Category: Politics

America-First Offshore Energy Strategy

I don’t like the idea of offshore oil drilling. Didn’t much care for it before the BP fiasco down in the Gulf, and certainly didn’t become a fan of it afterward. I understand the allure of cheap domestically produced fuels, but if one really wanted to put America first … there would be a focus on energy production that is sustainable in the long term.

Companies bidding to drill on federal lands pay two dollars per acre. Probably a huge bargain, but not zero. Then there’s a royalty of 12.5% from their production (maybe 18% for offshore, it’s a little confusing because two different agencies control the on-shore and off-shore lease agreements). Again, probably a huge bargain … but the current royalty seems to have generated two billion dollars in revenue from offshore oil drilling alone. And, yeah, the government is already doing something with that money. But they are not doing anything with the money from drilling contracts that have not yet been made.

I propose our Legislature dedicates 90% off the proceeds from the new drilling contracts to (1) renewable energy research, (2) public utility renewable energy adoption, and (3) outfitting federal buildings with wind turbines, solar panels, or other renewable energy generation facilities as appropriate for the area. Buy American made solar panels and wind turbines. Hire American workers to install the things. Spur advancements so American made solar panels are incredibly more efficient than anyone else’s.

Yeah, we’ll probably destroy the ANWR in the process. But that’s going to happen either way. This would at least provide a viable long term solution and the short-term MORE OIL solution we’re getting anyway.

Why Some Jobs Matter

A week or two ago, Paul Krugman published an article titled “Why Don’t All Jobs Matter?” in which he explored the different narratives behind the decline of mining and manufacturing jobs and the decline of retail jobs. He tried very hard to avoid focusing on the sexist and classist snobbery behind the difference. To some degree, losing low paying jobs that frequently lack benefits is not as bad as losing decently paying jobs that include health benefits and pensions (although court ruling that allow companies to raid pension plans for operating cash basically rendered pension plans an empty promise).

All jobs don’t matter in public discourse because people lack respect for the retail, cell center, hospitality, etc staffs with which they directly interact. Mining and manufacturing jobs were afforded this mythos because the majority of people never interact with these employees. A sentiment echoed today in a newsletter from Sherrod Brown’s office:

“I heard from those miners and their families in Steubenville. I talked with them, and heard their stories – stories of years of backbreaking, dangerous work, but work that had dignity. They put in their time to earn better lives for their families, and they deserve the full health care and pensions they were promised.”

“Work that had dignity”!? And calling out that they “put in their time to earn better lives for their families”!? I hope he didn’t intend to imply that all of these other sectors lack dignity and working in them are not actually attempts to earn better lives for a family too. I wish they would at least pretend to care about all of the non-white non-male people who are losing their jobs too (hey, politicians … white dudes are probably losing non-mining and non-manufacturing jobs too … if that helps you care).

Fifty years ago, a high school graduate knew he could show up at the GE Locomotive plant in Erie, PA and have a job for life. And the downfall of American manufacturing has eliminated that path. But women in the same city knew they could show up at the GTE office on the other side of town, get hired on in operator services, and have a job for life too. They, too, no longer have such certainty (nor can they be positive that either GE or Verizon are even hiring).

Not a lot of people grow up dreaming of being a sales clerk or fast food counter worker – but I doubt people dream of being an entry level manufacturing line worker either. People enter into the field and work their way up — and, yeah, “working you way up” in the steel plant involved a lot of physical work whereas becoming a low level manager at a store or a call center team lead involved a lot of time and mental effort.

It’s not a job – it’s a period in time associated with the job. When coal powered industrial revolutions, white men had power and everyone else knew their place. Sadly, failure to bring back the “good” manufacturing and mining jobs may not doom Trump to perceived failure so long as his policies punish non-white non-male people.

H1B Misuse

There aren’t a whole lot of Trump’s policies with which I have any agreement. The H1B program, however, is one that most certainly gets abused at the expense of American workers. Working in IT fields, I have seen a lot of questionable sponsorships. Questionable … well, if you don’t know the whole story (how long the company has been trying to hire a qualified citizen, or the entire scope of ‘qualified’), you may have a feeling that Americans are being overlooked in favor of cheaper foreign labor. But it’s just a feeling.

I have, however, seen outright fraud within the system. Well meaning fraud, but fraud just the same. The most egregious example was more than a decade ago. There was a Russian woman who worked on one of the internal help desks. Not quite the entry level “follow the online flow chart & read it to the caller” kind of help desks for which IT Support may be known … but a help desk just the same. She and half a dozen other people staffed the line. Because her visa sponsorship indicated that she had a unique skill set that the company could not staff with an American worker … well, someone questioned how such a uniquely skilled worker would have half a dozen American coworkers doing the exact same thing.

Now she was a very nice woman and I really hoped she got to stay in the country in spite of the visa irregularity being investigated … like she got reclassified into some other visa for people who just wanted to live here. Instead, the company created a new title and position for her. A higher profile position with more authority that paid more money … but, honestly, she still wasn’t doing anything I couldn’t have found dozens of other people in the area to do. It was data mining. Data mining that she had to learn how to perform once she took the position … and if the criterion was “someone who was capable of learning to generate reports from PC inventory data” the list of local, available, citizens who were perfectly qualified for the job. People who were OUT of work at the time and would have loved that made up job.

I never reported this visa fraud. It’s one thing to object to theoretical abuse of the system; it is quite another thing to get a person who you like deported. And there-in is the problem with reforming the H1B system … what do you do with the people who are already here under false pretenses? Like the Mexican restaurant owner who got deported a few weeks ago … that’s academically the right answer. But it ignores the human impact to the academic solution. Is it really the Right Thing to tear someone away from their community, from relationships they’ve had for a decade, from their home because they have violated the law?

But is it right to essentially reward them? To allow someone who had a fraudulent H1B first dibs on regular work visas at the expense of people who followed the proper process to get into the visa queue? To increase the regular work visa cap for the year to allow improper H1Bs to be converted? If I had a good answer, I’d have gotten myself hired on by DoJ or ICE. But there’s no way to both avoid personal grief while not rewarding the individual for not following the law.

I’m hoping Trump’s new initiative orders more stringent review of the claims being made on visa sponsorship forms. Maybe even something like the Patent office where individuals somewhat knowledgeable about the field determine the veracity of the claim. Leaving the current visa holders alone – at least until their visa comes up for renewal – is about the best compromise I could conceive.

Military Decision Making and The GBU-43

Some time ago, Trump announced that he would be giving more latitude to field commanders in military operations – when and what to target. At the end of last week, a Green Beret was killed in Nangarhar Province … and now a few days later we’ve dropped the largest bomb we’ve got in the same province. When asked if the president had authorized the strike, Spicer deferred to the military agencies. Trump just muttered some nonsense about how we all know what happened. If he’d authorized the strike, he would have been crowing about it.

 

History of South East Asia

Alternative Fact: “I felt pretty strongly that they (China) had a tremendous power over North Korea. But it’s not what you would think.” (Donald Trump in the Wall Street Journal)

Real Fact: No, it is exactly what I thought. I had a dual major in University: history and theoretical physics. So, yeah, I may have more knowledge of South East Asian history than the average American. I’ve specifically studied the history of the region as it relates to the war in Vietnam. I don’t believe Korea had quite the animosity toward China that fomented over hundreds of years in Việt Nam — a country whose name means Southern Bách Việt (an area of Southern China) … but that’s not saying much. There’s economic dependency, but coupling economic dependency with pre-existing resentment is not a recipe for harmonious relations.

My concern is not that a firm grasp of international history is not the norm world-wide (that sucks too, but probably been the way of things since language was developed). My concern is not that Trump has changed is opinion as new facts come to light — shocked, but quite heartened that the man eventually figured out that China was propping up its currency for a couple of years now. What concerns me is that the leader of China has to convey this history lesson to the US President. Because the dude refuses to let anyone else clue him into reality. None of his campaign advisers (both the currency manipulation & they can sort North Korea claims were made prior to him becoming president), none of the guys from State, no military adviser (including those who report directly to Trump) could bring real facts into this administration. In *this* instance, the leader of another country managed to hold Trump’s attention long enough to convey his version of reality (dangerous since our president is now operating under a view that doesn’t skew our country’s way … do we support Chinese expansion into the South China Sea now? I’m sure the Chinese president has a decent rational for that move as well).

But what happens when a situation arrives where the other country’s highest ranking individuals are not on hand to brief the US president??

Internet Privacy (Or Lack Thereof)

Well, the House passed Senate Joint Resolution 34 — which essentially tells the FCC that it cannot have the policy it enacted last year that prohibits ISPs from selling an account’s browsing history. What exactly does that mean? Well, they won’t literally sell your browsing history — anyone bored enough to peruse mine … I’d happily sell my browser history for the right price. But that’s not what is going to happen. For one thing, they’re asking for lawsuits — you visit a specific drug’s web site, or a few cancer treatment centres and your usage is indicative of specific medical conditions. An insurance company or employer buys your history and uses it to fire you or increase rates, and your ISP has created actual damages.

What will likely happen is the ISPs become more effective sellers of online advertising. They offer a slightly different service than current advertising brokers. The current brokers use cookies embedded on customer’s sites to track your browsing activity. If you clear your cookies, some of their tracking history is lost as well. If you use multiple computers (or even multiple browsers on one computer), they do not have a complete picture of your browsing because cookies are not shared between browsers or computers. If you browse in private mode (or block cookies, or use a third-party product to reduce personalized advertising), these advertisers may not be able to glean much about you at all. The ISP does not have any of these problems — no matter what computer or browser I use at home, the ISP will see the traffic. Since their traffic history is maintained on their side … nothing I can do to clear the history. Browse in private mode or block cookies and you’re still making a request that transits the ISP’s network.

The ISPs have disadvantages, though, as well. When you are using encrypted protocols (HTTPS, SSH, etc) … the ISP can see the destination IP and a bunch of encrypted gibberish. Now *something* about you can be determined by the destination IP (hit 151.101.129.164 a lot and I know you read the NYTimes online). Analysis of the encrypted content can be used to guess the content — that’s a bit of research that I don’t believe is currently being used for advertising, but there are researchers who catalog patterns of bitrate negotiation on YouTube videos and use it as a fingerprint to guess what video is being watched using only the encrypted traffic. Apart from some guessing, though, the ISP does not know exactly what is being done over encrypted communication channels (even the URL being requested – so while they may know I read the NYTimes, they don’t know if I read the political headlines, recipes, or concert listings out on LI). Cookie-based advertisers can, however, track traffic to encrypted (HTTPS) web sites. This is because site operators embed the cookie in their site … so where an ISP cannot read the data you transmit with an HTTPS site, the server in question *can* (otherwise it wouldn’t know what site you requested).

So while an ISP won’t sell someone a database of the URLs you’ve accessed last week, they will use that information to form advertising buckets and sell a specific number of ads being served to “people who browse yarn stores” or “people who read Hollywood gossip” or “right-leaning political activists”. Because they have limitations as well, ISP ad brokerages are unlikely to replace the cookie based individualized advertising. I suspect current advertising customers will spread their advertising dollars out between the two — get someone who can target you based on browsing over HTTPS and someone who can target you even if you block cookies.

What about using VPN or TOR to anonymize your traffic? Well, that helps — in either case, your ISP no longer can determine the specific web sites you view. *But* they can still categorize you as a technically saavy and security conscious individual and throw you into the “tech stuff” and “computer security stuff” advertising buckets.

You can opt out of the cookie-based individualized advertising — Network Advertising Initiative or Digital Advertising Alliance — an industry move that I assume was meant to quell customer anger and avoid government regulations (i.e. enough people get angry enough and are not provided some type of redress, they’ll lobby their state/federal government to DO SOMETHING about it). The ISPs will likely create a similar set of policies and a process to opt-out. Which means the being passed to the president for signature essentially changed the ISP’s ability to use my individual browsing history from an opt-in (maybe as a condition of a lower price rate) to an opt-out (where I have to know to do it, go through the trouble of finding how to do it, and possibly even keep renewing my opt-out). Not as bad as a lot of reporting sounds, but also not a terribly constituant-friendly move.

A couple of links to the current targeted marketing opt-outs for companies which whom I do business so bothered to waste a few hours trying to determine how to opt-out:

https://pc2.mypreferences.com/Charter/TargetedDigitalMarketingAds

https://www.t-mobile.com/company/privacy-resources/your-privacy-choices/ad-options.html

 

Learning the Hard Way (Or Not Learning at All)

Throughout the presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly called out the Obama administration and US military for announcing their plans to target an area. Tipping off the enemy, he said. No reason for it, he said. All manner of politicians, military strategists, and people who bothered to think about it for a few minutes explained the rational — there are a LOT of civilians in the area we will be targeting. We would rather not incur civilian casualties as part of our military campaigns — if for no other reason, it’s bad PR. Either the advanced warning drives them out of the area or they are still there to be hit. Driving them out of the area still disrupts their operations.

So now Trump is in charge – I am sure we’ve stopped advertising where military strikes will occur. And non-combatant civilian deaths have skyrocketed. Something like 1,000 reported in March — I’m sure there’s inflation involved in this reporting. The old Soviet instantaneous statistic modification was half anything good, double anything bad, which would still be 500 civilians killed in a month that is not yet over. Gee, if only there was some way we could let these civilians know ahead of time.

Coverage does not equal access

Coverage does not equal access — this political quip used to argue against the ACA is indeed true. Not sure why the answer is not that *no* coverage pretty well ensures no access.

It was a little silly to say that no one would need to change plans or doctors with the new law. Each new annual enrollment period at work, we have different plans and, yeah, I have to change plans even though I liked the one five years ago that had WAY lower deductables, lower out of pocket expenses, and lower cost to purchase. It isn’t available. I remember my mom changing doctors a number of times in the 80’s because her doctor no longer accepted whatever insurance she had at the time. Why one would claim the ACA would change facts that have been true as long as insurance has been about is beyond me. But the claim was made, so it’s a point of criticism for the law.

I guess the implication is that the AHCA will provide both coverage and access. I’ve read the bill … and not heard anyone explain how the changes even provide coverage let alone access. I guess if fewer people can afford coverage, the lucky ones who can don’t compete for appointments anymore. But that’s hardly a selling point for a bill — a bit like saying we’ve increased selection at the grocery store by making sure 18% of your neighbors can no longer afford food.

There’s a balance in the ACA that I don’t really like. But I *understand* that if we are going with the insurance model of health care and don’t want insurance companies to refuse to cover pre-existing conditions, we’ve got to ensure they’ve got customers who aren’t sick. In this light, the proposed changes to the AHCA allowing states make up their own list of essential services makes a bad bill even worse. I’d be able to have “continuing” coverage (and thus not be someone who could be charged a surcharge from an insurance company) by buying the cheapest policy available that covers only sprained left wrists. Then when I *actually* get sick, buy a good insurance policy that covers actual medical care.

From Russia, With Love

The more I hear about Flynn communicating with Ambassador Kislyak, the stranger it seems. Why the subterfuge? Surely the Russians knew Trump won the election, and they knew when he took power. Even if they didn’t think Trump would remove any sanctions put in place (why object to something you know is going to be rescinded in a few weeks?), the strategic move would be to wait for an inexperienced administration before taking any retaliatory action. There was absolutely no reason to tell the Russians “hey, don’t worry about the sanctions being put in place by the current administration. we’ll get you sorted in January”.