CAN YOU TRUST THEM WITH YOUR DATA? CAN YOU TRUST ANYONE WITH YOUR DATA? Experian in hot seat after exposing millions of social security numbers.
Archive for 2014
April 5, 2014
FIREFOX MEETS FIRESTORM: Mozilla clams up.
The comments on their feedback page remain highly negative.
AT THE HARVARD LIBRARY, books bound in human skin.
OVER ON TWITTER, R.D. Brewer writes, “Would it be too much to ask for the establishment GOP to become better politicians?”
And apparently, the answer is yes, it is too much to ask. I mean, look: I understand that the NRSC is an incumbent-protection club. That’s basically its job. But to introduce baseless charges of neo-Confederate racism in a GOP primary is beyond inept. Honestly, if you can’t find a real, instead of imagined, problem with a primary challenger then tout the virtues of your guy. And if your guy doesn’t have any virtues to tout that would be better than a baseless charge of neo-Confederate racism, then maybe just keep your mouth shut.
Good grief. You want party unity, don’t falsely tar fellow Republicans, and their grassroots supporters, as racists. Are you trying to get people to stay home in November?
A BRIEF HISTORY of the submarine.
IN THE MAIL: From Joe R. Lansdale, Cold in July.
Also, today only: Up to 45% off top-rated Strategy Board Games. I forget who I saw tweeting it, but we’d be in better shape if Obama had spent some time playing Diplomacy — or even Risk — in his misspent youth.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 331.
MEGAN MCARDLE: Be Glad That Corporate Liability Is Limited.
Tort law and corporate form have evolved together. You can argue, in fact, that judges allowed liability to expand so far in part because corporations were increasingly perceived as faceless bureaucracies, rather than extensions of a single owner who could be destroyed by an excessive judgment. Whatever the case, you cannot simply return to the old rules about firm formation while leaving the modern rules about liability in place. The result would be economic catastrophe as everyone tried to get their personal fortunes out of the business world, where they might be exposed to ruin — unpredictable, essentially unknowable ruin, because even if a lawyer can assure you that everything you’re doing is legal today, they can’t make any guarantees about tomorrow. It was black-letter law that you couldn’t sue a tobacco company for giving you cancer … until, suddenly, it wasn’t.
Does this mean that owners won’t watch their companies closely enough? Sure, though I’d point out that even people with every incentive in the world to know what’s going on in a large organization often don’t, because information travels through a bureaucracy the way movie heroes travel through quicksand.
The correct question isn’t whether there are costs to limited liability; the correct question is “compared to what?” And if the alternative is undoing the Industrial Revolution, I don’t think that’s a fair trade.
To some people, of course, undoing the Industrial Revolution is a feature, not a bug.
HMM: CIA Official Dies In Apparent Suicide. “A senior CIA official has died in an apparent suicide this week from injuries sustained after jumping off a building in northern Virginia, according to sources close to the CIA. . . . No other details of the death could be learned.”
MATTHEW CONTINETTI: How Comcast Bought The Democratic Party. “It is something of a political irony that Republicans, who for ideological reasons are pro-business, have not raised questions about, or objections to, the conjoining of two Democratic institutions into a media trust. If Republicans had any sense, they would wage war against Comcast and its Democratic enablers and turn the merger into a live issue.”
As we’ve seen with the RIAA and the MPAA, Republicans aren’t willing to go after big businesses, even big businesses that are their mortal enemies.
AT AMAZON, fresh deals on Hot New Releases, updated every hour.
JAMES TARANTO: Justice Thomas Was Right: Citizens United And The Defenestration of Brendan Eich.
Brendan Eich was struck by OkCupid’s arrow, but that doesn’t mean he’s in love.
As the Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross noted the other day, OkCupid, a dating website, urged its users to boycott Mozilla’s Firefox browser on the ground that “Mozilla’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples.” Eich’s offense was to donate $1,000 in 2008 to the campaign of California’s Proposition 8, a state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage that has since been nullified by federal courts. There has been no claim that Eich, an executive of Mozilla Corp. since its founding in 2005, discriminated against gay employees.
Ross had some fun with the hypocrisy of two of OkCupid’s co-founders, Sam Yagan and Christian Rudder. He searched the federal campaign-contribution database and found that Yagan gave to two candidates who opposed same-sex marriage: $500 to then-Rep. Chris Cannon of Utah, a Republican, in 2004; and $500 to then-Sen. Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Rudder donated $1,000 to Obama’s re-election effort, but that contribution came in September 2012, a few months after the president reversed his position. . . .
Eich’s support for Proposition 8 became public knowledge because of a California law requiring disclosure of personal information–name, address, occupation and employer’s name–of anybody who gives $100 or more to a campaign for or against a ballot initiative. The secretary of state’s office is required to post this information online, and, as HotAir.com’s “AllahPundit” notes, the Los Angeles Times made it available on its site as an easily searchable database.
So I guess it’s fair for people on the right to go after donors to lefty causes? Without mercy.
Related: Purge The 7 Million: The Purity of the Volk must be restored. “According to Wikipedia, 7,001,084 people voted for Prop 8. Why do any of those people still have jobs? Shouldn’t they all be forced to resign? And why should they have the privilege of living in California at all? I say round them up and move them someplace where they won’t do any harm.”
One reason why rich white guys like Eich are being targeted so viciously is that the many black churches who supported Proposition 8 — and, indeed, put it over the top — are out-of-bounds for criticism.
UPDATE: Uh oh: 60% of Intel employees who donated in Prop 8 debate supported banning gay marriage. “Exit question: When do we get a list of Silicon Valley donors to Obama’s campaign circa 2008, when he was still formally against [same-sex] marriage? True, he didn’t support Prop 8 or other attempts to legally ban SSM (a strong signal at the time that his stated view was a lie), but the whole point of the equal protection argument against traditional marriage laws is that you can’t reserve ‘marriage’ for straights without implicitly slapping a second-class-citizen stigma on gays. Obama was willing to do that, at least rhetorically. Let’s have the names.”
Purge them all!!!!!!
ANOTHER UPDATE: Mozilla set a new company record today for online customer dissatisfaction.
The comments on their feedback page seem uniformly negative at the moment.
THE ANTIGUN PEOPLE ALWAYS PREDICT A BLOODBATH, BUT IT NEVER HAPPENS: After passing concealed-carry law, Chicago has lowest murder rate since 1958.
I BET THIS GETS MORE COVERAGE FROM CNN THAN LELAND YEE, WHO’S ACTUALLY BEEN INDICTED. YOU KNOW? Grand jury convened in NJ bridge scandal.
LIFE IN OBAMA’S AMERICA: ONE LAW FOR THE RICH, ANOTHER FOR THE REST. Beau Biden DEFENDS the judge who only gave a du Pont heir probation after admitting to sexually assaulting his three-year-old daughter. “Beau Biden has defended the judge who decided to let an heir to the du Pont family agree to a plea deal after being charged with sexually abusing his young daughter. Biden, the Vice President’s son who is in his second term as Delaware Attorney General, wrote a letter supporting Superior Court Judge Jan Jurden and her decision to allow Robert H. Richards IV to admit to fourth degree rape and register as a sex offender but not serve any time.”
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: The General Motors Scandal May Be Worse Than You Think: Does anyone believe the Obama administration took as hard a look at GM as it did Toyota?
In February 2010, the Obama administration’s transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, told America, without a shred of evidence, that Toyota automobiles were dangerous to drive. LaHood offered the remarks in front of the House subcommittee that was investigating reports of unintended-acceleration crashes. “My advice is, if anybody owns one of these vehicles, stop driving it,” he said, sending the company’s stock into a nose dive.
Even at the time, LaHood’s comments were reckless at best. Assailing the competition reeks of political opportunism and cronyism. It also illustrates one of the unavoidable predicaments of the state’s owning a corporation in a competitive marketplace. And when we put LaHood’s comment into perspective today, it’s actually a lot worse. The Obama administration not only had the power and ideological motive to damage the largely nonunionized competition but also was busy propping up a company that was causing preventable deaths.
Also propping up the UAW.
Before plowing billions of tax dollars into saving the United Automobile Workers, did the car czar or any other Obama officials take extra care to review DOT records to ensure that taxpayers would not be funding the preventable deaths of American citizens? Would DOT and Holder exhibit the same zealousness for safety with GM as they did when it came to Toyota?
In the midst of the bailout debate and subsequent “turnaround,” news of a cover-up and major recall would have been a political disaster.
So it’s difficult to understand why this isn’t a huge scandal. If every obtuse utterance by an obscure Republican congressman gets the media juices flowing, surely the possibility of this kind of negligence is worth a look. Can anyone with access to the administration ask some of these questions? Because if you take credit for “saving” a company (actually, an “industry,” as no one would have ever driven again if Obama hadn’t saved the day), you also get credit for “saving” the real-life unscrupulous version of the company.
“I placed my bet on the American worker,” Obama told union workers in 2012. “And I’ll make that bet any day of the week. And now, three years later, that bet is paying off.”
Betting $80 billion of someone else’s money to prop up sympathetic labor unions isn’t exactly fraught with political risk. Unless it turns out that your administration is less concerned about the safety defects of the company you own than it is about the company you dislike. That would be corruption.
And that’s what we’ve got.
LARRY KUDLOW IN THE NEW YORK SUN: Is Atlas Shrugging? Koch Warning on Collectivism Echoes Slow Jobs Growth.
LIFE AMONG OUR RULING CLASS: Eric Holder Defends Using Justice Department Airplane For 27 Personal Trips.
April 4, 2014
CHECK HILLARY’S CAMPAIGN ACCOUNTS: $6 Billion Goes Missing at State Department. “In a special ‘management alert’ made public Thursday, the State Department’s Inspector General Steve Linick warned ‘significant financial risk and a lack of internal control at the department has led to billions of unaccounted dollars over the last six years.'”
WAR ON MEN: In Schools, Redefining Boyhood As A Disease. Yet another reason to wonder if sending your kids to public school is some sort of parental malpractice.
BLOWBACK: After Eich resigns, conservatives slam Mozilla—and call for boycott.
Media coverage of Mozilla and its Firefox Web browser over the past week has largely focused on new CEO Brendan Eich and his 2008 opposition to gay marriage (in the form of a $1,000 donation to California’s Prop 8 campaign). Yesterday, Eich resigned from Mozilla, and Mozilla has had plenty of support for letting Eich leave.
But it’s a new day, and that means it’s the turn of more conservative or libertarian thinkers and activists to bash Mozilla. Some are even calling for boycotts of the Firefox browser in campaigns that mirror those of sites like OKCupid, which encouraged users of its dating site to ditch Firefox as a way of pressuring Mozilla to distance itself from Eich.
Andrew Sullivan, the Daily Dish blogger and book author who has done as much as anyone over the last decade to make “marriage equality” a term that even conservatives can love, ripped Mozilla for not backing Eich.
“There is only one permissible opinion at Mozilla, and all dissidents must be purged!” he wrote.
Well, I hope Mozilla suffers enough to dissuade others from giving in so easily. But isn’t OK Cupid, the instigator here, the proper target for retaliatory efforts?
DO TELL: The Economist: Is college worth it? Too many degrees are a waste of money. The return on higher education would be much better if college were cheaper. But while I appreciate the plug, I must quibble with this:
What is not in doubt is that the cost of university per student has risen by almost five times the rate of inflation since 1983, and graduate salaries have been flat for much of the past decade. Student debt has grown so large that it stops many young people from buying houses, starting businesses or having children. Those who borrowed for a bachelor’s degree granted in 2012 owe an average of $29,400. The Project on Student Debt, a non-profit, says that 15% of borrowers default within three years of entering repayment. At for-profit colleges the rate is 22%. Glenn Reynolds, a law professor and author of “The Higher Education Bubble”, writes of graduates who “may wind up living in their parents’ basements until they are old enough to collect Social Security.”
That is an exaggeration: students enrolling this year who service their debts will see them forgiven after 20 years.
Well, yes, if you pay your debt for 20 years. But as I note in The New School, there are already people having their Social Security checks garnished, and there are plenty of people who have accumulated large debt because they aren’t able to make the payments. The Income-Based Repayment scheme helps with that some, but not enough, and it applies only to new borrowers, not to the already indebted.