I think its super rad how Apple is making good on its privacy rhetoric:
[Apple software engineering chief Craig Federighi] said users can create a new account on an app using its own one-click button “without revealing any new personal information.”
Federighi also noted that when apps ask for names and email addresses — typically auto-populated from a one-click login from a social networking site — you can still provide them if they wish. But when you don’t want to provide your real email address to protect your privacy, Apple will auto-generate a random “relay” email address that hides your real email address.
This isn’t the first time Apple has gone out of their way to engineer a product with privacy specifically in mind, for example in the way Apple Maps gathers route-data to improve the product:
“We specifically don’t collect data, even from point A to point B,” notes [Apple SVP Eddy Cue]. “We collect data — when we do it — in an anonymous fashion, in subsections of the whole, so we couldn’t even say that there is a person that went from point A to point B. We’re collecting the segments of it. As you can imagine, that’s always been a key part of doing this. Honestly, we don’t think it buys us anything [to collect more]. We’re not losing any features or capabilities by doing this.”
But this “Sign in with Apple” different in that it is a new, useful feature whose main draw is the privacy (although convenient SSO is also a hook, but presumably the apps already had that with “Sign on with Facebook” buttons or the like).
This is also a timely response to the recent WaPo piece on how much data your typical app ecosystem “leaks” about their user.
By Adam Goldman, The New York Times
This article describes how the FBI has had to refer cases to state and local law-enforcement in some domestic terror investigations because the wrong-doings being investigated were not solidly criminal according to Federal statutes - but the local authorities thought that they could more easily build a case using state statutes.
The article isn’t exactly clear on why this is a bad thing? Most crimes probably should be prosecuted at the state level, and using the resources of the FBI to track and identify threats but then coordinating with local authorities when actions become criminal seems like a good idea to me.
Maybe the cross-jurisdiction actions are difficult, logistically?
The article also discusses that the FBI’s capabilities to fight domestic terror has eroded after 9/11 and its focus on international terror, but that’s more of a budget concern that a lack of investigative power.
And that’s what the ACLU-rep’s quote states, along with other folks in the article:
“Law enforcement agencies already have the investigative and prosecutorial tools they need, and they should prioritize resources and policies to meaningfully address white supremacist violence,” said Hina Shamsi, a national security expert at the American Civil Liberties Union.
(That’s what I get for writing up my reaction to an article before I finish it …)
by Ben Dooley, The New York Times
Holy cow am I unprepared to comment on MMT. I think the thing that confuses me is the general unfamiliar terminology in the world of economics - when I hear “modern monetary theory” I think it’s somehow related to “market monetarism”, which is completely different.
It wouldn’t surprise me if something about the Japanese fundamentals were different in major ways from the US.
Just because “traditional” economics doesn’t fit what is happening in Japan doesn’t mean that one, specific theory which is predictive for Japan is “true” - presumably there is more than one alternate economics model which also describe Japan’s situation?
Sang-Wook Yi, Jee-Jeon Yi & Heechoul Ohrr, Scientific Reports\n
This is a pretty astounding result - the researchers find a bathtub-curve of all-cause mortality vs. total cholesterol with the mortality-minimum around ~200mg/dL.
I’m always a big proponent of the “show me the all-cause mortality data” school of thought, but the discussion on HN offered some good, skeptical positions (principally, that not correcting for statin use could skew an easy interpretation of the results).
And even if we truly had a bathtub-curve after accounting for confounding factors like statins-use, as total-cholesterol is only likely a proxy for the causative factors in atherosclerosis, the specific proxy-relationship may not translate cross-culturally (i.e. the relationship between TC and the causative factor could be dietary or something like that).
by Hubert Horan, American Affairs
Horan has had a long series of articles on Naked Capitalism on the economics Uber (and Lyft). Reading this single essay is easier than going through the long series.
Horan includes the (incompletely compensated) cost of fuel, maintenance, and vehicle depreciation in his “total economics” of the ride, even though those costs are not borne by Uber-the-company, so his math often adds up different than folks who look at the costs from Uber’s perspective.