My favorite fake news story

AP (Nov 2016): Researchers detect a major rise in epilepsy from flashing ads and screen jumps in the modern GUI.

Working with computer scientists, researchers measured the number of bonehead screen flashes, suggestion pop ups, and hopping about on Facebook and Microsoft GUI in general.

Researchers find that 40% off all mouse moves cause some random flash on he screen. 90% of all 3 key combinations result in some unique short cut to hell.  Test subjects were measured after a days use.  10% of them were found writhing on the floor in spasms.

Read Matt Levine every day

Link.

His link above.  Anything you want to know about the practices of co-location, uncertainty in the book, and crowded trade channels; he sees it every day and reports it exactly as the mahematicians needs it reported.

URL look up is made safe from DOD attacks, with a little knowledge of probability

FRIDAY MORNING IS prime time for some casual news reading, tweeting, and general Internet browsing, but you may have had some trouble accessing your usual sites and services this morning and throughout the day, from Spotify and Reddit to the New York Times and even good ol’ WIRED.com. For that, you can thank a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) that took down a big chunk of the Internet for most of the Eastern seaboard.

Distribute URL data entries according to probability of use such that the number of hops from the originating device to the nearest look up is short.  Then, in total, the probability of an innocent user being delayed by DOD attacks is minimized.

Best way to distribute the DNS look up service?

Spare processors in local routers that can spawn a new router with available DNS database functions, a slot for the DNS provider.  Then dynamically distribute DNS information by probability, as in a Huffman tree.

Ultimately, the best bet is to charge a hundreth cent per cycle on the database, and use all of that dough-re-me to buy spare processor as needed.  But that fine tuning requires Smart Card, like just about all the good things to come.

Union imposed price fixing does not work

Two tier pay systems seldom work.  They come in two parts.  First, the original group holds on to benefits.  Second, the new group pays for them.  Third: You get mostly old contracts and very few new contracts, then the oldsters retire, en masse, when this is not sustainable..  This is the Dallas pension problem, it is really the California energy price fixing problem under Gray Davis.  Price fixing jams the graph.

CalWatch: In 2011, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (pictured) won a hard-fought deal with the Los Angeles police and firefighters unions that targeted “pension spiking” — late-career maneuvering that allowed individuals to push up their final pay and thus their annual pensions. It also reduced the minimum pension available after 20 years of service.

All employee unions also made concessions reducing retirement benefits for newly hired workers that year. And after the 2011 contracts, all new hires had to share in the costs of health care benefits. Taxpayers had previously covered the whole tab.

Consumers spend on durables

Consumers, exports power U.S. third-quarter economic growth

OK, now the third revision tells us from whom the durables were purchased.  We will see the number drop a bit, maybe 3.0; still OK.  There is quite a big between income and expenses which means reconciliation later. The next revision could very well be up.

Commercial restrictions on freedom of speech?

HotAir found a gem.  Many states have laws which restrict merchants ability to talk fianane wityh their customers:

I’m always interested in free speech cases when they make their way through the court system, but this one is particularly unique. In a small town in upstate New York a beauty salon ran into a problem a couple of years ago. They listed their prices up front based on the cash price for services, providing a note saying that there would be an extra fee applied if the customer paid by credit card. They were advised by an attorney to take the sign down or change the wording because they were in violation of the law. That may sound fairly crazy, but it turns out the lawyer was correct and they wound up going to court, claiming that their right of free speech was being impinged. (Route Fifty)

The owners of Expressions Hair Design in Vestal, along with other New York businesses that have sued the state over the law, say their freedom of speech is being impinged on because they can’t explain to customers how credit card fees affect their bottom line.

Their case, Expressions Hair Design v. Schneiderman, is slated to come before the U.S. Supreme Court early next year. A decision in the case also is likely to be felt in nine states with similar laws (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Texas). And, given the reach of big retailers and the growth of online sales, it could influence how merchants in other states do business, too.

“All these laws are really doing is regulating speech in a way that favors credit card companies because it masks the costs of credit to consumers,” said Deepak Gupta, the consumer rights lawyer representing Expressions, where his mother gets her hair done. Under the laws, he said, “you can say the glass is half full, but you can’t say it’s half empty.”

How does trading pit work this problem? It simply reports that transaction costs are unmeasurably zero, the cost of an active trading pit is likely tens of dollars per year per billions of transactions. There arte no humans involved, except the person to person delivery of a real goodie.

How would the hackers find us?

Here we have it, for some reason the bank has your personal details.  Why?  All the bank needs, in our model, is to know your Smart Card is on the security block chain. Once that is established, your card has already agreed to play the proper Red/Green rules; and that means the card already verifies its owner.

Tech Insider: Hackers have broken into a high-end European bank and are blackmailing its customers.
Customers of Valartis, a Chinese-owned Liechenstein bank, are being told by unknown blackmailers they must pay 10% of their life savings or face having account details sent to finance authorities and the media, German-language newspaper Bild reports.

House Speaker. Ryan, let's sneak a big deficit potential in the budget

Typical Republicans on the budget.  
Short term financing is what Ryan want, he consumes borrowing capacity for the first six months, and that is the Trump bump, a little twerp in the House.  If our boy gets a big bump, we can expect a budget shutdown later.

Hill: Senate GOP members are instructing the Appropriations Committee to begin working on a stopgap that would fund the government through March, according to a Senate aide.
The effort shows that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is going along with the plan laid down by Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to move the short-term measure, even if the Senate GOP hasn’t completely bought in on the strategy.

From biometric news

Mobile bank offers hand recognition authentication
UK bank to extend trial of behavioural biometrics security
Visa and BioConnect work to enable multiple biometrics on mobile apps
Spanish bank offers ‘selfie’ service to open account
NEC aims for face recognition for payments by late 2017
Mastercard to roll out biometric ID service in North America


The proper viewpoint is that we will select some set of biometrics to make sure your bot only follow your instructions, this is about you having control.  The banks point of view and the individual point of view agree.

In the Secure Smart Card model, the identification biometric goes no further than the card itself, no one else is looking at your face, and certainly no human.  Once your card knows you, the system is safe. Safe in the sense that human disagreement are immediately moved out of the system, into customer service.  So, if the clerk wants a biometric look, you have to OK the delivery, it should not be necessary as long as your card knows you.

The question rermains, how can we invest in the North East

It really was New York's turn at the slop hole.  For 40 years it has been California or Texas.

How can the North East appear investable to us Southwest folks?

How would we deal with the mal-functioning Illinois system? And what if DeBlowsio butts in all the time.  Texans don't like unions, California can barely afford them, Illinois  is ruled by them.

If we screw it up then the collapse happens sooner, normal economics suffers distortion.  And we have the pain of the California legislature, none too bright; not to mention the Texas style county corruption.  The odds are against any massive resource transfer working.  How many club med California politicians ate going back to NY and check on our investment? None, that is how many.

California is at risk, we have to house the nation's homeless if the aggregate frigs up.