Tag Archives: mean

SIM Card Manufacturer Says Its Encryption Keys Are Safe From NSA Hacking

by Aaron Stone Posted on February 25, 2015

Mother Jones

I’m passing this along without comment since I don’t have anything substantive to add. I just wanted to keep everyone up to date on the Intercept story about the NSA stealing cell phone encryption data stored on SIM chips:

Security-chip maker Gemalto NV said Wednesday that American and British intelligence services could be responsible for a “particularly sophisticated intrusion” of its networks several years ago, but denied that the alleged hack could have widely compromised encryption it builds into chips used in billions of cellphones world-wide.

….Company executives also asserted that the interceptions wouldn’t have compromised the security of its newer SIM cards for 3G and 4G cellular networks, only older 2G networks. The reason: Gemalto says the new technology no longer require it to send telecom companies the keys to decrypt individuals’ communications—so they couldn’t have been intercepted.

Hmmm. On the one hand, many of the Snowden documents are indeed fairly old, dating back to 2010 or 2011. So they could be out of date. On the other hand, the NSA didn’t necessarily have to “intercept” anything here. A sufficiently sophisticated hack could presumably have given them direct access to the Gemalto database that contains the encryption keys. And needless to say, Gemalto has a vested interest in assuring everyone that their current products are safe.

So….who knows what really happened here. We’ll likely hear more about it as Gemalto’s internal investigation continues.

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SIM Card Manufacturer Says Its Encryption Keys Are Safe From NSA Hacking

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Take Two: Are Americans Really in Love With War?

by XLBAntoine Posted on October 1, 2014

Mother Jones

Yesterday I wrote that the American public is “in love with war.” This was obviously a bit of a rant, born of frustration with our seemingly bottomless tolerance for addressing foreign policy problems in suitably small countries with military force. Greg Sargent pushed back with some polling evidence, and Daniel Larison takes things a step further:

Far from being “in love” with war, a better way to think of the public’s reaction is that they have been whipped into a panic about a vastly exaggerated threat by irresponsible fear-mongers. Most Americans support the current intervention because they wrongly think it is necessary for U.S. security, and they have been encouraged in that wrong view by their sorry excuse for political leaders.

I got this same kind of pushback from several people, but I really think this is a distinction without a difference. As it happens, my primary point was actually the same as Larison’s: that the American public is very easily whipped into a war frenzy. In the case of ISIS, all it took was a couple of atrocities on YouTube; a bit of foaming at the mouth from the usual TV permahawks; and a presidential decision to take action. Obama didn’t even need to wave the bloody shirt. In fact, he’s been relatively restrained about the whole thing. Still, he did commit us to military action, and that was enough. Public support for bombing ISIS went from 39 percent to 60 percent in a mere twelve weeks.

Does this mean the American public is in love with war? Or merely that when a war is proposed, they can be persuaded to support it pretty easily? I submit that there’s not really a very big difference between the two.

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Take Two: Are Americans Really in Love With War?

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How Much Do Hurricanes Hurt the Economy?

by EmeliaRunyan Posted on August 7, 2014

Mother Jones

This story originally appeared on the Atlantic and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As climate change increases the intensity and (possibly) the frequency of major coastal storms, what will be the economic consequences?

Answering this question requires two big pieces of information: the economic consequences of such storms (typhoons, hurricanes, and tropical cyclones) and the patterns of those storms in the years ahead. As it turns out, it’s that first bit—the economic consequences of storms—that was difficult to pin down.

For years economists have debated whether destructive storms are even bad for a country’s economy. To a non-economist, the ill effects of a storm might seem intuitive, but economists have a knack for finding plausible counterintuitive explanations. When it comes to a major natural disaster, they had four competing hypotheses: Such a disaster might permanently set a country back; it might temporarily derail growth only to get back on course down the road; it might lead to even greater growth, as new investment pours in to replace destroyed assets; or, possibly, it might yet even better, not only stimulating growth but also ridding the country of whatever outdated infrastructure was holding it back. Woohoo.

Hsiang and Jina

Interesting theories, but time to test them out against some empirical data. And that’s what economists Solomon M. Hsiang of Berkeley and Amir S. Jina of Columbia set out to do in a paper released this week.

Hsiang and Jina looked at 6,712 cyclones, typhoons, and hurricanes observed from 1950 to 2008 and the economic fortunes of the countries they struck in the years that followed. With their data, Jina and Hsiang can decisively say: These storms are bad—very bad—for economic growth.

“There is no creative destruction,” Jina told me. “These disasters hit us and their effects sit around for a couple of decades.” He added, “Just demonstrating that that was true was probably the most interesting aspect for me to start with.”

Hsiang and Jina find that such storms (which they group under the umbrella term “cyclones”) can be as bad as some of the worst sorts of man-made economic challenges. A cyclone of a magnitude that a country would expect to see once every few years can slow down an economy on par with “a tax increase equal to one percent of GDP, a currency crisis, or a political crisis in which executive constraints are weakened.” For a really bad storm (a magnitude you’d expect to see around the world only once every 10 years), the damage will be similar “to losses from a banking crisis.” The very worst storms—the top percentile—”have losses that are larger and endure longer than any of those previously studied shocks.”

Here’s a little chart they made comparing these different sorts of disasters:

Hsiang and Jina

The effects are lasting: Overall, they find that “each additional meter per second of annual nationally-averaged wind exposure lowers per capita economic output 0.37 percent 20 years later” (emphasis added). Put simply, economies “do not recover in the long run.”

So what does this mean for a planet with a changing climate?

Projections for storm patterns as the planet’s climate morphs are, as Jina put it, “a very complex area.” How do you choose which model to rely on? You go with, Jina says, “the best”: those of Kerry Emanuel at MIT, world expert on cyclone patterns.

When they meshed their backward-looking empirical calculations with Emanuel’s forward-looking projections, the number they got was startling: $9.7 trillion—the present discounted value “of expected losses due to enhanced cyclone activity” if we don’t take any action to dial back greenhouse-gas emissions. (This is the calculation they make at the 95 percent confidence interval, though the figure could range from $3.9 trillion to $15.5 trillion.)

“For me,” Jina says, “it is a very convincing argument to say that we need to mitigate as much climate change as we can.”

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How Much Do Hurricanes Hurt the Economy?

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Doctors Aren’t Really Very Smart About Buying Generics

by MapleValle Posted on July 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Sarah Kliff takes a look today at our use of generic drugs. Long story short, it’s surprising how few of us save money by buying generic pain medicine instead of name brands (Advil, Tylenol, Bayer, etc.). Why? In most cases, I suppose it’s just ignorance: people don’t realize that the “store brand” is genuinely identical to the name brand. In other cases it might be something else. I buy generic ibuprofen, and it usually comes in the form of small brown pills. One day, however, I went to to a different drug store to stock up, and it turned out that their generic ibuprofen came in the form of small orange pills. Marian used these for a while, but really hated them. Eventually she cracked, and insisted on buying a new bottle from our usual drug store. Sometimes little things can make all the difference.

Anyway. The main point of Kliff’s post is that generics are good, and as evidence of this she puts up a chart showing what doctors themselves buy. Here’s an excerpt from the chart:

It’s true that doctors mostly favor generics when it comes to basic pain relievers. But frankly, what’s amazing to me is how little they prefer them. For chrissake, they prefer generic aspirin by only ten percentage points. That means they buy the name brand about 45 percent of the time. Why would a doctor do this? Granted, the extra few dollars is probably no big deal to them, but why waste it anyway? Certainly not because of ignorance. Are their spouses doing the buying? Or what?

And why the active preference for name-brand rubbing alcohol, of all things? It’s hard to think of anything more generic than that. What’s the deal here?

As for Alka-Seltzer, the dislike of generics is so huge that there just has to be some real difference here. But what?

In any case, I suspect this might have some real importance beyond the question of doctors spending a few dollars they don’t have to. If physicians aren’t really sold on generics in their own personal lives, does this mean they’re not really sold on them in their professional lives too? Do they tend to prescribe name brands when they shouldn’t? And how much does this cost all of us?

Originally posted here:  

Doctors Aren’t Really Very Smart About Buying Generics

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America Sucks at Eating Vegetables

by munrhexaa Posted on June 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Hold on a second. Kelsey McKinney draws my attention this morning to the latest USDA report on the kinds of foods we eat, and the chart on the right shows what it has to say about vegetables.

Is this for real? Since when are potatoes vegetables? I mean, I’m delighted by this news since it means my mother has been wrong all these years when she badgers me about not eating enough vegetables. Hell, it turns out that the bag of potato chips in my pantry apparently counts too. I’ll be sure to have some with my lunch today.

Still, I suspect that mom is right, which makes this a pretty depressing chart. Regardless of how the USDA classifies them, I’ll continue to put potatoes (and corn) into the starch food group. Aside from that, it appears that we eat plenty of salad (head lettuce, Romaine lettuce, tomatoes) but not much of anything else. All the things we traditionally think of as vegetables (broccoli, peas, beans, etc.) are consumed in such tiny quantities they don’t even show up.

That’s terrible. Eat your vegetables, America!

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America Sucks at Eating Vegetables

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Latest Gallup Numbers Confirm 10-12 Million Newly Insured Under Obamacare

by AileenFlanagan Posted on June 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Gallup’s latest poll number for the uninsured is out, and it’s stabilized now that the open enrollment period for Obamacare has ended. It was 13.4 percent in April and it’s 13.4 percent in May:

The fact that the rate stabilized provides some confidence in Gallup’s polling, since that’s what should have happened once open enrollment ended. This is a drop of about 4 percentage points from the 2011-12 baseline, and represents about 10 million newly insured—a figure that’s been confirmed elsewhere and now seems like a pretty good estimate. Add to this the number of children and sub-26ers who are newly insured, and you’re probably up to 12-13 million who are newly insured under Obamacare. Some of this comes from people buying insurance through the exchanges; some comes from Medicaid signups; and some comes from people signing up for insurance at work thanks to the individual mandate.

It’s possible that other estimates will upend this number over the next few months, but I doubt it. This is probably about what we got from Obamacare. It’s up to you to decide if you think it’s worth the price.

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Latest Gallup Numbers Confirm 10-12 Million Newly Insured Under Obamacare

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Rich Doctors Like Republicans; Sorta Rich Doctors Like Democrats

by ElizaTSK Posted on June 4, 2014

Mother Jones

We jabber a lot these days about how the real action in income inequality lies in the 1 percent. That is, the big increases haven’t really been between the earnings of, say, teachers and computer programmers, but between computer programmers and Wall Street traders. And rising inequality is even more apparent within the 1 percent: The super rich in the top 0.1 percent are pulling away from the merely rich in the top 1 percent at an astonishing rate.

Today, Sarah Kliff points us to a kinda sorta related chart that’s pretty eye-opening. As high earners, you’d think that doctors would be more likely to contribute money to Republicans than Democrats. But it turns out that isn’t true. A new analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine shows that merely well-off doctors—your allergists, your pediatricians, your pulmonologists—favor Democrats. It’s only when you get into the territory of medical royalty—your surgeons, your urologists, your radiologists—that political contributions start to heavily favor Republicans. Even within one of the best paid professions in the country, there’s a class divide, with the haves favoring Republicans and the have-nots favoring Democrats. That’s fairly remarkable.

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Rich Doctors Like Republicans; Sorta Rich Doctors Like Democrats

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An Economist Answers Some of My Questions About "Capital in the 21st Century"

by BoydWooreycu Posted on April 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday I posted a couple of very rudimentary comments regarding Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster new book, Capital in the 21st Century. I had questions about Piketty’s estimates of r (return on capital) and g (economic growth) in the past and—much more importantly—how they were likely to play out in the future. But all I had were amateur musings because I am, after all, only an amateur.

However, yesterday Brad DeLong tackled some of the questions I asked in a far more rigorous and disciplined way, teasing out a lot of unstated implications along the way—including the importance of various measures of r and how they relate to the probability of increasing future wealth concentration in the real world. It’s a long post, and complex in places, but highly recommended. If you’re willing to work your way through it, DeLong provides a framework for thinking about Piketty’s model that helps you start to make sense of both the book and its conclusions.

POSTSCRIPT: I’ve gotten a couple of questions about why I seem unduly skeptical, or even harsh, about Piketty’s book. It’s obviously a landmark work, I don’t really mean to be unfair. But it’s a book with innovative and untested ideas that has obvious appeal to anyone left of center, and I think this is precisely the time to avoid unquestioning hosannas. Affinity bias makes us all sympathetic to Piketty’s arguments, and that’s why we should instead question it carefully and thoroughly.

See more here – 

An Economist Answers Some of My Questions About "Capital in the 21st Century"

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Why you should be skeptical of Walmart’s cheap organic food

by LesliJZAuqcp Posted on April 12, 2014

Walmarts and all

Why you should be skeptical of Walmart’s cheap organic food

By

Walmart

Out on the mean streets of the U.S. organic foods industry, Walmart has stepped onto the corner with both guns drawn. On Thursday, the superstore behemoth announced its plan to partner with Wild Oats (which you may recognize as a former subsidiary of Whole Foods) to offer a line of organic goods at unprecedentedly low prices in 2,000 of its U.S. stores. To start, the line will offer primarily canned goods and other pantry staples that will cost up to 25 percent less than those of other organic brands.

At first blush, this appears to be great news. Cheaper, more accessible organic food – isn’t that one of the prerequisites for the kind of healthy food system we’ve all been waiting for? The New York Times notes that Walmart’s big move could ultimately create a larger supply of organic goods, pushing down organic prices in the long run.

From The New York Times:

“We’re removing the premium associated with organic groceries,” said Jack L. Sinclair, executive vice president of Walmart U.S.’s grocery division. The Wild Oats organic products will be priced the same as similar nonorganic brand-name goods.

If that sounds suspicious to anyone familiar with organic growing practices, it should. For those not as well-versed, we’re here to help! We spoke with Coach Mark Smallwood, executive director of The Rodale Institute in Kutztown, Penn., about how Walmart could manage to offer such low prices, and what that might mean for organic farmers across the country.

Smallwood explains that the concept of a “premium” associated with organic food is misleading, because the price of an organic good reflects the true cost of its production.

“The issue is that there aren’t the subsidies available to organic farmers that there are [for conventional farmers.] So there’s a question in my mind about how Walmart is going to pull this off and be able to make profit,” Smallwood said. “And for them to even come out and make that statement before they’ve started is a huge question mark. Somebody’s going to have to pay, and my hope is that it’s not the organic farmer.”

Smallwood also shared his concern that if Walmart were to incentivize large-scale organic production, industrial organic practices would become more widespread. In this model, farmers adhere to just the bare minimum of organic standards and ultimately end up depleting soil health on a piece of land, abandoning it, and moving on to another.

“Will a large agricultural operation come in and buy up tens of small family farms and put them all under one name, and then create that slash-and-burn model?” Smallwood said. “That’s what I’m afraid of. That’s the [possible] downside.”

For the optimists in all of us, let us remember that it’s too soon to know exactly which approach Walmart will take. As Smallwood says: “The potential is there for [organic farmers] to be treated very well, and paid handsomely for the wonderful artisan stewardship of the planet. What is that worth to Walmart? We’re going to find out.”

We reached out to Walmart specifically to ask if the company was planning to source from small-scale farmers, and where its farmers would be located geographically. This was their response via email:

Regarding your questions, we are working with our suppliers to create a surety of demand which ultimately helps us pass along savings to our customers. We’re using our scale to deliver quality, organic groceries to our customers for less. When we do this, it’s a win, win, win situation for our customers, our suppliers and our company. Our customers can trust that they will save money at Walmart, our suppliers can count on us for the demand and we are able to offer innovative new products.

Hey — we didn’t say it was a good response. Since it provides exactly none of the specifics that we sought out, we’ll just have to wait and see, and hope for the best.


Source
Walmart to Sell Organic Food, Undercutting Big Brands, The New York Times

Eve Andrews is a Grist fellow and new Seattle transplant via the mean streets of Chicago, Poughkeepsie, and Pittsburgh, respectively and in order of meanness. Follow her on Twitter.

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Why you should be skeptical of Walmart’s cheap organic food

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Two French Unions Ban Work Email After 6 pm

by FilomenaBrother Posted on April 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Huh. A couple of white-collar unions in France have signed a new labor agreement:

The legally binding deal, signed by employers’ federations and unions representing almost one million workers in the digital and consultancy sectors, stipulates that employees should be left alone when they are out of the office.

Staff will be ordered to switch off their professional phones and avoid looking at work-related emails or documents on their tablets and computers. Businesses will be required to ensure that workers are under no pressure to check their messages.

The ban takes effect at 6 pm each night. Remarkable.

Link:  

Two French Unions Ban Work Email After 6 pm

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