11/22/14 Today's Inquiries

2 factor authentication! Lots of reading for you to do today.


The Links:

I'm not going to write a bunch about Obama's immigration reform plan. I honestly don't think it's going to significantly change the lives of many immigrants. For example, see this:

But let’s focus on what is the truly thorny issue, which is what to do about foreigners now working in the US. The Obama promise that he’ll handle the issue “responsibly” is already a big red flag. His high concept proposal:

So we’re going to offer the following deal: If you’ve with been in America more than five years. If you have children who are American citizens or illegal residents. If you register, pass a criminal background check and you’re willing to pay your fair share of taxes, you’ll be able to apply to stay in this country temporarily without fear of deportation. You can come out of the shadows and get right with the law. That’s what this deal is.

How many people will actually pass this bar? The fact sheet suggests that the number that will qualify is five million (although the , out of a total estimated illegal immigrant population of 11 million. And the main mechanism is the expansion of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program:

DHS will expand the existing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to include more immigrants who came to the U.S. as children. DHS will also create a new deferred action program for people who are parents of U.S. Citizens or Lawful Permanent Residents (LPRs) and have lived in the United States for five years or longer if they register, pass a background check and pay taxes.

Notice this differs from past amnesty programs which required applicants to pay back taxes, an almost impossible bar (I have one acquaintance, an illegal immigrant of 15 years with his own Social Security number who has consistently paid taxes who said he’d be the only person to qualify) in requiring taxes to be paid prospectively. But how many people who have been under the radar can prove they’ve lived in the US for five years?

Of course the right wing will stay classy as always:

There's some crazy stuff going down in Mexico. More here. And do we have a modern day Marie Antoinette?

Imagine, for example, what would happen if Michelle Obama bought a multi-million-dollar mansion from a U.S. government contractor that had just been granted a concession worth billions of dollars in highly suspicious circumstances.

The giant contradiction at the heart of the US economy:

Suppose you told an economist these facts and only these facts: Long-term interest rates have fallen sharply over just a few months. Prices for oil and other much-needed commodities have been in free fall in the face of weak demand. Markets are predicting that inflation will be low in the years ahead and that the central bank will keep interest rates lower for longer.

Knowing only those facts, the economist would conclude that this country was staring down the barrel of a significant economic slowdown, and maybe even a recession.

What would that economist conclude, though, if stock prices are consistently rising toward record highs, job gains are the best in years, corporate sales and profits are rising, and business surveys and other real-time indicators of the economy point to steady expansion?

That country, of course, would seem to have a perfectly strong economic outlook. And as you have surely guessed, both these situations apply to the same country at the same time, which is to say the United States in November 2014.

The liquidity monster that awaits. Alphaville argues that the next financial crisis may stem from a collapse of liquidity following post-crisis regulation and the end of QE. However, he seems to forget that the pinnacle of the 2008 meltdown was a liquidity crisis. Major banks were failing because they nobody was loaning money. The overnight markets basically froze up and Lehman got caught short. It's not just post-crisis regulations and central bank actions that can kill liquidity.

And, Paul Krugman reviews Martin Wolf's new book, The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned - and still have to learn - from the Financial Crisis.

34 states saw the unemployment rate decrease in October. Georgia leads the way (in unemployment)!

My days as a pseudo lassiez faire guy are behind me but I agree with what's been written here. Part of the reason we're having a debate about net neutrality now is we don't have a competitive ISP environment. The vast majority of people are limited to 2 choices of ISP, their cable or their phone company. It is that duopoly which allows companies like Verizon and Comcast to abuse their customers and extort content creators. Indeed, many cities are trying to start public networks and find themselves sued by ISPs or blocked by legislation written at the behest of ISPs.

Restrain Regressive Rent Seeking. If you're not familiar, rent seeking is when a company uses its political power, market power, or some other kind of manipulation to extract money from the state and/or customers which it would not otherwise be able to get in e free market. See the post above for a perfect example.

Private prisons, (another great example of rent seeking) have a lot more minorities than our already disproportionate state prison system.

Interesting commentary on Ferguson from Claudia Rankine, who just published her new book, Citizen, an American Lyric.

 I happened to be in St. Louis a week after the Ferguson protests started. So I went to the neighborhood, just to look around, talk to people, try to understand what they were feeling. I knew what I was feeling. I knew there was a simmering rage but also desired to understand what it meant to be living in the midst of that moment...

Those two interactions—they exhausted me. Because they just had a sense of inevitability. It almost felt Greek. Predetermined, and hopeless. And then you had all these police cars with white policemen and policewomen, just sitting inside the cars, looking out at you. It was like you were in a theater, and they were this encased audience. It made me think of Antigone. And so that’s what I’m working on—a rewriting of Antigone, as a way of discussing what it means to decide to engage. The dead body’s in the street. What do you do now? 

The police and national guard are out in full force ahead of the grand jury decision. You have to wonder if this will be a self fulfilling prophesy where the presence of the police creates the conditions for a riot.

Grad students are about to go on strike at the University of Oregon. I don't see this ending well for them. What possible leverage could they have?

It's not just computer science, economics has a lady problem too. And congress.

The shittiest places in San Francisco.

How Galileo invented the tyranny of the clock.

Hmm, if this device can turn water into gasoline, can we use it with hydrogen powered vehicles which out put water to make more synthetic gasoline?

Some guy in 1939 wrote a 50,000 word book without using the letter 'E.'

You know, the Bible is really long. I wish there was some kind of truncated version that I could read in a matter of minutes.

Tina Fey has a new show that's going to be on Netflix. I miss 30 Rock so this gets me very excited.

Mindsuckers. Nature's zombies and parasites. Lovely.

Get excited for the next Hobbit movie!