Tag: You’re Doing it Right

There The Market Goes Again, Solving Problems Without Threats Of Force

Humans aren’t very good drivers. We’re unable to watch everything that’s going on around us at all times, we’re easily distracted, and many of us seem utterly incapable of putting the cell phone down even when we’re driving. Not surprisingly, especially when you consider the number of vehicles on the road, a lot of collisions happen every day. The State benefits from this because it has create numerous laws that allow it to rake in cash when people crash into one another but do fuck all for safety. Fortunately the market is here to help and it doesn’t even need a gang of armed agents to shoot our pets:

In what may not come as a surprise, vehicles with automatic braking systems are involved in rear-end crashes (that is, accidents in which a vehicle hits a car directly in front of them) at lower rates than vehicles not equipped with the systems, says the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, or IIHS.

The research focused on Forward Collision Warning (FCW) and Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB), as well as the suite of systems made by Volvo called City Safety, which includes advanced versions of those two technologies. The research examined vehicles from a number of different automakers including Acura, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Subaru and Volvo, which were equipped with FCW and AEB, as well as vehicles that included just FCW or no crash prevention tech at all.

According to the IIHS research, equipping vehicles with both warning and autobraking systems reduced the rate of rear-end crashes by 39 percent and rear end crashes with injuries by 42 percent. That’s an overall reduction in crashes by 12 percent and a reduction in injury crashes by 15 percent.

Machines can be far better drivers than humans. With the right sensors they can watch everything that’s going on around them, they don’t get distracted, and they can multitask so sending information over a cellular connection doesn’t hinder their ability to drive. Adding automation to automobiles has been improving safety since, at least, power brakes became a thing. As the amount of tasks an automobile can do itself increases we will likely continue to see a correlating increase in safety.

What’s beautiful about these safety systems is that they don’t require the threat of violence to create. I’m sure the State will take credit for these automated breaking systems by making them mandatory but the State didn’t invent them, the market did. Automobile manufacturers have voluntarily developed these systems to make their vehicles safer and therefore, they hope, more appealing to customers.

Meanwhile the State will continue passing laws to needlessly change the roadways and highways, make more things a finable offense, and other such nonsense under the false claims of increasing safety while really increasing its revenue.

Consider Estonia When Starting An Online Business

When people tell me they want to start a white market business in the United States I strongly encourage them to think twice. Between the never ending rules and restrictions and the high taxes the United States is a terrible place to start an above the ground business. Fortunately we live in a world where those imaginary lines on maps are becoming less relevant. A while ago Estonia announced it’s e-residency program, which allows people to become virtual residents of Estonia. In an article discussing Estonia’s new deal with BitNation I noticed the e-residency program might include some real benefits:

Estonia, a country at the forefront of modern e-government, has been offering efficient online services to its citizens for more than a decade.

“By offering e-residents the same services, Estonia is proudly pioneering the idea of a country without borders,” proudly states the e-residency website. In particular, e-residents can digitally sign, verify and encrypt documents and contracts, establish an Estonian company online in 24 hours with a physical address in Estonia provided by an external service, and administer the company from anywhere in the world.

Currently, establishing an Estonian bank account for the company requires one in-person meeting at one of the banks that recognize e-resident smart ID cards – currently LHV, Swedbank and SEB – but once the account is established e-residents can manage e-banking and remote money transfers from anywhere in the world.

An appealing feature of e-residency for entrepreneurs is that, in Estonia, company income is not taxed. Therefore, compliance is simplified and all income is available for re-investment. However, since e-residency doesn’t imply tax residency, e-residents are supposed to pay taxes at home for the money that they take out of the company.

The question here is how much information does the Estonian government voluntarily provide other nations. If it hands over all business information upon request this e-residency program probably isn’t going to be that useful. But if it’s unwilling to hand over information and instead relies on business owners voluntarily providing their home countries tax information this could be a boon.

I bring this up because I believe it’s a good idea to keep an eye out for good deals. My preference is for underground businesses but I know a lot of people want to operate in the white market because it’s easier. Just because you want to operate in the white market doesn’t mean you have to play by the United States’ draconian rules or fund its insatiable war machine. E-residencies are likely to become more commonly available as other governments realize the wealth they could steal by offering denizens of foreign countries a better deal. After all, many great conquers managed to sign up a lot of foreign nationals by offering to steal far less from them. There’s no reason you can’t profit a bit by taking such offers when they’re made.

Pfizer Joins The Ranks Of Intelligent Companies Fleeing The American Empire

Pfizer is joining the elite club of American companies fleeing the empire. Wanting to avoid the oppressive tax environment of the American Empire, Pfizer has started merging with a foreign company so it can move its headquarters to the much friendly nation of Ireland:

Pfizer Inc on Monday said it would buy Botox maker Allergan Plc in a deal worth $160 billion to slash its U.S. tax bill, rekindling a fierce political debate over the financial maneuver.

The acquisition, which would shift Pfizer’s headquarters to Ireland, would be the biggest-ever tax inversion.

Just as expatriation has forced the government of the United States to put laws into place that prevent individual tax cattle from fleeing, this decision by Pfizer has renewed efforts to prevent corporate tax cattle from fleeing:

U.S. President Barack Obama has called inversions unpatriotic and has tried to crack down on the practice.

Senator Bernie Sanders, another Democratic candidate for president, called on the Obama administration to stop the deal, which “would allow another major American corporation to hide its profits overseas.”

“Congress also must pass real tax reform that demands that profitable corporations pay their fair share of taxes,” Sanders said.

Their reaction demonstrates once again that property rights don’t exist under the State. Politicians are unhappy because Pfizer is choosing to merge with another company so it can take its supposed property to a friendlier environment. Because of this they’re looking to change the rules. In other words they’re stating that Pfizer’s property is actually owned by the State and the temporary usage privileges may soon be revoked.

It really makes you wonder why anybody would consider starting a business in this forsaken country. You can never been certain when the rules will change and the only thing that seems consistent is the rate of plunder going up over time.

Let’s Encrypt To Enter Public Beta On December 3rd

Unfortunately there are a lot of websites that still aren’t utilizing HTTPS to ensure confidential and unaltered communications between them and their users. One of the excuses often given by website administrators for not using HTTPS is that certificates cost money. Another excuse is that managing certificates is a huge pain in the ass.

StartSSL has been providing free certificates for years but administrators still have to manually manage them. A while ago a group of people decided to kill both birds with a single stone and began work on Let’s Encrypt. Let’s Encrypt is a certificate authority and software package that work together to provide automatically managed certificate to websites. It’s been in closed beta for a while and starting December 3rd it will be making the beta test available to the public.

This means anybody wanting a certificate will be able to request one. It also means there will no longer be any excuses for websites not to implement HTTPS. And with the ever more pervasive surveillance state it’s absolutely necessary to make HTTPS the default.

The Decentralized Internet

“Internet provision is a natural monopoly!” How many times have you heard some economic illiterati say that? I’m sure you’ve heard it a few times even though the entire concept of natural monopoly is a myth. To demonstrate this I’m going to provide a couple of examples of decentralized Internet architectures. First we’re going to look at the corporate world where one Internet Service Provider (ISP) has decided centralized infrastructure isn’t fulfilling all of its needs:

Well T-Mobile wants to fix all that… by putting an LTE tower in your house. Yes, the unconventional carrier has announced a 4G LTE CellSpot that it says will offer 3,000 square feet of LTE coverage for your home or business. Plug it into the wall outlet, connect it to the internet, and your LTE connection will get a boost anywhere T-Mobile has spectrum. The CellSpot supports up to 16 calls at a time, and will work with any 3G, 4G, and LTE device on T-Mobile’s network.

T-Mobile’s biggest limitation is coverage. Improving coverage isn’t easy for a cell carrier because building towers is expensive and the bureaucracy between them and their customers is significant (my hometown kept denying AT&T permission to build a new tower simply because the city council didn’t want travelers to see an “ugly” tower when they passed through town). Being able to install a lot of microcells is a lot easier than building a tower simply because the carrier doesn’t have to buy land and get permission from local bureaucracies.

Two mistakes T-Mobile is making, in my opinion, is only allowing its customers to install these CellSpots and not paying people who choose to install them:

And the price is right too — eligible Simple Choice customers can get the LTE CellSpot for free (with a refundable $25 deposit), and keep it as long as they are customers of T-Mobile.

I bet T-Mobile would quickly find itself enjoying spectacular coverage if it paid anybody willing to install one of these in their home or business a little kickback (these microcells, after all, are consuming electricity and using bandwidth). For the right price (which means enough for me to make a little bit of profit) I’d be willing to install one of these in my home and I’m not even a T-Mobile customer.

Admittedly relying on a centralized ISP, even if they’re utilizing a decentralized architecture, isn’t exactly demonstrating that Internet provision isn’t a natural monopoly. Fear not! T-Mobile isn’t the only game in town:

When you live somewhere with slow and unreliable Internet access, it usually seems like there’s nothing to do but complain. And that’s exactly what residents of Orcas Island, one of the San Juan Islands in Washington state, were doing in late 2013. Faced with CenturyLink service that was slow and outage-prone, residents gathered at a community potluck and lamented their current connectivity.

“Everyone was asking, ‘what can we do?’” resident Chris Brems recalls. “Then [Chris] Sutton stands up and says, ‘Well, we can do it ourselves.’”

When somebody says, “Well, we can do it ourselves,” you know they’re on the right track:

Faced with a local ISP that couldn’t provide modern broadband, Orcas Island residents designed their own network and built it themselves. The nonprofit Doe Bay Internet Users Association (DBIUA), founded by Sutton, Brems, and a few friends, now provide Internet service to a portion of the island. It’s a wireless network with radios installed on trees and houses in the Doe Bay portion of Orcas Island. Those radios get signals from radios on top of a water tower, which in turn receive a signal from a microwave tower across the water in Mount Vernon, Washington.

[…]

Back in 2013, CenturyLink service was supposed to provide up to 1.5Mbps downloads speeds, but in reality we “had 700kbps sometimes, and nothing at others,” Brems told Ars. When everyone came home in the evening, “you would get 100kbps down and almost nothing up, and the whole thing would just collapse. It’s totally oversubscribed,” Sutton said.

That 10-day outage in November 2013 wasn’t a fluke. At various times, CenturyLink service would go out for a couple of days until the company sent someone out to fix it, Sutton said. But since equipping the island with DBIUA’s wireless Internet, outages have been less frequent and “there are times we’re doing 30Mbps down and 40Mbps up,” Brems said. “It’s never been below 20 or 25 unless we had a problem.”

A better, more reliable service for less. What more could one ask for? Anybody who lives in a rural area knows the struggle of getting fast, reliable Internet access. Unfortunately many people in rural areas turn their frustrations into political campaigns. By the time they’re done they have higher taxes and promises from the local, state, or federal government that go unfulfilled. Had they taken the money they invested in political shenanigans and instead built a network they would have fast, reliable Internet connectivity. This is why you should listen to the person who says, “Well, we can do it ourselves,” instead of the idiot who tries to start a political campaign.

Internet provision isn’t a natural monopoly. A community can come together and build their own network and attach it to the Internet. This is even easier now that wireless connectivity is no longer slow or outrageously expensive.

Competition Is The Solution To Expensive Medication

Government regulation of the medical industry, particularly making buying health insurance mandatory and granting monopolies on ideas, have made medication unaffordable. People in need of medication are justifiably pissed about this, especially since many pharmaceutical companies feel the market is regulated enough to make it safe for them to continuously jack prices up. Unfortunately their anger is only resulting in more price increases because they believe more government regulatory power is the solution.

But more government regulatory power only exacerbates the problem because it further pushes competition out of the market and competition is the solution to high medication prices:

Turing Pharmaceuticals, the company that last month raised the price of the decades-old drug Daraprim from $13.50 a pill to $750, now has a competitor.

Imprimis Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a specialty pharmaceutical company based in San Diego, announced today that it has made an alternative to Daraprim that costs about a buck a pill—or $99 for a 100-pill supply.

“While we respect Turing’s right to charge patients and insurance companies whatever it believes is appropriate, there may be more cost-effective compounded options for medications, such as Daraprim,” Mark L. Baum, CEO of Imprimis, said in a news release.

What government enabled to run up to $750 per pill a single competitor brought down to $1.00 per pill. In a free market this is the norm. Absent of monopolies on ideas, mandatory purchasing of services, absurdly high testing costs designed to favor politically connected established manufacturers, and other forms of regulation on medical products there is actually a very large pie. And if anything can be said about markets if there is pie everybody wants a piece. Different providers attempt to grab a piece in different ways.

Some sell a premium good or service, some will provide the most inexpensive option possible, and many others will fall somewhere in between. Rolex continues to thrive by providing a premium wristwatch to its target market just as Timex continues to thrive providing very affordable wristwatches.

The medical market is no different. Some medication providers will charge a premium while others will provide an inexpensive option because the two portions of the market ensure enough pie is available for both and enough pie being available for both ensures both portions of the market are served.

If you become outraged when medical companies jack their prices up don’t beg the government to do more of the same. Instead do whatever you can to help expand a free market.

Apple Doing More For China’s Environment Than China’s Government

I continue to be amazed by people who believe governments are an effective way to protect the environment. It’s such a stupid belief because governments are the biggest polluters whose only interest in regulating pollution is getting a piece of the action through permit issuances. The only way to reduce pollution, which is the only way to change anything, is direct action. Oftentimes direct action to reduce pollution involves individuals whose property has been damaged by a polluter filing a lawsuit (of course such action has been illegal in the United States ever since the federal government started involving itself in pollution licensing). But that’s not the only way.

Apple has announced a plan to build solar power plans in China:

Six months after Apple said it wanted to stop climate change, rather than debate the issue, the company has announced two new programs that it says will reduce the carbon footprint of its manufacturing partners in China. The two schemes aim to avoid the production of more than 20 million metric tons of pollution between now and 2020 by building solar energy sources in the country’s northern, eastern, and southern grid regions, and by partnering with suppliers to install clean energy projects over the coming years.

At the same time, Apple also announced that it has completed 40 megawatts of solar projects in China’s Sichuan province, capable of producing the same amount of energy used by Apple’s retail stores and operations offices in the country. Apple says the completion of the projects makes the company carbon neutral in China, but that doesn’t factor in the energy used by its manufacturers and suppliers. The two new schemes are intended to offset that energy usage, producing more than 200 megawatts of electricity through the new solar sources — enough to power 265,000 homes in China for a year — and by helping suppliers build projects that will offer more than 2 gigawatts of clean energy.

This move by Apple will do more good than any amount of petitioning the Chinese government. In fact if companies did similar things in the United States it would do more good than any amount of Environment Protection Agency (EPA) regulations.

Overcoming Advertisement Reliance

As more consumers tire of footing the bill for advertisers content producers are being forced to look into other revenue generation models. Yesterday Google joined the legion of content producers experimenting with directly charging for content by announcing a YouTube subscription service:

At a press event this morning in San Francisco, livestreamed in from the YouTube Space in Los Angeles, the video-sharing company announced YouTube Red, a subscription service for the site’s most dedicated viewers. For $9.99 a month (or $12.99 if you order through iTunes; iOS users can pay the normal price if they sign up through the web), the YouTube Red membership gives users ad-free videos, and original shows and movies from YouTube creators (including PewDiePie, Joey Graceffa, Fine Brothers Entertainment, and more). It also opens up access to the recently launched Gaming app, and YouTube Music, a new app that will be available soon. Crucially, a YouTube Red subscription will be interchangeable with a Google Play Music subscription, making this as much a streaming music investment as anything.

I think this is a sensible approach. Google will still maintain the ad supported service but is now adding a subscription service that removes ads and gives subscribers access to premium content. Sweetening the deal is the fact that a YouTube Red subscription also gains you access to Google Play Music, so subscribers are really getting some Nextflix and some Spotify for the price of one of those services individually.

In addition to premium content subscribers to YouTube Red will enjoy a more secure experience since ad networks are a common vector for malware, better battery life since ads consume a notable amount of power, and lower bandwidth bills since ads eat up a lot of bandwidth. For heavy YouTube users $9.99 per year might prove to be a savings compared to the cost of buying additional data for ad usages.

Although most media outlets are focusing on Google offering premium content for subscribers the big news, in my opinion, is the fact Google is offering a subscription service at all. For the longest time Google was the name in Internet advertising. In fact it still is. But even it’s seeing the writing on the wall. Through the pervasive use of ad blockers consumers are signaling the market that they’re no longer satisfied with being the product. Unlike many businesses, which stick their head in the sand when their business model starts dying, Google is at least experimenting with alternative revenue sources. I hope it proves successful because I want to see the advertising model die in a fire.

The Privacy Arms Race

The National Security Agency (NSA) is listening in to every phone call. Closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras are seemingly in every businesses and on every street corner. Police cars have cameras that automatically scan the license plates of other vehicles they drive by. Surveillance is so pervasive that we must accept the fact that privacy is dead.

Or not. Doomsayers will declare the death of privacy but the truth is privacy is an arms race. This has always been the case. When aerial surveillance came into its own so did camouflage canopies and hidden shipyards. Criminals kept tabs on the movement of beat cops so their activities wouldn’t be spotted and now surveil the location of CCTV cameras for the same reason. Electronic forms of communication lead to the development of taps, which lead to the development of encrypted electronic communications.

The privacy arms race is alive and well today. As the State and corporations utilize more surveillance technologies markets are springing up to offer countermeasures. One market that is starting to dip its toes into modern counter-surveillance is the fashion industry:

Last spring, designer Adam Harvey hosted a session on hair and makeup techniques for attendees of the 2015 FutureEverything Festival in Manchester, England. Rather than sharing innovative ways to bring out the audience’s eyes, Harvey’s CV Dazzle Anon introduced a series of styling methods designed with almost the exact opposite aim of traditional beauty tricks: to turn your face into an anti-face—one that cameras, particularly those of the surveillance variety, will not only fail to love, but fail to recognize.

Harvey is one of a growing number of privacy-focused designers and developers “exploring new opportunities that are the result of [heightened] surveillance,” and working to establish lines of defense against it. He’s spent the past several years experimenting with strategies for putting control over people’s privacy back in their own hands, in their pockets and on their faces.

Admittedly many of the fashion trends and clothing shown in the article look silly by the average standard. In time counter-surveillance fashion will either begin to take on an appearance to appeals to our sensibilities or our sensibilities will change to view this counter-surveillance fashion as fashionable.

Using fashion as counter-surveillance is as old as surveillance itself. Spies always try to dress to blend into their surroundings. Street criminals often choose a manner of dress that is unlikely to catch the attention of police. Undercover police select clothing that doesn’t scream “I’m a cop!”

Privacy isn’t dead. Far from it. It’s true that surveillance technology appears to have the upper hand for the time being but counter-surveillance technology will overcome it and then the cycle will repeat itself.

Password Managers Compared

Now that LastPass is owned by a company nobody trusts a lot of interest in alternatives has been generated. I looked at several alternatives, ultimately settling on 1Password, but my time is limited. Fortunately I found a surprisingly complete chart comparing the features of numerous password managers. If you’re interested in moving away from LastPass or you just want to start using a password manager this chart has you covered.