Quotulatiousness

November 28, 2018

AirBnB virtue signals its … anti-semitic street cred?

Filed under: Business, Law, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the National Post, Barbara Kay discusses the odd business choices of AirBnB in cutting off rentals to only certain locations that just happen to be in Israel:

Planning a group holiday in Kashmir? Airbnb is there to serve you. Likewise in Tibet, northern Cyprus and Georgia’s separatist republic of Abkhazia, all occupied or disputed territories. Airbnb’s political neutrality in these hot spots therefore quite rightly casts suspicion, to put it mildly, on its recent decision to delist some 200 Jewish homes in West Bank communities.

Airbnb stated, “We know that people will disagree with this decision and appreciate their perspective. This is a controversial issue.” No kidding. An Israeli class-action lawsuit has been filed against Airbnb, seeking US$4,000 in damages for every affected host.

Indignation has been running high outside of Israel as well, in statements both spontaneous — disgusted blog, Twitter and Facebook posts — and considered. The Beverly Hills city council, for example, passed a unanimous condemnatory resolution, calling Airbnb out for anti-Semitism and stating, in part: “The City of Beverly Hills hereby calls upon Airbnb to correct this act of disrespect to the land of Israel and restore its original services immediately.”

Setting aside the anti-Semitic optics, is it legal for Airbnb to do this?

The U.S. Constitution, as well as various state laws and acts of Congress, prohibits both American individuals and corporations from participating in boycotts against other nations. A corporate boycott against a foreign government does not fall under the “free speech” rubric,” but is considered a “tool of statecraft” reserved for the federal government in such situations as war. The office of Rob Portman of Ohio (R), an author of the Israel Anti-Boycott Act in the Senate, told The Jerusalem Post last Tuesday that it wants to hear from Airbnb. The Illinois state legislature — which passed the nation’s first local anti-BDS law in 2015 — will reportedly meet in mid-December, when it anticipates debating whether Airbnb violated its statute.

Establishing illegality pivots on whether the move is deemed as “politically” inspired. It certainly seems to be. As noted by Kohelet Forum legal expert Eugene Kontorovich in a recent Wall Street Journal oped, “An American Jew with a rental property in the West Bank is barred from listing it for rent on the website. But an American Arab is welcome to list his home a few hundred metres away, even though the Palestinian law forbidding real-estate deals with Jews carries a maximum penalty of death. That openly racist policy doesn’t trigger Airbnb’s delisting policy.”

England: South Sea Bubble – The Bubble Pops – Extra History – #4

Filed under: Americas, Britain, Business, Economics, Government, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Extra Credits
Published on 11 Apr 2015

Support us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon
____________

With the South Sea Company’s value dangerously inflated, Blunt drives one more scheme to raise stock prices – and it finally backfires on him. Early investors (including the famous politician Robert Walpole) seize the opportunity to sell their stock while the value is high, and the general public finally realizes that the South Sea Company has no actual worth. Everyone who didn’t sell their stock in the first round finds themselves suddenly bankrupt as the stock value plummets. Even King George, on vacation when disaster strikes, loses a large amount of the royal fortune. Robert Walpole, however, sees this as an opportunity to make himself a hero of the public. Hiding his own involvement in the South Sea Swindle, he cancels all debts owed for the company’s stock to help put its public investors back on their feet. Despite this, the public demands an inquiry and Walpole must walk a thin line between his facade as defender of the people and the reality of his, his party, and the King’s blatant corruption.

November 27, 2018

England: South Sea Bubble – Buying Out Britain – Extra History – #3

Filed under: Americas, Britain, Business, Economics, Government, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Extra Credits
Published on 28 Mar 2015

Support us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon
____________

The time has come for Blunt to enact the final act of his scheme: taking on the 31 million pound British debt. When Parliament initially balks at transferring responsibility for that much money to Blunt’s insolvent South Sea Company, he bribes them with special deals on his own stock. Despite a legal clause that should have locked the stock price until the company began paying off the debt, Blunt keeps introducing new plans to inflate the stock price and pocket the money for himself. He does everything from selling stocks on layaway to loaning people money so they could buy more stocks from him, creating an artificial demand for South Sea Company stock that drives the company’s worth up to 300 million pounds: a staggering ten times the initial value of the already stunning debt it had assumed. His success, founded entirely on speculation with no actual revenue from trade, not only starves out other businesses across Britain but exceeds the total amount of money in the country’s entire economy. This bubble can not last.

November 26, 2018

England: South Sea Bubble – Too Big to Fail – Extra History – #2

Filed under: Americas, Britain, Business, Economics, Government, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Extra Credits
Published on 14 Mar 2015

Support us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon
____________

Frustrated at every turn by the Whig-controlled Bank of England, Harley and Blunt decide to start their own institution: a trading company that will exchange government debt for stock shares. This new South Sea Company will have a monopoly on trade in the rich new lands of South America, but all the ports there are controlled by Spain, with whom Britain is at war. So Blunt pushes the country into a premature and unfavorable peace with Spain, enlisting famous authors to write his propaganda and convincing Queen Anne herself to tip the balance of Parliament in his favor. After the queen dies and the government changes hands, Blunt kicks Harley and his Tory leaders out of the company. He manages to bring King George I himself on board as a ceremonial leader, linking the success of the South Sea Company with the reputation of the monarchy. But while his maneuvering inflates the value of his company’s stock, it’s never produced anything close to the amount of money he’s convinced people to invest in it.

November 25, 2018

England: South Sea Bubble – The Sharp Mind of John Blunt – Extra History – #1

Filed under: Britain, Business, Economics, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Extra Credits
Published on 28 Feb 2015

Support us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon
____________

When Robert Harley steps in as England’s new Chancellor of the Exchequer, he discovers that not only is the government deeply in debt, but no one knows quite how much debt it owes. Because vicious political infighting between the Tory and Whig politic parties made it difficult to pass new tax laws, Harley turned to a private financier named John Blunt to help find enough money for England to keep up with its expenses for the year. Using Harley’s government resources, Blunt instigated a series of get-rich schemes that drove artificial demand for unsustainable land and lottery investments with tremendous short term gains. Before the year was done, Blunt had successfully covered the shortfall for the government that year – albeit at the cost of driving England’s already outrageous debt even higher.

November 24, 2018

It’d be an inhumanly restrained government that wouldn’t take advantage of this arrangement

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

And I don’t know of anyone who thinks that highly of our current federal government. In the Financial Post, Terence Corcoran outlines the government’s bribe offer to Canadian media organizations:

Historically, a free press has meant freedom from government intervention — from the king, the president, the prime minister, politicians, bureaucrats. The proposals outlined Wednesday by Finance Minister Bill Morneau to rescue journalists pretends to be consistent with that fundamental principle. The measures, he said, will be “arm’s-length and independent of the government.” They are not, and they represent a step backward for Canadian journalism.

Under the Morneau proposals, the arm of government is directly involved in deciding which journalists or news organizations will receive special treatment, tax breaks, charitable status. Over five years the amount of federal money moving directly into news and journalism will exceed $600 million, which obviously results in government dependence, not independence.

Morneau’s own words betray the falsity of his defence of the media-bailout plan. Decisions will be in the hands of an “independent panel of journalists (that) will be established to define and promote core journalism standards, define professional journalism, and determine eligibility.” What the heck does all that mean? Other journalists are going to set standards for what? Content? Ethics? Ideology? Adherence to the Canada Food Guide?

[…]

It is also unlikely that these measures to shape local journalism and bolster some media companies over others will be the end of government efforts to meddle in the industry. One can reasonably expect that there will be corresponding attempts to undermine the corporate entities and others that are said to be destabilizing Canadian journalism and the news and information business.

There is constant pressure on government from many sources to take action against the social media giants that are accused of stealing profits from legacy newspapers while spreading fake news. In a new commentary this week, former U.S. labour secretary Robert Reich called on Washington to break up Facebook and Google on the grounds that they dominate advertising. Anti-trust action is needed, said Reich, on the grounds that they “stifle innovation.” Canadian regulatory activists share the view that the U.S. tech and media companies need to be controlled and taxed — with the money redistributed to Canadian entities.

November 21, 2018

QotD: Occupations and sex differences

Filed under: Business, Economics, Health, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Sex differences are a distribution, not a hard, bright line. For example, the women’s world record in the hundred-meter dash is slower than the U.S. high school boys’ record. Men on average are faster than women. But the women at the top of the distribution — those Olympians — are still faster than most men. It would be absurd to say that a woman can’t run the hundred meter in 11 seconds, just because most women can’t. It would be equally absurd to say that men are not, on average, faster than women.

So it’s possible that the distribution of nurturing traits is skewed enough that fewer men will be good at the difficult and emotionally taxing job of providing intimate care for sick and needy people. While there are plenty of health care jobs that don’t require so much direct human interaction, they tend to require more training. And the ability to sit in a classroom and absorb material from a textbook is also a human trait that is unevenly and unfairly distributed. It’s not that no men can succeed in transitioning from old-style “manly” jobs to the pink-collar professions, but that fewer men may be able to do so than we’d like to think.

Megan McArdle, “Some Blue-Collar Workers Probably Shouldn’t Do Pink Jobs”, Bloomberg View, 2017-01-06.

November 18, 2018

Ironically, Pabst may be forced to start brewing its own beers

Filed under: Business, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’ve never had a PBR, so maybe all those hipster poseurs really do like the stuff, but their favourite ironic drink may be in danger, as Pabst is suing MillerCoors to force them to keep brewing the stuff for Pabst:

A Wisconsin courtroom was the setting this week for a lawsuit pitting some of the biggest names in watery American beer against each other. The case pits “hipster favorite” Pabst, parent of PBR, against the much larger MillerCoors, which Pabst claims wants “to put it out of business.”

Earlier this year, Pabst sued MillerCoors, alleging MillerCoors has engaged in “breach of contract, breach of anti-competition laws, fraud, and misrepresentation.” The companies’ currently have an agreement in which MillerCoors brews Pabst’s beer brands. That agreement is about to end, and MillerCoors seems ambivalent about renewing the contract. Pabst has asked the Wisconsin court to award it $400 million in damages and to force MillerCoors to renew the contract.

The case, which is being heard in state court in Milwaukee, could decide the future of Pabst’s entire portfolio of beers, from PBR to Old Milwaukee, Lone Star, Old Style, Colt 45, Natty Bo, Rainier, Schlitz, Olympia, Stroh’s, Schaefer, Schmidt’s, Pearl, and Blatz.

MillerCoors brews Pabst’s beers under a 1999 contract—a type of agreement known in the industry as contract brewing—that is set to expire in 2020. That contract contemplated two potential five-year renewals. MillerCoors argues the company should be free to determine whether to renew the contract, while Pabst alleges “that the two need to find a solution together if Pabst wants to continue the agreement.” Pabst also insists MillerCoors has a good-faith obligation to negotiate a renewal.

MillerCoors hasn’t foreclosed on continuing its partnership with Pabst. For example, it’s considered selling its Irwindale, California, facility to Pabst, or continuing to brew Pabst’s beers there at a much higher cost.

Pabst insists the only way the company can continue to exist is if MillerCoors, which is owned by Molson Coors, continues to produce its beers under contract at a cost Pabst finds fair. That may be true. Pabst doesn’t brew beer, and AB InBev, which owns industry leader Budweiser and which is likely the only other brewer large enough to produce the full Pabst line, forswears the contract-brewing model.

As Tim Worstall put it earlier this week: “Basically, and not accurately, Pabst books the advertising space and MillerCoors does everything else. And given that it’s the brand bit of brewing that makes the money, not the brewing bit, why would you continue such an arrangement if you didn’t have to?”

As Iowahawk put it, “Oh cripes when will I ever learn not to trigger the Beer Snobs”:

November 17, 2018

Alistair Dabbs on the “Church of Failure”

Filed under: Business, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

He says he’s a recent convert:

“Work out loud,” my prospective new employer tells me, adding that “we are a team, not a family”. Sister Sledge need not apply.

I try to keep my best poker face but I can sense my left eyebrow raising by itself. When I first entered the work market in the 1980s, the prevailing language of corporate bullshit rolled its tongue around paradigm-shifting and envelope-breaking. Today, we talk about “high-bandwidth collaboration” and “it’s OK to fail”.

Come to think about it, my prospective employer just said something about “failing quickly and cheaply”. Earlier, they pontificated that “failure breeds success”. Clearly, failure is the key skill they’re looking for in an employee. I’m their man.

I come well-prepared for this onslaught of hipster interview gibberish: I grew some stubble, put on a lumberjack shirt, boned up on my IT certifications (just in case) and, most important of all, learnt the language of corporate culture decks. You too can master modern marketspeak for the digital era by reading Culture Decks Decoded by Brett Putter.

Unfortunately, the interviewer is now talking about “pseudo-harmony” and has just invited me to be “a no-ego doer”. My left eyebrow feels like it is travelling towards the back of my head.

It’s when he says “date the model, marry the mission” that I realise I couldn’t possibly keep up the pretence in such a workplace for more than five minutes. I can control it no longer. Visibly shaken by my sudden and uncontrollably explosive yell of laughter, my interviewer wishes me a good day. No worries, there are plenty of other organisations out there who’ll pay me handsomely to fail for them – quickly, cheaply and even frequently if that’s what’s required.

I am a recent convert to the Church of Failure. Previously, I regarded failure as undesirable and unnecessary if there was an option of not failing. My LinkedIn profile would list items under the “Experience” heading thus:

    Provided consultancy to major newspaper group on how to maximise digital publishing productivity at minimal cost; was ignored; watched helplessly as six-figure sum poured needlessly into incompetent alternative system that inevitably failed; left company to work elsewhere; those who instigated embarrassing disaster received promotion.

Now I get the picture: bosses can forgive and even admire a brave failure, no matter how avoidable… but absolutely nobody likes a smart arse.

November 15, 2018

“… like watching a spontaneous Humanitarian Olympics rise up out of the town itself”

Filed under: Business, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Gerard Vanderleun is one of the refugees from the Camp fire that burned out all of the town of Paradise, California. He’s staying in Chico, fortunately with a roof over his head, unlike many of his fellow Paradisians who lost literally everything but what they were wearing:

In the 24-Hour Walgreens Pharmacy on East Avenue, the pharmacists have been working overlapping shifts since the fire swept over Paradise last Thursday. These people and their back up staff work seemingly rock solid for hours on end. They fill and file and dispense medications which people from Paradise do not have with them. This is a demanding and thankless and exhausting task. And yet — I am the witness — they have been doing this without letup. Many have come in from surrounding towns, from Redding, to help and to keep the medications needed by a town of 30,000 displaced into a city of 80,000. Yes, the Walgreens pharmacists are leaving it all on the field.

Today, after the banking holiday of Monday, there was what can only be described as a run on the banks. Not a hostile or panicked run on the banks but just an overwhelming number of people needing to get their money straight in one way or another… such as “My ATM Card and My ID were melted in my wallet when my pants burst into flame.” Please understand that today in Chico that is a reasonable statement. And the bankers all showed up looking cool and formal and professional and competent and moved the vast lines of people through with all hands on deck and cleared up a myriad of money crises. One banker I spoke with came up from Santa Rosa on his day off to help the team. He was a sharp dressed man. He and the other bankers were leaving it all on the field.

They all were leaving it all on the field everywhere in Chico. From Penny’s in the Mall to the Birkenstocks Store downtown on Broadway. In big jobs, and in small jobs, there was a long train of people working at the top of their game no matter what their game was. It has been days of this now in Chico; days of there being no big jobs or small jobs but only the unremitting effort the people to help their fellow citizens no matter what.

And since none of the Acronym Agencies have really shown up yet, this has all been done without any real government organization. Instead, it has been like watching a spontaneous Humanitarian Olympics rise up out of the town itself; and once started it has become as self-organizing and self-sustaining as the fire itself. Today as I moved around Chico I saw a town, untouched itself by the flames, rise up to restore and rebuild the lives of their fellow citizens of Paradise; lives that the fire had stolen. And by the end of the day, you could feel, palpably feel, that Chico knew it would win. Chico was leaving it all on the field.

Tomorrow? Chico will do the same.

Amazon’s HQ$2Bn decision

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

If you had any doubt that the Amazon HQ2 competition was about anything other than trolling for economic bribes, this should banish the thought:

Amazon is getting some prime real estate.

In exchange for more than $2 billion in economic incentives, the online shopping giant will locate a pair of new corporate headquarters just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., and just across the East River from Manhattan. Tuesday’s much-anticipated announcement of the locations for Amazon’s “HQ2” also included details — which had previously been kept from the public — about the economic incentives that successfully lured the Seattle-based firm to the east coast’s political and economic hubs.

Amazon says it will invest $5 billion and create more than 50,000 jobs across the two new locations, with at least 25,000 employees at each of its new corporate campuses, to be located in Virginia’s Crystal City and New York’s Long Island City. Nashville wins a consolation prize: a new supply chain and logistics center that promises 5,000 jobs in exchange for $102 million in economic incentives.

In New York, Amazon will receive $1.2 billion in refundable tax credits through a state-level economic development program and a cash grant of $325 million that’s tied to the construction of new buildings at the Long Island City location over the next 10 years. In Virginia, the state is ponying up $573 million in tax breaks tied to the creation of 25,000 jobs, and the city of Arlington will provide a cash grant of $23 million over 15 years funded by an existing tax on hotel rooms.

Yes, the numbers are staggering — New York state’s pledge of $1.52 billion for 25,000 jobs works out to more than $60,000 in taxpayer support per new job created — but Amazon appears to have selected New York and the D.C. area based on more than just how many zeroes local officials agreed to put on the giant cardboard check.

After all, New Jersey offered Amazon $5 billion (with another $2 billion from Newark), and Maryland offered $8.5 billion. Yet Amazon passed them both over to pick their neighbors.

November 14, 2018

QotD: Protectionism and competition

Filed under: Business, Economics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The ITC [U.S. International Trade Commission] acts as if American companies have a right not to be injured by foreign competition, regardless of how poorly they serve their American customers.

James Bovard, The Fair Trade Fraud, 1991.

November 13, 2018

THE GREAT WAR IS NOT OVER

Filed under: Business, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 12 Nov 2018

The Patreon Page: https://www.patreon.com/thegreatwar

The following information — basically the same as what Flo discusses in the video above — was sent out to Patreon supporters:

July 14, 2014 was our first day with The Great War project. 4 1/2 years later, and we managed to not miss a single Thursday to bring you the latest weekly update from 100 years ago. We could not have done this without your support on Patreon. We are not exaggerating when we say that our show would have been cancelled several times if we had to rely on YouTube revenue alone. For that we, and the rest of the production team want to say: “Thank you!”

Now, in the last few weeks we were rather quiet here on Patreon but also on Social Media in general. The main reason for that was that we, the team who researched big parts of this project, who edited, animated and published all the episodes and we who responded to your questions and criticisms over the years needed to figure out what we want to do after 11/11/18.

We quickly realised that we want to continue working in the field of historical film production and with that in mind we will start our own company in early 1919, pardon 2019. So far, we were employees of Mediakraft, the company that initially financed this channel and kept it afloat before you all started supporting us on Patreon. But now we want to stand on our feet.

And the great news is, that The Great War will stay with us and with you in the future. We reached an agreement with Mediakraft that we can continue working on the channel and publish more content. For this content, we still need your support and we hope that you trust our capabilities based on the past 4 1/2 years.

From a historical perspective, 11/11/1918 may have marked the end of hostilities in the First World War but it certainly didn’t usher in an era of world peace – quite the contrary. New wars, more revolutions, difficult peace negotiations and the attempts to create a new world order all were pivotal moments in our world history and we want to continue to tell these stories on The Great War channel.

But, there is always a but, that doesn’t mean that we won’t change things up behind the scenes and on the channel. The first, and for you probably most important point, is that Indy has moved on to new projects (and we wish him all the best for that) which means we will be looking to find a new host. This won’t be easy and I know you will be nervous, but we are sure that we can find someone that can fill these shoes over time.

Moreover, we will probably move away from the weekly episode format that was also accompanied by two extra weekly uploads for the past years. This incredible high output meant that we couldn’t always focus on topics as much as they deserved and we know from the numbers on YouTube that it was an overwhelming amount of content for a lot of our fans, too. Instead we will probably move to less uploads but longer episodes with more detail, more polish, better animations and just overall try to take it to the next level.

To wrap this long post up, I want to kindly ask you to trust in our abilities, to be open for this new direction and most importantly to continue to support us here on Patreon as now independent creators. Over the next few weeks, I will send out more updates on this evolution of The Great War. Right now we want to publish the first new episode in early January. In the meantime, you can enjoy the epilogue episodes with Indy that we will put up in the future.

And if you have any questions or ideas, feel free to put them in the comments of this post, we will try to answer them to the best of my ability.

Flo & Toni

Producers of The Great War

November 12, 2018

Reason magazine at 50

Filed under: Business, History, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Reason, the top libertarian magazine in the United States, if not the world — I’ve been a subscriber for something like thirty years now. To mark the occasion, Matt Welch recounts the story of the magazine’s founder, Lanny Friedlander.

The New Republic was launched in 1914 by three of the most famous intellectuals of the Progressive era: Walter Lippmann, Herbert Croly, and Walter Weyl. National Review was introduced in 1955 by an oil tycoon’s son named William F. Buckley, already notorious for provocative books criticizing Yale and defending Joseph McCarthy. The Weekly Standard was founded with Rupert Murdoch’s money 40 years later by former Dan Quayle speechwriter William Kristol, whose legendary magazine-editor father Irving was considered the godfather of neoconservatism. Prestigious journals of opinion often emanate from prestige.

Not so Reason. The magazine you are reading was the brainchild of a 20-year-old Boston University student nobody had ever heard of named Lanny Friedlander, who stapled together and mailed out the first mimeographed issues from a hopelessly disorganized room at his mother’s brick house in Brighton, Massachusetts. You will search in vain for any editor’s note in the history of The Nation or Mother Jones with a lead like this opening line from Friedlander in January 1970: “I drive a delivery van for a living.”

From these inauspicious beginnings, Reason has grown to a magazine with a circulation of over 40,000, averaging more than 4 million visits online per month and producing videos that were watched 48 million times on YouTube and Facebook in the last year — in addition to a practical-minded public policy shop that helps reform public pensions, privatize government services, and build better highways. Almost all of that achievement took place after Friedlander exited the scene. In 1970, after two thrilling but erratic years, Reason‘s founder sold the publication’s thin assets and thicker liabilities for less than $3,500 to the industrious California-based trio of systems engineer Robert W. Poole Jr., libertarian lawyer Manuel S. Klausner, and neo-Objectivist philosopher Tibor Machan. (Their significant others, who also joined the partnership at the time, were eventually bought out.) In 1978, they launched the foundation that publishes the magazine to this day.

By the time both Reason and the modern libertarian movement began to flourish, one of the key architects of both had fallen off the grid, never to return. Yet Friedlander’s distinct vision is still visible, in the form of the magazine’s lowercase, sans-serif logo, its willingness to gather in various strains of libertarianism for examination and debate, and a certain natural sympathy for outsiders, eccentrics, dreamers. “He was bold, amazingly gifted, socially uncertain,” recalls Mark Frazier, then a high school student who helped with paste-up and other tasks on some of those early editions before moving on to a long career in the free cities movement. “He followed a compass that set many different things in motion.”

Who exactly was this sui generis spark, how was he able to rise above the 1960s and ’70s din of short-lived libertarian-world newsletters, and why did he flame out so fast? These elusive questions have haunted a succession of Reason captains. Upon Friedlander’s death in 2011, Nick Gillespie, editor in chief of the magazine from 2000 through 2007, wrote that in the absence of any information, he had “started thinking of Lanny as libertarianism’s answer to Syd Barrett, the mad genius founder of Pink Floyd who got something great started and then couldn’t or wouldn’t live in the world he did so much to create.” Even people who knew Friedlander in the flesh are hazy on details, tending to project onto his sparse canvas the arc of their own life journeys.

A closer examination on the occasion of this 50th anniversary begins to fill out the picture of Reason‘s starkly minimalist origin story. Lanny Friedlander was an Objectivist who believed in big-tent libertarianism, a student protester who reviled other student protesters, and an anti-war/anti-draft activist who volunteered for the Navy. He was professionally charismatic and personally introverted, an exacting truth seeker and unreliable narrator, a systemic thinker and disheveled coordinator. (“The printed format of this issue,” he wrote when announcing the magazine’s first offset-press edition in September 1969, “does not represent a guarantee that the next issue will also be printed.”) He will likely be remembered most for his striking sense of art direction — Wired co-creator Louis Rossetto, who first encountered Reason as an undergrad at Columbia University, said in 2011 that the publication “was my gateway to good design” — yet when describing himself, Friedlander preferred the term “writer/intellectual.”

November 10, 2018

Don’t expect the “Internet-of-Things” to get better security without Uncle Sam’s pressure

Filed under: Business, Government, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Bruce Schneier believes it will take government action (or as The Register phrased it, “Uncle Sam … putting boots to asses”) to get any significant improvement in Internet-of-Shit device security:

Any sort of lasting security standard in IoT devices may only happen if governments start doling out stiff penalties.

So said author and computer security guru Bruce Schneier, who argued during a panel discussion at the Aspen Cyber Summit this week that without regulation, there is little hope the companies hooking their products up to the internet will implement proper security protections.

“Looking at every other industry, we don’t get security unless it is done by the government,” Schneier said.

“I challenge you to find an industry in the last 100 years that has improved security without being told [to do so] by the government.”

Schneier went on to point out that, as it stands, companies have little reason to implement safeguards into their products, while consumers aren’t interested in reading up about appliance vendors’ security policies.

“I don’t think it is going to be the market,” Schneier argued. “I don’t think people are going to say I’m going to choose my refrigerator based on the number of unwanted features that are in the device.”

Schneier is not alone in his assessment either. Fellow panellist Johnson & Johnson CISO Marene Allison noted that manufacturers have nothing akin to a bill of materials for their IP stacks, so even if customers want to know how their products and data are secured, they’re left in the dark.

“Most of the stuff out there, even as a security professional, I have to ask myself, what do they mean?” Allison said.

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