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John Oliver Explains Why It’s So Crucial Apple Is Refusing the FBI’s Encryption Demands

by ClariceBlair51 Posted on March 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Sunday, John Oliver took on the FBI’s continuing demands for Apple to unlock a cellphone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. Speaking largely on Apple’s side of the debate, the Last Week Tonight host explained the importance of encryption and broke down what’s at stake in the high-profile battle:

“There is no easy side to be on in this debate,” Oliver said. “Strong encryption has its costs, from protecting terrorists to drug dealers to child pornographers. But I happen to feel that the risks of weakening encryption, even a little bit, even just for the government, are potentially much worse.”

Even Sen. Lindsey Graham, who first came out strongly against Apple for refusing to comply with the FBI’s orders, recently admitted that upon further research, he’s realized the government’s orders could pose an enormous risk to Americans’ security.

“It’s just not so simple,” Graham told Attorney General Loretta Lynch during a hearing on the subject last week. “I thought it was that simple—I was all with you until I actually started getting briefed by people in the intel community and I will say that I’m a person who’s been moved by the arguments that the precedent we set and the damage we may be doing to our own national security.”

As Oliver notes, it’s a “miracle” Graham has finally grasped the concept of nuance.

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John Oliver Explains Why It’s So Crucial Apple Is Refusing the FBI’s Encryption Demands

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Why Is Flint’s Water Still Unsafe? Or Is It?

by BethEverett Posted on January 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Can someone help me out? Flint reconnected to the Detroit water system in October, and it was supposed to take a few weeks after that to clean out the pipes. So what happened? I keep seeing pallets of bottled water being delivered to Flint, but shouldn’t the tap water be safe by now? Has it been tested for lead levels in the past month or two? I’ve been trying to check this out, but I can’t seem to find anything definitive.

I feel like I must have missed something. I don’t know how hard a thorough round of testing is, but it sure seems like that would have been a top priority starting in early November. Is it being done?

UPDATE: Here’s the answer:

Over time, the lead pipes in Flint built up a protective mineral coating—or scale—that prevented lead from getting into the water.
During the 17 months it was used, acidic water from the Flint River corroded away the scale, exposing fresh metal.
Even if the water is now good, it’s going to take a while before the scale rebuilds. In the meantime, lead can still leach into the water.

Back in December, the Flint Utilities Director announced that they planned to boost the level of phosphates in the water to aid in rebuilding the scale. They also hired a firm to begin testing of high-risk homes. Normally it can take up to five years for scale to rebuild, but presumably the additional phosphates will reduce this time. Still, it might be quite a while before the water is safe again, which explains the continuing pallets of bottled water.

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Why Is Flint’s Water Still Unsafe? Or Is It?

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Big Banks Lose a Battle

by JamisonJose503 Posted on December 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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In order to close a $70 billion gap in highway funding, Congress plans to raid the Federal Reserve and sell some oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Yesterday I called these moves “ill considered,” but David Dayen writes that there’s at least one pay-for in the transportation bill that’s also pretty good public policy.

Ever since its founding, the Fed has paid banks a 6 percent annual dividend on the stock they buy to become members of the Federal Reserve system. In 1913 this was designed to entice banks to join the newfangled scheme. Today, it’s just an annual gift. So Senate drafters decided to cut the dividend to 1.5 percent and use the rest of the money for the transportation bill. Banks went ballistic, but in the end they were unable to keep their full handout:

When the final bill was released Tuesday, the dividend reduction remained in there, albeit with some modifications.

The reduction now applies only to banks with over $10 billion in assets, compared to the $1 billion threshold in the original bill. Instead of cutting the dividend to 1.5 percent, the rate will now match the interest rate of the highest-yield 10-year Treasury note at the point that the dividend is due. For context, the high yield at the last Treasury auction was 2.304 percent.

It’s a small thing, but it’s always nice to see big banks lose a battle now and again. It keeps us all on our toes.

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Big Banks Lose a Battle

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Another Shot Fired in the Great Immigration vs. Wages War

by BlaineHightower Posted on September 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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Does illegal immigration suppress the wages of native-born workers? The evidence suggests that it doesn’t—or not much, anyway. One of the data points supporting this is a study done by David Card of the effect of the 1980 Mariel boatlift on workers in Miami. Even though Miami experienced a huge spike in immigrants during the boatlift, Card found no significant impact on wages.

Today George Borjas steps in with a different analysis. He’s been arguing for a long time that immigration has a bigger effect on wages than we think—especially the wages of unskilled workers. In a new working paper, he looks specifically at the wages of high school dropout and concludes that although overall wages in Miami were unaffected by the Mariel boatlift, the wages of dropouts were affected. In relative terms, they went down by 10 to 30 percent.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this were true, but Borjas’s paper does leave me with a few questions. Take a look at the chart on the right, which shows the wages of high school dropouts relative to high school graduates. Miami is the thick blue line. The other lines are various estimates of wages in cities that weren’t affected by the boatlift. There are a few oddities here:

Before 1980 and after 1990, the wages of high school dropouts in Miami are above zero, which means dropouts earned more than high school grads. That seems very peculiar, and none of the control cities show the same effect. Does this suggest there’s something wrong with the Miami data?
The Mariel boatlift produced a truly enormous spike in unskilled workers. Borjas estimates that it increased the number of working-age high school dropouts in Miami by about 18 percent in just a few weeks. I wonder if it’s really possible to extrapolate from this to the much more gradual increase in illegal immigrants nationwide over a span of two or three decades?
This is especially apropos because the chart shows that the impact on wages was fairly short lived. Even with such a huge labor shock, wages of high school dropouts were only affected for about six years. By 1988 they had recovered fully. Borjas acknowledges that this is hard to account for.

I’m no expert in this stuff, and I imagine the folks who are experts will weigh in soon enough. However, even if Borjas is basically right, the question we care about is what this tells us about the effect of illegal immigration on wages more generally. If a huge spike produces a short-lived wage depression of about 20 percent or so, what does a gradual increase over a wide geographic area produce? Unfortunately, Borjas says that there was more going on in Miami during this period than just a labor supply increase, which means “it is difficult to say much about the dynamics of the wage effect of immigration from the evidence generated by the Mariel supply shock.” Intuitively, though, it seems like it would be something far less dramatic. Maybe 5 percent or so? Less?

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Another Shot Fired in the Great Immigration vs. Wages War

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Bees and flowers have a special relationship, and climate change is screwing it up

by StarlaODoherty Posted on September 1, 2015

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Bees and flowers have a special relationship, and climate change is screwing it up

By on 1 Sep 2015commentsShare

Climate change — as it is for pretty much all life forms — is a huge bummer for bees. If neonics and other pesticides weren’t enough to deal with, a recent study demonstrated that global warming has fueled drastic bee habitat loss, leading to a 200-mile reduction in their natural environments. Something out in the great abyss has it out for the buzzers (hint: it’s CO2).

The video above, produced by the good folks over at High Country News, explores a curious new coupling between climate change and bee ecosystems. Because bees depend on flowers for food and flowers depend on bees for pollination, the two groups of organisms tend to sync up. (Remember scribbling “symbiotic relationship” into your high school biology notebook? It’s one of those.) And because climate change is fiddling with the times that flowers bloom, it means “we could have a situation where plants are available but bees are not active,” says Rebecca Irwin, an associate professor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University, in the video. “That’s going to be a problem for both parties.”

To try to examine some of the relationships at play, Irwin’s team is conducting some pretty fascinating experiments. By digging out trenches of snow near the end of winter, the researchers can coax some patches of flowers into blooming a bit earlier than others. In doing so, the team is effectively able to simulate pockets of climate change — consider a warming world with less extreme winters — and examine how the bee and flower populations interact in these areas. Without ample pollination, the early bloomers could be left with little reproductive success. Results of the experiments are pending.

Maybe you don’t give a shit about bees at all, but we assume you’re mildly interested in little things like “the produce section at Whole Foods” — which could disappear entirely if bees are wiped out. Check out the clip above to learn exactly how your salad mix could be at risk.

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Wild Science: Will climate change force bees to miss flower season?

, High Country News.

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Bees and flowers have a special relationship, and climate change is screwing it up

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Obamacare Is Facing Yet Another Legal Challenge

by Palahnajje Posted on August 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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Do you remember John Boehner’s House lawsuit against President Obama over some details of Obamacare? When it was finally unveiled, it turned out it had two parts. The first challenged a delay in implementing the employer mandate. That was a big meh. Even if the suit prevailed, it would be meaningless by the time it finished its trip through the court system.

But the second part was a surprise. It challenged the outlay of $175 billion as part of the Cost Sharing Reduction program, which pays out money to insurance companies and lowers premiums, primarily for the poor. Obama claims that CSR is like Medicare or Social Security: a mandatory payment that doesn’t require yearly authorizations. Congress claims it does, and went to court to fight its case. So how is that going? David Savage of the LA Times gives us an update:

In May, U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer voiced exasperation when a Justice Department lawyer tried to explain why the Obama administration was entitled to spend the money without the approval of Congress. Why is that “not an insult to the Constitution?” Collyer asked.

But the more formidable barrier now facing the lawsuit is a procedural rule. Judges have repeatedly said lawmakers do not have standing to re-fight political battles in court….But in late June, the high court gave the House lawsuit an apparent boost when it ruled the Arizona Legislature had standing to sue in federal court to defend its power to draw election districts….Ginsburg in a footnote said the court was not deciding “the question of whether Congress has standing to bring a suit against the president.” But administration supporters acknowledge the high court’s opinion in the Arizona case increases the odds the suit will survive.

….Washington attorney Walter Dellinger, a former Clinton administration lawyer, believes the courts will not finally rule on the House lawsuit. “There has never been a lawsuit by a president against Congress or by Congress against the president over how to interpret a statute,” he said.

If the courts open the door to such claims, lawmakers in the future will opt to sue whenever they lose a political battle, Dellinger said. “You’d see immediate litigation every time a law was passed,” he said.

In other words, this is starting to look an awful lot like King v. Burwell: a case that initially seemed like an absurd Hail Mary by conservatives, but that eventually started to look more formidable. In the end, King still lost, but not before plenty of liberals lost a lot of sleep over it.

I think that’s still the most likely outcome here. Allowing Congress to sue the president would be a huge reversal for the Supreme Court, and it’s not clear that even the conservatives on the court want to open up that can of worms.

But there’s more to this. If the Supreme Court rules that Congress has no standing to sue, but it looks like they might treat the case sympathetically on the merits, conservatives merely have to find someone who does have standing to sue. That probably won’t be too hard. It may take years, but one way or another, this might end up being yet another legal thorn in the side of Obamacare.

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Obamacare Is Facing Yet Another Legal Challenge

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These Antidepressants May Increase the Risk of Birth Defects

by SusannahGiles Posted on July 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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Babies born to women who took certain antidepressants during pregnancy may have an elevated risk of birth defects, according to a study published Wednesday in the medical journal BMJ.

Over the past few years, researchers have come to conflicting conclusions about the health impacts of taking common antidepressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, early in pregnancy. Some studies have found prenatal exposure to SSRIs to be associated with heart and brain defects, autism, and more, while others have found the risk to be minimal or nonexistent.

The BMJ study, led by researchers at the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, shed light on the matter by analyzing federal data of 38,000 births between 1997 and 2009. Researchers interviewed the mothers of children with certain birth defects associated with SSRIs, asking if they took certain antidepressants during the first three months of pregnancy or the month prior to it. Unlike many previous studies, which looked at the effects of SSRIs as a group, the researchers looked at the health impacts of five specific drugs. They found that two drugs were associated with birth defects, while three of the drugs were not. Here are the details:

Sertraline (Zoloft): No increased risk of birth defects. (This was the most common of the five drugs, taken by forty percent of the women on antidepressants.)
Paroxetine (Paxil): Babies were between 2 and 3.5 more likely to be born with heart defects, brain defects, holes between heart chambers, and intestinal deformities.
Fluoxetine (Prozac): Babies were two times more likely to experience heart defects and skull and brain shape abnormalities.
Escitalopram (Lexapro): No increased risk of birth defects.
Citalopram (Celexa): No increased risk of birth defects.

Researchers are quick to note that even in the case of paroxetine and fluexetine, the absolute risk of these defects is still very small. If mothers take paroxetine early in pregnancy, for example, the chance of giving birth to a baby with anencephaly, a brain defect, rise from 2 in 10,000 to 7 in 10,000.

Some doctors worry that studies like this dissuade mothers who truly need mental health treatment from seeking it—particularly since the stress associated with depression in the mother can impact the health of the baby. Elizabeth Fitelson, a Columbia University psychiatrist who treats pregnant women with depression, described this tricky balance to the New York Times earlier this year: “For about 10 percent of my patients, I can readily say that they don’t need medication and should go off it,” she said. “I see a lot of high-risk women. Another 20 percent absolutely have to stay on medication—people who have made a suicide attempt every time they’ve been unmedicated. For the remaining 70 percent, it’s a venture into the unknowable.”

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These Antidepressants May Increase the Risk of Birth Defects

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Chart of the Day: Obamacare Is Popular!

by Zeniarwpzz Posted on April 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Guess what? Obamacare’s popularity has been rising slowly but steadily for the past two years, and in April it hit a milestone. According to Kaiser, it is now more popular than unpopular. Not by much, but at least it’s making progress.

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Chart of the Day: Obamacare Is Popular!

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Tired of Remembering Passwords? Try Swallowing Them Instead.

by Keenan11Mzrcnj Posted on April 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Chances are you’re bad at passwords. Most of us are. A recent statistic offered up by Jonathan LeBlanc, the global head of developer advocacy at PayPal, suggests that nearly 10 percent of people have a password consisting of 123456, 12345678, or, simply, “password.”

LeBlanc has some bold thoughts on improving this state of affairs. As he told the Wall Street Journal last week, “embeddable, injectable, and ingestible devices” are the next step companies will use to identify consumers for “mobile payments and other sensitive online interactions.”

From the Journal:

While there are more advanced methods to increase login security, like location verification, identifying people by their habits like the way they type in their passwords, fingerprints and other biometric identifiers, these can lead to false negative results, where valid users can’t log in to their online services, and false positives, where invalid users can log in.

Mr. Leblanc pointed to more accurate methods of identity verification, like thin silicon chips which can be embedded into the skin. The wireless chips can contain ECG sensors that monitor the heart’s unique electrical activity, and communicate the data via wireless antennae to “wearable computer tattoos.”

Ingestible capsules that can detect glucose levels and other unique internal features can use a person’s body as a way to identify them and beam that data out.

To be fair, LeBlanc told the paper that these specific technologies aren’t necessarily things that PayPal is planning, but he’s been raising the possibility in a presentation he’s been giving, and has said the online dealbroker is “definitely looking at the identity field” as a means of allowing users a more secure way to identify themselves.

You don’t have to be a “mark of the beast” person or a conspiracy theorist to have concerns. Indeed, what could possibly go wrong with a little implanted device that reads your vein patterns or your heart’s unique activity or blood glucose levels just so you can seamlessly buy that cup of Starbucks? Wouldn’t an insurance company love to use that information to decide that you had one too many donuts—so it won’t be covering that bypass surgery after all?

As the Wall Street Journal cautiously notes, “Mr. Leblanc admits that there’s still a ways to go before cultural norms catch up with ingestible and injectable ID devices.”

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Tired of Remembering Passwords? Try Swallowing Them Instead.

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Welfare Reform and the Decline of Work

by UnitedCashLoans Posted on April 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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A recent paper suggests that over the past two decades there’s been a decline in the desire of people outside the labor force to ever get jobs. Why?

We conjecture that two mechanisms could explain these results. First, the EITC expansion raised family income and reduced secondary earners’s (typically women) incentives to work. Second, the strong work requirements introduced by the AFDC/TANF reform would have, through a kind of “sink or swim” experience, left the “weaker” welfare recipients without welfare and pushed them away from the labor force and possibly into disability insurance.

This comes via Tyler Cowen, who attended an NBER session this morning conducted by the authors of this study. He came away thinking they probably hadn’t made a strong case. Still, an interesting hypothesis that probably deserves followup.

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Welfare Reform and the Decline of Work

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