zmetro.com

Emily Badger:

Technology has blurred the walls of the workplace in at least two dramatic ways. People who once worked inside the clear confines of a cubicle, inside an office, within an office tower in a commercial district, can now work from nearly anywhere. And because the spatial distinction has been disappearing between work and home (and everywhere in between), neat divisions in time are now eroding, too.

Even if you do still have an actual office where you commute every day, you have probably experienced how these lines have softened simultaneously: You’ve walked out of your building and into the subway, pulled out your phone, and gone right back to triaging email.

These sweeping shifts in where and when work takes place have been brought about by much more than just the Internet. Credit the portable laptop and the smartphone, WiFi and fiber optic infrastructure, computer security from VPNs, high-quality teleconferencing and the cloud. As for your computer itself? “It’s just a shell,” says Adam Stoltz, a real estate workplace strategist based in Washington. “It’s the thing that enables me to get to the data.”

Justin Elliott:

Twice a day, seven days a week, a tractor trailer carrying 8,000 gallons of watery, cloudy slop rolls past the bucolic countryside, finally arriving at Neil Rejman’s dairy farm in upstate New York. The trucks are coming from the Chobani plant two hours east of Rejman’s Sunnyside Farms, and they’re hauling a distinctive byproduct of the Greek yogurt making process—acid whey.

For every three or four ounces of milk, Chobani and other companies can produce only one ounce of creamy Greek yogurt. The rest becomes acid whey. It’s a thin, runny waste product that can’t simply be dumped. Not only would that be illegal, but whey decomposition is toxic to the natural environment, robbing oxygen from streams and rivers. That could turn a waterway into what one expert calls a “dead sea,” destroying aquatic life over potentially large areas. Spills of cheese whey, a cousin of Greek yogurt whey, have killed tens of thousands of fish around the country in recent years.

Ken Silverstein:

Though the think tank didn’t disclose it, First Solar belonged to CAP’s Business Alliance, a secret group of corporate donors, according to internal lists obtained by The Nation. Meanwhile, José Villarreal—a consultant at the power-?house law and lobbying firm Akin Gump, who “provides strategic counseling on a range of legal and policy issues” for ?corporations—was on First Solar’s board until April 2012 while also sitting on the board of CAP, where he remains a member, according to the group’s latest tax filing.

CAP is a strong proponent of alternative energy, so there’s no reason to doubt the sincerity of its advocacy. But the fact that CAP has received financial support from First Solar while touting its virtues to Washington policy-makers points to a conflict of interest that, critics argue, ought to be disclosed to the public. CAP’s promotion of the company’s interests has supplemented First Solar’s aggressive Washington lobbying efforts, on which it spent more than $800,000 during 2011 and 2012.

“The only thing more damaging than disclosing your donors and having questions raised about the independence of your work is not disclosing them and have the information come to light and undermine your work,” says Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics. “The best practice, whether required by the IRS or not, is to disclose contributions.”

Nowadays, many Washington think tanks effectively serve as unregistered lobbyists for corporate donors, and companies strategically contribute to them just as they hire a PR or lobby shop or make campaign donations. And unlike lobbyists and elected officials, think tanks are not subject to financial disclosure requirements, so they reveal their donors only if they choose to. That makes it impossible for the public and lawmakers to know if a think tank is putting out an impartial study or one that’s been shaped by a donor’s political agenda. “If you’re a lobbyist, whatever you say is heavily discounted,” says Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University and an expert on political ethics. “If a think tank is saying it, it obviously sounds a lot better. Maybe think tanks aren’t aware of how useful that makes them to private interests. On the other hand, maybe it’s part of their revenue model.”

Marietje Schaake:

It is impossible to follow the news without being confronted with ‘cyber’ related issues. Cybercrime, cyber police, cyber-attack, cyber war, cyber terrorism, cyber Monday, cyber punk, cyber party, cybersex and cyberspace are only a few of a long list of words that have joined our vocabulary in recent years. Everything seems to be ‘cyber’.

Though so far, cyber-attacks have not lead to immediate deaths or large-scale destruction, when talking about cyber security, it is important to know what it is we seek to defend: digital freedoms and our open societies. We need to defend democratic principles not only against outside attacks, but also against erosion from within. Too often freedom is compromised for alleged security or by a focus on a misperceived threat.

Digital freedoms and fundamental rights need to be enforced, and not eroded in the face of vulnerabilities, attacks, and repression. In order to do so, essential and difficult questions on the implementation of the rule of law, historically place-bound by jurisdiction rooted in the nation-state, in the context of a globally connected world, need to be addressed. This is a matter for the EU as a global player, and should involve all of society.

The good news is that we don’t need ‘cyber democracy’ to guarantee ‘cyber security’. In most cases the foundations for resilience are already in our existing laws and regulations. Technologies are an essential part of our daily lives, businesses, education, cultural experiences and political engagement. As a result, resilience and defense need to be integrated and mainstreamed to strengthen both freedom and security.

Bruce Schneier:

The Internet has turned into a massive surveillance tool. We’re constantly monitored on the Internet by hundreds of companies — both familiar and unfamiliar. Everything we do there is recorded, collected, and collated — sometimes by corporations wanting to sell us stuff and sometimes by governments wanting to keep an eye on us.

Ephemeral conversation is over. Wholesale surveillance is the norm. Maintaining privacy from these powerful entities is basically impossible, and any illusion of privacy we maintain is based either on ignorance or on our unwillingness to accept what’s really going on.

It’s about to get worse, though. Companies such as Google may know more about your personal interests than your spouse, but so far it’s been limited by the fact that these companies only see computer data. And even though your computer habits are increasingly being linked to your offline behavior, it’s still only behavior that involves computers.

Bill Moyers:

In the fall of 1972, the venerable National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) made a surprising announcement: It planned to move its main offices from New York to Washington, D.C. As its chief, Burt Raynes, observed:

We have been in New York since before the turn of the century, because we regarded this city as the center of business and industry. But the thing that affects business most today is government. The interrelationship of business with business is no longer so important as the interrelationship of business with government. In the last several years, that has become very apparent to us.[1]

To be more precise, what had become very apparent to the business community was that it was getting its clock cleaned. Used to having broad sway, employers faced a series of surprising defeats in the 1960s and early 1970s. As we have seen, these defeats continued unabated when Richard Nixon won the White House. Despite electoral setbacks, the liberalism of the Great Society had surprising political momentum. “From 1969 to 1972,” as the political scientist David Vogel summarizes in one of the best books on the political role of business, “virtually the entire American business community experienced a series of political setbacks without parallel in the postwar period.” In particular, Washington undertook a vast expansion of its regulatory power, introducing tough and extensive restrictions and requirements on business in areas from the environment to occupational safety to consumer protection.[2]

EV World:

John Hofmeister doesn’t call it ‘peak oil,’ instead he calls it the ‘energy abyss,’ the point at which the global economy ceases to grow because the oil industry can no longer meet demand.

Hofmeister is the former president of Shell Oil, the same Shell Oil that is preparing to drill the deepest hole yet drilled to reach oil and gas 200 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico in 9,500 feet (2,900m) of water, surpassing the working depth of Shell’s Perdido rig, also located out in the Gulf and producing around 100,000 barrels a day. The cost of that rig: $3 billion.

In his 2010 book, Why We Hate The Oil Companies, Straight talk from an energy insider, he wrote the following:

“It’s inevitable. The industry that produces oil can’t produce enough, unless the world doesn’t grow. It’s possible that we will have such expensive oil that we will stymie growth. How many people will suffer? How many poor will become poorer, while rich become richer because we have failed rational tests of creating alternative competitive fuels? We have a choice to condemn ourselves to an energy abyss in the name of the status quo and lack of enlightened leadership, or we can choose to develop alternatives.

Why aren’t we more thoughtful about the future? Why don’t we begin the journey towards a range of alternatives that delivers increased national security, increased economic security, and multiple choice for consumers?

Charles Arthur:

He says that the growing number of accounts in app stores could also have a disruptive effect on other media types: “Whereas video, books and music are targeted to smaller user bases, apps are broadly consumed. Developers like Rovio or Supercell can offer their products to billions while TV producers can only hope for millions. Apps are becoming the universal medium for entertainment, and iTunes the universal distributor.”

Apple has been criticised by both developers and customers because every app that goes onto the store is first checked by the company’s own team. Delays are commonplace – and can stretch to weeks at busy times.

Apps have been rejected for what seem like trivial reasons (such as appearing to use an Apple name in the title) or, more egregiously, for allowing people to access nudity and for expressing political views – which saw an app from a Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist rejected (though later reinstated).

Just as stunning have been some of the apps that have been let through – ranging from the fairly inoffensive, but trivial (such as “fart apps”, which simply make a noise) – to one called Baby Shaker which encouraged the player to shake an onscreen baby to make it be quiet. “See how long you can endure his or her adorable cries before you just have to find a way to quiet the baby down!” said the blurb.

Megan McArdle:

Last week, I asked Jim Manzi for his thoughts on the Oregon health care experiment. Manzi is a very smart guy who has founded a very successful company that helps other companies do experiments. He is also the author of the terrific Uncontrolled, a book about using randomized controlled trials to improve business, policy, and life in general. Jim was kind enough to send me his very long, very smart, very wonkish thoughts, which you’ll see below. If you have any interest in Oregon, or just want to be smarter about issues in evaluating social science, you should read this all the way through.

Some Observations on the Oregon Health Experiment

As a vocal proponent of using randomized experiments to inform policy debates, I have followed the discussion surrounding the recent Oregon Experiment with great interest. I think the only thing I’ve previously written for publication on the topic of health care finance was a review of the RAND Health Insurance Experiment. This is the only other randomized experiment of which I am aware that tested the impacts of varying levels of generosity of health care coverage on physical health. The RAND experiment concluded that (1) lower levels of coverage “reduced the use of nearly all health services,” but that (2) this reduction in services “had no adverse effect on participants’ health.” As a casual observer of the topic, that struck me as a fairly important result.

The Oregon Experiment has replicated the first part the first part of the RAND result: Providing free health care coverage increased the use of health care services. However, a debate has arisen between Austin Frakt, Kevin Drum, Avik Roy, Megan and others around the second part: Did this increase in use of health care services lead to measurable improvements in physical health?

This debate has been very informative, but here a few key points that I don’t think have been very widely noted:

1. Almost half the people who were offered free health insurance coverage didn’t bother to send back the application to get it.

About 90,000 people applied for the health insurance lottery (though selection was done at the household level). About 35,000 people won the lottery, and thus had the right to submit an application, but only about 60% of these lottery winners actually sent the application back. This ought to tell any common sense person a lot about the revealed preference for how much the uninsured value the coverage on offer.