Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan

Herman Cain has been getting a lot of mileage about his ‘simple’ 9-9-9 tax plan. Jared Bernstein says that it will result in a big tax increase on the middle class and a huge tax cut for the very wealthy. I have seen similar conclusions reached by other analysts.

While this is a goal of the oligarchy, they would like to achieve their goal in more subtle ways. The very transparency of Cain’s scheme is likely to be the thing that pricks his bubble and sends him back into the ranks of the stragglers for the Republican nomination.

How to choose passwords

All of us who are heavy users of computers and the internet know that we get drowned in the number of passwords we need and that it is hard to keep track of them.

James Fallows describes what he learned after his wife’s Gmail account was hacked and gives a list of suggestions for passwords.

The science, psychology, and sociology of creating strong passwords is a surprisingly well-chronicled and fascinating field. On The Atlantic‘s Web site, we will describe some of the main strategies and the reasoning behind them. Even security professionals recognize the contradiction: the stronger the password, the less likely you are to remember it. Thus the Post-it notes with passwords, on monitor screens or in desk drawers.

But there is a middle ground, of passwords strong enough to create problems for hackers and still simple enough to be manageable. There are more details on our site, but strategies include:

  • Choose a long, familiar-to-you sequence of ordinary words, with spaces between them as in an ordinary sentence, which more and more sites now allow. “Lake Winnebago is deep and chilly,” for instance. Or “my favorite packer is not brett favre.” You could remember a phrase like that, but a hacker’s computer, which couldn’t tell spaces from characters, would see only one forbiddingly long password sequence.
  • Choose a shorter sequence of words that are not “real” English words. I once lived in a Ghanaian village called Assin Fosu. I can remember its name easily, but it would be hard to guess. Even harder if I added numbers or characters.
  • Choose a truly obscure, gibberish password—”V*!amYEg5M5!3R” is one I generated just now with the LastPass system, and you’re welcome to it—and then find a way to store it. Having it written down in your wallet is one, though the paper it’s on shouldn’t say “Passwords” at the top. The approach I prefer, and use for some passwords, is to entrust them to online managers like LastPass or RoboForm. Even if their corporate sites were hacked, that wouldn’t reveal all your passwords, since the programs work by storing part of the encoding information in the cloud and part on your own machine.

At a minimum, any step up from “password,” “123456,” or your own birthday is worthwhile.

Finally, use different passwords. Not hundreds of different ones, for the hundreds of different places that require logins of some kind. The guide should be: any site that matters needs its own password—one you don’t currently use for any other site, and that you have never used anywhere else.

“Using an important password anywhere else is just like mailing your house key to anyone who might be making a delivery,” Michael Jones of Google said. “If you use your password in two places, it is not a valid password.”

I asked my experts how many passwords they personally used. The highest I heard was “about a dozen.” The lowest was four, and the norm was five or six. They all stressed that they managed their passwords and sites in different categories. In my own case, there are five sites whose security really matters to me: my main e‑mail account, two credit-card sites, a banking account, and an investment firm. Each has its own, good password, never used anywhere else. Next are the sites I’d just as soon not have compromised: airline-mileage accounts, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, various message boards and memberships. I have two or three semi-strong passwords I use among all of them. If you hacked one of them you might hack the others, but I don’t really care. Then there is everything else, the thicket of annoying little logins we all deal with. I have one or two passwords for them too. By making it easy to deal with unimportant accounts, I can concentrate on protecting the ones that matter.

Seems like good advice.

Dogs Decoded

The PBS series Nova has a wonderful program about dogs with the above title that looks at the amazing things we are learning about them. It was broadcast on October 12 and will be available for free viewing online for only a week after that. Don’t miss it, especially if you are fond of dogs.

I particularly enjoyed it because there were lots of scenes in which they showed dogs that were exactly like Baxter, the Wonder Dog.

baxter.jpg

Five signs that Americans are moving away from religion

Tana Ganeva points to various data that support this idea.

  1. American religious belief is becoming more fractured.
  2. Non-belief — and acceptance of non-belief — on the rise
  3. Growing numbers of young people who do not identify as religious
  4. Hate group that exploited religion to bash gays hemorrhaging funds
  5. Getting married by friends

What the last item refers to is that more and more people are not getting married with the trappings of religion, choosing instead more informal, secular wedding ceremonies.

To vote or not to vote

Recently at a dinner someone made a comment that one hears often, that those who do not vote in elections have no right to then complain about the government’s actions or the way society is run. The speaker was implying that voting is the admission price one pays for the privilege of entering the public debate.

I disagree with this sentiment, for many reasons. For one thing, one can have principled non-voting. If one thinks the system is rigged, and that elections are merely a façade designed to give legitimacy to a corrupt political system, then not voting can be a very principled and political act. In such cases, not voting is akin to a boycott, or voting with one’s feet. There is a reason that almost all totalitarian societies still feel obliged to hold fraudulent elections in which the ruler gets an overwhelming majority, because elections tend to confer at least some legitimacy on the winner, even if it is rigged, as long as participation is reasonably high. This is why in many autocratic countries people are forced to vote or the ballot boxes are stuffed with counterfeits, while opponents of the regime urge people to boycott them.
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Bipartisanship in the service of the oligarchy

If you were paying close attention, you may have noticed that yesterday Congress, which is supposed to be locked in partisan gridlock that has paralyzed it, managed in a bipartisan manner to pass quite easily and with little fanfare major free-trade agreements with Panama, Colombia, and South Korea. The House passed the South Korea agreement by a vote of 278 to 151, Panama by 300 to 129 and Colombia by 262-167. In the Senate, the South Korean plan passed by a vote of 83 to 15, Panama by 77 to 22 and Colombia by 66 to 33.

Whether one thinks such agreements are good for everyone or not, the oligarchy definitely favors them because anything that enables them to move goods, money, and manufacturing capacity more easily and cheaply across borders enables them to make more money.

These agreements had been negotiated by George W. Bush but had stalled in Congress because of opposition from the labor movement that they would cost jobs here. This time they passed easily, thanks to the support of president Obama, which illustrates once again that the oligarchy can sometimes get more of what it wants under a Democratic administration than under a Republican one. It also illustrates once again how noisy partisan gridlock only comes into play when it comes to doing things that benefit ordinary people, and miraculously melts away when the oligarchy’s interests are involved.

Relativity-4: Measuring time and space

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

To get a better grip on what is involved in the theory of relativity, we need to think in terms of ‘events’, things that occur instantaneously at a point in space and which every observer will agree happened and is unique. An example of an event might be me clapping my hands once. That occurs at one place in space (where my hands meet) at one moment in time (the instant they make contact) and all observers will agree that I did indeed clap my hands. Of course, actual events will be spread out over a region of space (my hands are quite big objects) and over a small but extended interval of time (the period during which my hands are in contact while clapping) but we can imagine idealized events as things that occur at a single point in space at a single instant in time. Specifying an event also uniquely specifies a location and a time since only one event can occur at any point in space at a particular time.

Suppose we have one event A that takes place at one place at one time (say a neutrino created by a nuclear reaction at CERN) and another event B that takes place at another place at another time (say the detection of the arrival of that same neutrino at the Grand Sasso laboratory). Einstein causality says that since event A caused event B, event A must take place before event B. Even if the neutrino were to travel at a speed greater than the speed of light, all that would do is reduce the time difference between the two events, not reverse their order, as was noted in the example given in the first post in this series. So why is this event seen as such a sensational development?

The answer lies in the fact that Einstein causality is believed to hold true for every observer who sees the same two events, irrespective of the state of motion of the observer. And the existence of faster than light neutrinos means that even though we on Earth will continue to see event A before event B, there are observers who are moving relative to us who will see the neutrino being detected at Gran Sasso before it was created at CERN or, more bizarrely in the case of the shooting example, that the bullet will emerge from person B and seem to travel back into the gun of person A. And unlike in that earlier example, this will not be due to an illusion due to the accident of where the observer happened to be located.

To understand how this can happen, we need to go more deeply into the question of how we measure the location and the time of events and how they differ for observers moving with respect to one another. Location and distance measurements seem pretty straightforward and we do it all the time when we measure the length of something. We simply hold a ruler along the line joining the two events, take the ruler readings at the locations of each of the two events, subtract the smaller reading from the larger, and the resulting number gives us the distance between the two events.

As for the time interval between two events, we can look at our watch when we see event A occurring and note the reading, then look again when we see event B occurring and note the reading, and once again subtract the smaller reading from the larger. The resulting number gives us the time that lapsed between the two events. There is a slight complication here in that it takes time for light to travel from one place to another so the actual time at which event A occurred would be a little earlier than when we see it. But since we know the speed of light, we can take that into account. All we have to do is measure the distance between where we are and the location of event A and divide that by the speed of light to get the time taken for the light to reach us. We then subtract that time from our watch reading to get the ‘true’ time at which the event A occurs. We can do the same thing for event B.

For example, in the earlier example, if you were standing next to the victim at B, you would have seen the bullet at the 2 meter mark 9 seconds after the gun fires. If you had been standing next to the shooter at A, you would have seen it 3 seconds after the gun fired. If you correct for the time of travel for the light to reach you from the bullet at the 2 meter mark, the bullet would be said to be at that point one second after the gun was fired, irrespective of where you were standing. So the time of an event can be specified uniquely in the case of different observers who are not moving with respect to the events.

What if the observer is moving, though? The question that Einstein pondered is the following. Suppose I, seated in my office, observe two events on the sidewalk outside my window and measure the distance between them and the time interval according to the above methods using my own ruler and watch. Now suppose another person is moving with respect to me (say passing by in a train) and sees the same two events as I do and measures the distance and time interval between them using her ruler and watch. Will that person’s measurements of the distance and time intervals agree with mine?

It is the answer to this question that determines whether we live in a world in which Galilean relativity rules or one in which Einsteinian relativity rules.

Next: Galilean and Einsteinian relativity

Rising Cain

I must admit that the rise of Herman Cain to becoming a major player in the Republican primaries took me by surprise. According to the latest PPP poll, he leads nationally with 30%, followed by Romney with 22%. “If the race came down to a two way match between Cain and Romney, Cain leads 48-36. Cain would pick up Bachmann, Gingrich, Perry, and Santorum’s supporters. Romney would get Huntsman and Paul’s. Cain would absolutely crush Perry in a head to head, 55-27. He would win over the supporters of every other candidate, including Romney’s by a 56-24 margin.”

Since I had not given much credence to the idea that Cain would win the nomination or the presidency, I had not really taken the time to examine too closely his stands on the issues or ponder what kind of president he might make.

But even if Cain is a truly awful person to lead the nation, the fact that there is a possibility that the two parties’ nominees for the next presidential election could both be people of color signals that the nation has come a long way in its acceptance of minorities in leadership positions.

Both Obama and Cain are obliging servants of the oligarchy, no doubt, but that is a given the way that the election system is currently set up. That particular hurdle will be harder to overcome than even electing a gay, non-Christian, minority woman as president.