Tag: hit&run

One all-too-apparent lesson
from the launch of Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges last year
is that the government isn’t very good at building software. The
federal health exchange portal, HealthCare.gov, was essentially
unusable for two months after launch last year, despite repeated
outside warnings that the project was in trouble and repeated
administration assurances that all was under control. The biggest
issues on the consumer side of the system were at least temporarily
patched by December, but much of the back end that communicates
with and pays insurers remained—and remains today—incomplete.
Insurers are using imprecise manual workarounds instead. Last week,
the Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human
Services reported
that there were 2.9 million “inconsistencies”—situations in which
the data hub was not able to verify submitted information, mostly
regarding citizenship and income—in the applications sent to the
federal exchange. The vast majority, about 2.6 million, remained
unresolved.

It’s not just the federal government. The state exchanges remain
a mess. Some were never functional and had to be scrapped. And even
those being held up as model systems, like Covered California, have
problems. As The Wall Street Journal
reports, thousands of people who purchased health coverage
through state exchanges “still don’t have coverage due to problems
in enrollment systems. In states including California, Nevada and
Massachusetts, which are running their own online insurance
exchanges, some consumers picked a private health plan and paid
their premiums only to learn recently that they aren’t
insured.”

The experience overall with the exchanges has not been good. As
The L.A. Times reports, even highly educated, tech-savvy
young adults had
serious difficulties using the site. In a study, researchers
found that people between the age of 19 and 30 were often stymied
by the system. When asked how it could be better, they said they’d
like it to be more like commonly used, privately developed websites
and applications—things like Yelp or TurboTax.

Obamacare’s exchanges were not inexpensive projects, built on
the cheap with skimpy resources. As of February, the federal health
agency had budgeted
about $834 million for the exchange. By the end of the year, it
is expected to have spent $1 billion. That’s relatively cheap
compared to the price tag for all the state exchanges, which

cost some $4.7 billion.

In contrast, the first iPhone—a marvel of usable, accessible
design with a brand new touch-screen operating system that spawned
a slew of competitors and has now fundamentally reshaped the
handheld market (as well as the daily life of millions) in its
image—cost
about $150 million to develop before its release in 2008.

This is obviously not a perfect comparison:
Apple was building a consumer gadget, not a highly regulated,
health-focused, government-run shopping portal; Apple wasn’t
coordinating and connecting multiple government agencies and
insurer computer systems, nor was it relying on an army of outside
contractors; and Apple was not building a product that, by law, had
to launch and had to have certain specifications.

Even still, those difference are not quite so extreme as they
might sound: Apple’s project required coordinating with mobile
carriers, first AT&T and then others, and, in the year after
the first generation phone launched, building a unique platform
(the app store) for a wide array of mobile software to sell their
wares. And while Apple was not bound by law to complete the iPhone
and make it a success, it had spent so much on development that it
would have destabilized the entire company.  It too was bound
to complete its product.

And at the same time, those differences also suggest the
inherent advantages of the private sector. It’s less
restricted by bureaucracy and regulations, more flexible in terms
of deadlines and partnership decisions, and able to do its work
quickly and effectively in house. It is motivated by competition
and by consumer demand. It’s also, as a market leading company,
able to hire the most productive and innovative workers, and pay
them more.

These advantages are built in, and while it’s certainly possible
and desirable to improve tech management and administration in the
public sector to some extent, those advantages are never going to
go away. It’s never going to be a level playing field.

The trick, then, isn’t to determine, as we have, that the
government isn’t very good at software development and put a lot of
energy into trying to make it better. It’s to recognize the
government’s limited capabilities and built-in disadvantages,
accept them, and work to avoid project and programs that might
require the government to play software developer. 

Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and
Cory Booker (D-N.J.), last seen
collaborating to stop the federal government from interfering
with states that have legalized medical marijuana, are back working
together. This time the two of them aim for criminal justice reform
that reduces the misery the system is able to inflict on juveniles
and low-level criminals. It’s called the REDEEM Act (“REDEEM”
stands for the not at all awkward acronym “Record Expungement
Designed to Enhance Employment”). Here’s how Paul’s office
describes what the
legislation does:

· Offers adults way to seal non-violent criminal records:
Presents the first broad-based federal path to the sealing of
criminal records for adults. Non-violent offenders will be able to
petition a court and make their case. Furthermore, employers
requesting FBI background checks will get only relevant and
accurate information – thereby protecting job applicants – because
of provisions to improve the background check system.

· Incentivizes states to increase the age of criminal
responsibility to 18-years-old: Currently 10 states have set the
original jurisdiction of adult criminal courts below 18-years-old.
This sends countless kids into the unforgiving adult criminal
system. The REDEEM Act incentivizes states to change that by
offering preference to Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS)
grant applications for those that have set or older 18 as the age
of original jurisdiction for adult criminal courts.

· Allows for sealing and expungement of juvenile records:
Provides for automatic expungement of records for kids who commit
non-violent crimes before they turn 15 and automatic sealing of
records for those who commit non-violent crimes after they turn 15
years old.

·Restricts use of juvenile solitary confinement: Ends the cruel
and counterproductive practice of solitary confinement except in
the most extreme circumstances in which it is necessary to protect
a juvenile detainee or those around them.

· Lifts ban on SNAP and TANF benefits for low-level drug
offenders: The REDEEM Act restores access to benefits for those who
have served their time for use, possession, and distribution crimes
provided their offense was rationally related to a substance abuse
disorder and they have enrolled in a treatment program.

Yes, that’s right; a Republican pushing to restore food stamp
access to drug offenders. Tell us again what a crazy, radical Paul
is (though the demand that these folks enroll in a drug treatment
program is unfortunate rehab service cronyism/rent-seeking).

The first item on the list could very well be inspired by some
pushes to
ban criminal background checks. But rather than controlling
what information employers may ask candidates, Paul and Booker
instead are looking to control what information the government may
release, a much smarter option less likely to lead to lawyers
sniffing around businesses looking for easy lawsuits or the
government presuming to tell private employers what information
they may or may not consider when hiring somebody.

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Unpatriotic American
corporations are fleeing the United States for foreign climes in a
suddenly headline-grabbing practice called “inversion.”
It’s desertion, damnit. Or as Fortune‘s Allan Sloan
puts
it in breathlessly stupid form, “Bigtime companies are moving
their ‘headquarters’ overseas to dodge billions in taxes … that
means the rest of us pay their share.”

He continues:

Ah, July! What a great month for those of us who celebrate
American exceptionalism. There’s the lead-up to the Fourth,
countrywide Independence Day celebrations including my town’s local
Revolutionary War reenactment and fireworks, the enjoyable days of
high summer, and, for the fortunate, the prospect of some time at
the beach.

Sorry, but this year, July isn’t going to work for me. That’s
because of a new kind of American corporate exceptionalism:
companies that have decided to desert our country to avoid paying
taxes but expect to keep receiving the full array of benefits that
being American confers, and that everyone else is paying for.

Yes, leaving the country–a process that tax techies call
inversion–is perfectly legal. A company does this by
reincorporating in a place like Ireland, where the corporate tax
rate is 12.5%, compared with 35% in the U.S. Inversion also makes
it easier to divert what would normally be U.S. earnings to
foreign, lower-tax locales. But being legal isn’t the same as being
right. If a few companies invert, it’s irritating but no big deal
for our society. But mass inversion is a whole other thing, and
that’s where we’re heading.

It’s legal to emigrate? When the fuck did that happen?
And you still have access to the old digs’ markets? For shame.

Yeah. I was feeling bad about leaving my former fellow New
Yorkers holding the bag for that state’s mugging-worthy tax take
when I split for Arizona. Not. I got out of that abusive
relationship, thank you.

I’m not exactly sure what “pay their share” of taxes means,
though I hear that particular whine a lot when people and their
businesses flee from the
U.S. to Singapore,
California to Texas, or from Maryland to Pennsylvania.
Everybody left behind supposedly has to pick up the remainder of
some fixed tab.

But except for extortions of fixed weights of gold and gems
imposed by conquerors of antiquity on their prostrate subjects,
taxes are rarely set as sums to be divvied among the suffering
masses, but rather as percentages of economic activity. If the
local powers that be make their digs so unattractive—say, with a
corporate tax rate of 35 percent while the competition asks 12.5
percent—there’s going to be less economic activity to get a share
of.

Not that there would be anything wrong with fleeing a fixed
sum.

We see the same phenomenon within the United States, with people

migrating from state to state. The migrations appear to be
heavily driven by
both taxes and respect for personal freedom (politicians can
fuck things up in lots of ways, and not all of them involve tax
rates).

What’s Sloan’s solution?

My answer: Fight to fix the tax code, but don’t desert the
country. And I define “fiduciary duty” as the obligation to produce
the best long-term results for shareholders, not “get the stock
price up today.” Undermining the finances of the federal government
by inverting helps undermine our economy. And that’s a bad thing,
in the long run, for companies that do business in America.

Yeah, well. This country was settled by people who “deserted”
some place else because things were better here. If the powers that
be can’t find it in themselves to keep things better,
there’s no good reason to not desert again—ludicrous appeals to
self-sacrificing patriotism notwithstanding.

California prosecutors have decided not to pursue
charges against Erick Gelhaus, the sheriff who fired eight shots at
a 13-year-old boy he believed was armed, killing him on the spot.
The kid, Andy Lopez, was actually carrying a mere pellet gun.

The Lopez parents are furious with the lack of criminal charges,

according to the Associated Press:

The parents of Andy Lopez decried the decision, saying “it is
impossible” to accept and they felt as though their son “had been
killed again.”

The teen’s death last year heightened racial tensions in a
mostly Latino neighborhood of Santa Rosa, a city of about 170,000
residents around 50 miles north of San Francisco. The shooting
parked protests and criticism that the officer acted too
quickly.

In fairness to the sheriff, the pellet gun apparently resembled
a real gun:

Deputy Erick Gelhaus fired multiple rounds in response to what
he believed was an imminent threat of death, Sonoma County District
Attorney Jill Ravitch announced at a news conference.

“While in the lawful performance of his duty, Deputy Gelhaus was
faced with a highly unpredictable and rapidly evolving situation,”
Ravitch said. “He believed honestly and reasonably that he was
faced with a do-or-die dilemma.”

Ravitch displayed photographs of the pellet gun found next to
Lopez and a real assault rifle to highlight similarities in
appearance.

Gelhaus shot Lopez on Oct. 22 as the teen walked near his home
with the pellet gun. The deputy told investigators he believed the
gun was real and opened fire out of fear for his life.

Gelhaus was wrong, of course. And a kid who hadn’t done anything
remotely criminal died because of the sheriff’s shoot-first
approach to local law enforcement.

Want to attract the attention of NSA cubical
dwellers? Then just use the TOR anonymizing system or try
researching operating systems other Windows. As Patrick Tucker over
at
Defense One explains:

If you take certain steps to mask your identity online, such as
using the encryption service TOR, or even investigating an
alternative to the buggy Windows operating system, you’re all but
asking for “deep” monitoring by the NSA…

According to a recent report from the German media outlet
Tagesschau,
a group of TOR affiliates working with Tagesschau looked into the
source
code for [the NSA’s] XKeyscore. They found that nine servers
running TOR, including one at the MIT Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, were under constant NSA
surveillance. The code also revealed some of the behaviors that
users could undertake to immediately be tagged or “fingerprinted”
for so-called deep packet inspection, an investigation into the
content of data packages you send across the Internet, such as
emails, web searches and browsing history.

If you are located outside of the U.S., Canada, the U.K. or one
of the so-called
Five Eyes countries partnering with the NSA in its surveillance
efforts, then visiting the TOR website triggers an automatic
fingerprinting. In other words, simply investigating
privacy-enhancing methods from outside of the United States is an
act worthy of scrutiny and surveillance according to rules that
make
XKeyscore run. Another infraction: hating Windows…

If you visit the forum page for the popular Linux Journal,
dedicated to the open-source operating system Linux, you could be
fingerprinted regardless of where you live because the XKeystore
source code designates the Linux Journal as an “extremist forum.”
Searching for the Tails,
operating system, another Windows alternative popular among human
rights watchers, will also land you on the deep-packet
inspectee list.

The whole Defense One
article is worth your attention.

I do wonder if my regular use of DuckDuckGo for
searches worries the folks over at the NSA? For more background,
see my article, “How
to Keep Your Government From Spying On You.” See also my
collegue Scott Shackford’s excellent post from yesterday on just
how “inadvertant”
the NSA’s spying on American citizens really is.

Britain’s Chief Inspector of Schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw, has
announced that he would like schools to be allowed to fine parents
who, among other academic crimes, don’t read to their
children. Parents who neglected their children’s homework
or school events should also be punished, he said.

As he
told the London Times: 

Parents should be fined if they miss parents’ evenings, fail to
read with their children or allow homework to go undone, the chief
inspector of schools said.

“Headteachers should have the power to fine them. It’s sending
the message that you are responsible for your children no matter
how poor you are.”

Actually it seems to
be sending the message that the state is responsible for the
children, and it’s responsible for the parents, and it’s
responsible for enforcing read alouds in their homes.

As a gal who somehow grew up literate despite a mom and dad who
loved to read, but not to me, I wonder if Sir Wilshaw would agree
to have me come in and decide how to
raise his children or grandkid so they could
grow up to be professional writers like me. Talk about bookish!

And if he doesn’t accept that, well, perhaps he should pay me a
small fine.

• Germany’s president, Angela
  Merkel, visited Beijing, where she and China’s president, Xi
  Jinping, pledged to increase strategic cooperation between the two
  countries. The
  White House, meanwhile, says it hopes the U.S. and Germany can
  maintain a friendly relationship despite growing outrage over U.S.
  spying in Germany.
• The losing presidential candidate in Afghanistan is
  disputing the results and may form a parallel government in Kabul.
  A bomb killed at least 16 people outside of the capital, including
  4 NATO troops, as Secretary of State John Kerry warned against any
  attempt to take power by “extra legal means.”
• Israel has launched an aerial offensive in Gaza
  after militants in the Palestinian territory fired at least 80
  rockets into Israel yesterday.
• The real Internal Revenue
  Service scandal is that it hasn’t been funded enough, because
  of Republicans, according to The New York Times, a
  “newspaper of record.”
• Mississippi State Sen.
  Charlie McDaniel, who unsuccessfully challenged six-term
  incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran in the Republican primary held last
  month, is alleging voter fraud. Mississippi has a voter ID law but
  McDaniel’s lawyer says the real voter fraud happens in absentee
  ballots.
• A math professor used the
  Amazon Kindle “Popular Highlights” feature to measure which
  bestseller is likely the least read. Thomas Pynchon’s Capital
  in the 21^st Century came in first.

Over the weekend, Google co-founders Sergey Brin
and Larry Page sat down for a rare joint
public interview with venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, in
which the three billionaires reminisced about how Brin and Page
nearly sold their groundbreaking search technology to Excite for
$1.6 million in 1999 (Google’s market capitalization is now $392.7
billion), speculated on how self-driving cars could change the way
we live (there are “policy risks,” said Brin), and discussed how
Google rewrote the rules on mission creep (“ideally, the company
would scale the number of things it does with the number of people
in a linear fashion,” said Page).

But why isn’t the company devoting more of its innovation
firepower to the wildly inefficient U.S. health care industry,
which hogs about 18% of GDP? Brin explained:

Generally, health is just so heavily regulated. It’s just a
painful business to be in. It’s just not necessarily how I want to
spend my time. Even though we do have some health projects, and
we’ll be doing that to a certain extent. But I think the regulatory
burden in the U.S. is so high that think it would dissuade a lot of
entrepreneurs.

Page echoed Brin, and then speculated that if researchers were
allowed to anonymously mine medical records “I imagine that would
save 10,000 lives in the first year.” That can’t happen, noted
Page, because of rules imposed by the 1996 federal Health Insurance
Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Later in the interview, an audience member asked the co-founders
if government makes it more difficult for them to engage in
long-term planning. Page responded by offering some perspective on
how regulation that “increases without bounds” is likely to lead
government “to collapse under its own weight:”

I was trying to reduce the complexity in Google. I was thinking,
“We’re getting to be a bigger company. Let’s take our rules and
regulations. Let’s make sure they stay at 50 pages, so people can
actually read it.” But the problem that I discovered about that was
that by reference, we include the entire law and regulation of the
entire world, because we’re a multinational company. We operate
everywhere. Our employees, what they do affects everything. In some
sense, we’d have to read the hundred million pages of law and
regulation that are out there.

The entire interview is below. A transcript is
here.

The
left really does hate freedom. There’s no other way to interpret
its hysterical overreaction to the small bow that the Supreme Court
made to liberty in its rulings in the Hobby Lobby and Harris
rulings, notes Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia.

In both instances the justices found the narrowest possible
grounds to stand up for the First Amendment liberties for free
speech, association and religion. “Despite such skittishness, the
lefto blogosphere erupted into tiresome taunts of fascism and
worse,” she notes.

View this article.