiple people to pool their resources for risk mitigation. Take home owner’s insurance for example. When you buy a home owner’s policy you’re donating some money to a common pool. Any paying customer can withdraw from the pool if they experience a situation, such as a house fire, that is covered by the insurance policy. Those with higher risks are more likely to withdraw from the pool so they pay a higher premium. Those with lower risks pay less.

Automobile insurance is the same way. Higher risk drivers; such as young males, people who have been found guilty of driving while intoxicated, people who have been found guilty of reckless driving, etc.; pay a higher premium because they’re more likely to withdraw from the community pool.

Most people accept that higher risk people should pay a higher premium for home owner’s or automobile insurance. But when they’re talking about health insurance they suddenly have a change of heart and think that higher risk people should pay the same as lower risk people. That makes no sense. Health insurance, like any other form of insurance, is pooled risk mitigation. If you live an unhealthy lifestyle you’re more likely to withdraw from the pool so you pay a higher premium. Oftentimes these risks are outside of your control, which sucks. However, if the pool empties, that is to say there are more withdrawals than deposits over a long enough period of time to completely drain the accounts, everybody loses their coverage. That being the case, higher risk people have to pay more to ensure the pool remains solvent even if the risks are outside of their control.

It’s not a sinister scheme, it’s exactly how insurance works.

If Everything Sucked as Much as Public Schools

The Foundation for Economic Education posted an excellent article explaining how absurd it would be to run grocery stores like public schools. But the best piece of information in the article is this:

One often hears that education is too important to leave to the whims of the market. Yet food is even more important; it’s a prerequisite before education can be considered. In spite of this, the (relatively) free market in food seems to work quite well.

Consumers get a wide variety at a low cost. Even people that have niche dietary requirements like gluten-free or vegan have products suited to them. And while complaints about the quality of public education are rampant, one rarely hears objections about the quality of the grocery stores. In the latter case, people don’t have to complain; they just take their business to someone who will serve them better.

Education isn’t even possible if one doesn’t have enough food to survive. Yet public education is a sacred cow. If you criticize public education or, worse, advocate for its complete elimination you are going to hear a lot of people accusing you of hating children. However, if you don’t advocate for socializing grocery stores nobody cares. In fact, everybody seems to be fine with grocery stores remaining private.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that grocery stores in the United States are private. If they weren’t they’d operate like the grocery stores in the former Soviet Union or current ones in Venezuela. You’d have to wait in line for hours just to find out that the store doesn’t have anything you need in stock.

We’re All Victims Now

For the longest time self-identified rightists have been referring to anybody they identified as leftists as special snowflakes who are constantly seeking opportunities to be victims. The irony in this is that those rightists are constantly seeking opportunities to be victims:

That said, Hanlon is right to bemoan the rise of a “cottage industry of outrage” related to conservatives on college campuses. Whether or not their frustration stemmed from legitimate grievance, the conservative student movement is increasingly, and loudly, playing the victim—with an energy as palpable as the left’s. Too many right-leaning student groups have lost interest in inviting speakers who are knowledgeable about philosophy and policy: they would rather score easy outrage points with provocateurs.

I suspect that some of this is not just a reaction to the left’s hysterics, but rather, a convergence. Many of the forces that incentivize leftists to seek victim status—Title IX guidance, administrative bloat, changing ideas about safety in the K-12 system, helicopter parenting, concept creep—apply equally to rightist students.

As is often the case, in their constant struggle against leftists the rightist have become the very thing they hate. At one point identifying as politically right in the United States meant you were an opponent of socialism, advocate of self-reliance, and absolutist on free speech. Now rightists are just as much of socialists as leftists (but are dishonest about it, unlike most leftists), supporters of the nanny state, and flip their shit whenever somebody exercises free speech in an unapproved manner.

The rightists and leftists in this country deserve each other.

The Wonders of Socialism

Socialism ensure that everybody is equal..ly poor:

In a new sign that Venezuela’s financial crisis is morphing dangerously into a humanitarian one, a new nationwide survey shows that in the past year nearly 75 percent of the population lost an average of 19 pounds for lack of food.

The extreme poor said they dropped even more weight than that.

The 2016 Living Conditions Survey (Encovi, for its name in Spanish), conducted among 6,500 families, also found that as many as 32.5 percent eat only once or twice a day — the figure was 11.3 just a year ago.

How can the people of a nation with such plentiful resources end up starving? Through the wonders of socialism!

Venezuela is yet another example in a long, sad list of examples of centrally planned economics failing. As Ludwig von Mises explained so thoroughly, centrally planned economies are always doomed to fail. It’s not possible for a handful of individuals to accurate determine the wants and needs of millions of people. Especially when the wants and needs of every single one of those millions of people are constantly changing.

The only question here is whether or not the Venezuelan government will do the decent thing and disband itself or if the people will have to rise up and overthrow it.

Where Does Trump Buy His Drugs

Where does Trump buy his drugs? Asking for a friend.

President Trump thinks drugs cost as much as a Snickers or Butterfinger.

“Drugs are becoming cheaper than candy bars,” Trump said at a news conference Thursday.

Could drugs cost less than a candy bar? Perhaps, if the government wasn’t investing so many resources into wielding violence against peaceful drug manufacturers, sellers, and users. But risk increases prices and the war on unapproved drugs adds a lot of risk for participants in the drug market.