09:23 – Some people apparently have poor reading comprehension. I got email the other day from someone who asked why I was cheering for the euro to crash.
In the unlikely event that any of my other readers believe I’m cheering for the euro to crash, let me be clear: I believe the collapse of the euro is inevitable, but what I believe will happen and what I would like to see happen are not necessarily the same thing, and in this case are definitely not. The collapse of the euro will be catastrophic, and not just for Europe. The consequences of that collapse will be felt worldwide. Those consequences will include a great deal of human suffering, and a reduction in standard of living across the board. Most of southern and eastern Europe will become what amounts to third-world countries, but the rest of us will not escape entirely. The US, Canada, Australia, and the rest of the first world will also suffer, the UK more so, and northern Europe even more so. And the effect of this economic collapse will be catastrophic in many of the world’s poorer countries, which depend on subsidies from the formerly wealthy nations even to feed their populations.
All of this has happened because governments have been living beyond their means and encouraging their citizens to do the same, consuming now with a promise to pay later. Well, it’s now later, and we’re all going to pay the price in the form of lower standards of living, much higher unemployment, cuts in salaries and benefits in real terms, later retirement age, drastic cuts in government social programs, and so on. Well, at least those of us who are not members of privileged classes, such as government employees. And even they will suffer cutbacks, as taxpayers revolt.
Our financial mess a couple years ago lit the fuse, which is now rapidly approaching the European powder keg. The result is not going to be pretty.
This is interesting.
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/09/04/opinion/04reich-graphic.html
We workers have not been compensated for our incredible climbing productivity gains since 1980. Too bad they did not chart top executive pay there for comparison to worker wages and productivity. But that is typical of the NYTimes: leave half the story out.
Well, the obvious argument is that nearly all of that increased productivity has had nothing to do with labor and everything to do with capital. A company that previously employed 1,000 workers on a production line, with very little automation, may now employ a tenth that number, but with significant investments in robots and other automation.
Note that productivity has continued to increase as unemployment also increased. To some extent, that’s because deadwood has been cut from the workforce, but increasing automation is also a huge factor. That’s why unemployment is structural and here to stay. Increasingly, employing a person is not cost-effective, at least at current rates. When you add in the fact that most work that does require human labor is easily sourced in countries where wage rates are a tenth or less what they are here, and things really look dim for all but the brightest and best-educated workers.
Good point. Another article I read recently, pointed out that China is no longer the low-cost manufacturing capital of the world. The piece mentioned several other countries that are now successfully competing with China on manufacturing cost. Vietnam was one that was mentioned.
I would speculate that the graph Chuck linked to doesn’t tell the whole story. I suspect that for at least the first half of the 1947 to 1979 era, the people in the bottom fifth of the income level were working hard to improve their condition. I further suspect that since that time the people in that group are increasingly dependent on government assistance instead of their own hard labor.
If you are working a minimum wage job and barely making ends meet, you can either work a second job or get a higher paying job. If you’re collecting government assistance, what do you do to improve your lot?
Also I recall reading about a single mother in Boston who went from a $25,000/year job to a $35,000/year job. By the time she paid taxes on the extra $10,000/year, and dealt with the loss of government assistance, she was actually further behind every month.
I am really getting tired of the Firefox updates. I really do not WANT to update, but there is something about the notification wordings that makes me click on the darned things before I fully realize what I am doing (I am usually in a hurry when those notifications pop up). Next thing I know the update process has started, and there is no way to stop it. I even tried pulling the plug on an update a couple versions ago, and it just kept going when I restarted.
But here’s the deal. The most recent upgrade to 6.0.2 has managed to kill most of my username and passwords that were already in Firefox, and have been preserved through all upgrades since I first installed Firefox on this computer in December 2006.
I don’t recommend upgrading to the latest version if you can keep from doing it. I might just turn off all upgrade announcements. With the frequency of upgrades increasing dramatically, the risk that something like the loss of these auto username and password entries obviously increases to the point that it actually happens. When oh when do we get to the point that it all works good enough and there is no reason to keep doing upgrades?
“If you’re collecting government assistance, what do you do to improve your lot?”
Collect *more* government assistance, either by finding out extra “entitlements” or by applying for some additional benefit with a false name. Or by taking a job in the cash economy and not declaring the income.
In the Seventies in Australia under the Whitlam Labor government there were ads on radio and TV saying something like “call the social security office to see what your entitlements are”. No wonder spending got way out of control then.
And two acquaintances were very good sports players. Both were on the dole, and playing sport semi-professionally. My brother said that they’d said “we don’t play unless we get $1000 a week.” Back then that was more money than I could imagine. Lots of people do stuff like this, put their snout in the welfare trough and take money for working in the black economy.
Ten years ago, my daughter was still in high school, and she created a Yahoo email account. Time passes, she moves through several other email services, becomes a Mac zombie, and forgets all about the Yahoo account.
All of a sudden last spring, everyone in her address book for that account, started getting spam from her. The account had been hi-jacked. She had long since forgotten the password to get into the account, and people were writing angry emails to her about the spam, which was fairly prolific, so she called Yahoo. Being a teenager when she opened the account, she had created Q&A identification questions that she had no remembrance of what the answers were. Bottom line: Yahoo would not let her in, nor would they close the account. Nor would they investigate her insistence that the account had been hi-jacked. At one point they asked for her permission to view emails sent from the account, she gave it, and they could clearly see it was spam-like messages, but after 10 to 20 minutes of arguing over her inability to provide the identification questions, they considered her only an interloper trying to get Yahoo to do something that was against their rules. Funny that they asked for her permission to view the emails in the account, but later determined that she was not the account owner.
Months pass. The spam from that account finally ceases. Then, last week, it started up again.
If anyone has any ideas on how to kill that account, I sure would like to hear them.
A pal in a mailing list I’m in had that happen to him. Someone guessed his password, changed it and started spamming from it (“I’m stuck in London with no money, please send me some” using the guy’s real name.)
I think eventually he was able to persuade Yahoo that he’d been hijacked and got his account back. I’ll post a message to the list tonight to see if there was a happy ending and how he did it.
Chuck, I don’t want to criticise your daughter, but…
I only use questions/answers that I know the answer to, and ones that I won’t or can’t forget. My family might, possibly, know the answers if they knew the questions. Like what was the surname of the family that sold us our boxer in 1967? I know the name, my sister knows the name, my brother *might* remember the name. I’m sure mum’s forgotten it.
Those security questions are a two-edged sword. Remember the adventures of Sarah Palin. Really, if you have a strong password, the security questions are a back-door for trojans. I wish sites would stop using them.
Still, what to do about accounts like that? Yahoo ought to be motivated – they don’t want their network used for spam. I have the feeling it’s a matter of getting ahold of the right person in the customer service department – someone who actually understands the problem.
Well, I’m ambivalent about “strong” passwords. My uni is about to force me to change the password I’ve used since, oh?, 1997. It will have to contain a mixture of LC, UC, numbers, and non-AN IIRC. That means I’ll have to write it down. My current password is not written down anywhere.
If my questions and answers are sufficiently cryptic how are they crackable? Does anyone know the name of the street my best friend lived in when I was five?
I don’t, but I might be able to find out if I wanted access to your account badly enough. There’s simply too much information about nearly all of us available on-line for security based on personal details to be reliable. What if your best friend posts details on his Facebook page?
Writing down a password is obviously a bad idea. I would suggest basing your password on a phrase that’s memorable to you. The example I used years ago (for a WPA password) was “the cowards never started and the weaklings died along the way. By itself, “tcnsatwdatw” is actually a pretty good password. It won’t be compromised by a dictionary attack. You can improve it a lot by having a standard policy. For example:
Capitalizing the second, fourth, and fifth letters in all your passwords converts it to:
tCnSAtwdatw
Always inserting a specific symbol or symbols at a specific point boosts security hugely. For example, you might always use % as the second character and 8 as the next-to-last character, which yields:
t%CnSAtwdat8w
At that point, you have a 13-byte password that’s unbreakable other than by the NSA and similar national organizations. Of course, it’s still a pretty weak password if you want it to remain secure for long. I can build a literal supercomputer for password cracking pretty cheaply, just by installing a bunch of fast video adapters in a standard PC. Over the next several years, that’ll become more and more important. Passwords that everyone assumed several years ago were completely secure are now pretty trivial to crack.
Actually, I combine several things in to most passwords. The best friend from 1963 and I have been out of contact for 35 years, he hasn’t lived in the street I was thinking of since 1970, and I might throw in the year we bought our boxer and other stuff. So it can be a fairly complex password of two or three words and dates concatenated.
The sort of attack you mention probably would be pretty hard to do as, hopefully, the password file isn’t easily accessible and after a few failed attempts at a dictionary attack the account would be locked.
I hardly ever write down passwords in the clear. I write them as if they were hints for a cryptic crossword. If people can guess my password from the extremely obscure hints, most of which only I know, then they’ll be disappointed by the payoff.
In theory you’re right, but in practice I’m pretty safe, and I just can’t consistently remember the sorts of passwords you advocate.
Password Strength
Well my daughter was only about 14 when she created that account and all its security questions. Teenage girls have a strong tendency to fantasy, and none of her questions were grounded in real life–they were about her fantasy stories at that age. You cannot really tell a kid that age they are wrong for doing that, but 10 years later, they realize it.
Yahoo does not care about solving that kind of problem. Daughter told me that she argued hard with them for over 10 minutes, but they refused to budge. I can tell you that she will never call them ever again. As far as Yahoo’s concern about being a source of spam–that is nonexistent, IMO. I have had several people over the years try to communicate with me, but their messages never got through, because their Yahoo email server was blocked along the way as a source of spam. My daughter’s most recent spam from that account, actually went into my spam folder, which is where I am going to leave that email address. So much for Yahoo’s reputation.
I asked my acquaintance about his problems, it was with GMail, not Yahoo. I emailed his response to work as I was rushing out the door but it was blocked at our gateway due to the profanity it contained (yes, he is seriously pissed off with GMail and Yahoo) so I don’t have the details with me and I can’t access my private e-mail accounts at work.
I guess that there’s not much to be done except tell the friends who’re being griefed that it’s not her. I forget passwords all the time so I write them, hint questions and the answers to hint question in cryptic form that hopefully only I will understand. Then I lose the diary it’s all written down in. (Actually, I don’t often do that, but my hints are written in 3-4 diaries I have to consolidate.)
I have two Yahoo accounts; one is a total spamhole I haven’t checked for months. It gets about 20 spams a day. The other never gets spam but I don’t check it often, I mainly use my ISP e-mail account and Hotmail. Both get 1-2 spams a week, which I can tolerate.
My GMail account gets so much spam I almost never check it. And I never told *anyone* that address. But it still got 30-40 spams a month. Hotmail has a facility for addition e-mail addresses that I may start using for new sites.