Brian Gongol
What's gone wrong with the Secret Service?
Washington Post analysis: Too many new duties after 9/11, getting shuffled into a new DHS bureaucracy, and -- in no small measure -- a loss of experienced workers and a huge degree of distrust of management by the rank-and-file
Russia's economic woes partially tie back to its takeover of Crimea
War can't be examined in isolation from economics. Russia may be on track to burn through its fiscal reserves in a matter of just a couple of years. What happens next is probably not going to be pretty.
Whooping cough may be evolving to evade immunization
That's scary. What's worse is the thought that people are choosing to exempt themselves and their children from immunization programs, which only opens the door further to the risk of the disease among the population as a whole. The awful movement that steers people away from vaccines is only weakening the immunity of the human species at large. We clearly have enough to worry about with the natural evolution of our viral enemies without some of our fellow people turning into traitors against us all.
Why everyone should know self-defense: Case study #16
A crowded Chicagoland mall was evacuated and closed after a fight broke out in the food court. Good people need to know how to protect themselves and de-escalate situations with authority.
Is there really anything wrong with disposable technology?
A British engineering professor bemoans the fact that young people generally don't know how to fix their gadgets, but is it really a bad thing that the technology itself improves so quickly that there's little incentive to keep up with the details?
Show notes - The Brian Gongol Show on WHO Radio - December 28, 2014
Airing live at 9 pm Central; streaming at whoradio.com/listen
China blocks Gmail
Because nothing is worse for an authoritarian government than people who can think for themselves and exchange those thoughts with others in relative privacy and freedom. Let's not forget that mundane-seeming technologies like the fax machine helped undermine the Soviet Union.
Who owns what in America
America's most unpopular companies
ISIS/ISIL/QSIL/Daesh turns on its own
Japan's savings rate has turned negative
That's a first
Cheap work eventually runs out
China's labor costs have risen enough to meaningfully diminish the country's competitive advantage. The boom didn't really last long by historical standards.
Facebook admits its automatic "year in review" might have missed the mark for some people
You might think that a quick glance at the global and national data alone might have suggested that not everything we talk about on Facebook is stuff we'd like to relive...but perhaps these things do not occur to the wunderkinds. And, to be quite honest, the apology as shared with the Washington Post was actually a bit tone-deaf in itself.
More Apple products were activated over Christmas than those of any other manufacturer
So says Yahoo analytics subsidiary Flurry, which says "Apple accounted for 51% of the new device activations" right around Christmas.
Team planning Obama Presidential library is worried about Chicago proposals
The hilarious part: Most of their concerns have to do with political uncertainty, and whether the government and public agencies involved will actually supply the things they want for the library to go through. This, from a group planning a library to honor a Presidential administration that has shown a remarkable affinity for capricious initiation and execution of rules to advance its own political agenda, with great disregard for the consequences to the people who have to live by those rules and laws.
German transition to renewable energy is painful
There are lots of moving parts to the system -- and it appears that they aren't being very well coordinated. Germans are as a result paying a very high price for electricity without a mountain of attending benefits.
The Fugio Cent: Benjamin Franklin's admonition to the country
Franklin designed a penny with the image of a sundial and the word "Fugio" (Latin for "I fly"...thus suggesting "Time flies"), and a slogan saying "Mind your business". It's entirely possible -- maybe even likely -- that he intended for the ambiguity of that particular phrasing. "Mind your business" certainly literally means "Attend to your work", but it also can be another way to say "Mind your (own) business". How delightfully American.
Outside investors aren't enamored -- at all -- with Japanese stocks
Bloomberg reports that investment inflows are dropped by 94% from 2013 into 2014. To the contrarian investor, it's certainly a signal worth investigating.
Psychological conclusions reached in 2014 that could make for a happier year ahead
What is wrong with the open-plan workplace
Distractions from noise alone probably reduce quite a lot of any gains to be had from "easier collaboration"
Fifteen out-of-left-field predictions for 2015
Some will be right, many will be very wrong. Most valuable as an exercise in considering some of the outside circumstances that could mess with the status quo in the year ahead.
January 1, 2015
FBI wants to recruit "ethical hackers"
Annual salaries for these "cyber special agents" start at about $60,000 a year. That number might need to go higher if we really want to recruit qualified technicians.
BlackBerry saves the day for Sony after hacking
Shawn Johnson on the Iowa stereotypes encountered during "The Apprentice"
Kim Jong-Un: Extreme eyebrow plucker?
The South China Morning Post brings this not-very-urgent but hilarious update to the world's attention
"My doctor told me I should vaccinate my children, but then someone much louder told me I shouldn't"
The people behind The Onion strike again with a great piece of satire
January 2, 2015
Researcher suggests that cancer is basically just bad luck, 2/3rds of the time
"[O]nly a third of the variation in cancer risk among tissues is attributable to environmental factors or inherited predispositions. The majority is due to 'bad luck,' that is, random mutations arising during DNA replication in normal, noncancerous stem cells." This conclusion will be hotly debated, to be sure. Undoubtedly, some cancer risk is certainly due to environmental or genetic conditions -- but if it's really this much of a crapshoot, there's a strong case to be made for putting all of us under routine surveillance (blood tests at every annual physical, for instance), and for crafting our health-care system to accommodate the sort of risk that apparently affects us all with substantial equality (in other words, if we're all at mostly equal risk and the risk is mostly random, then we should all bear the costs rather equally as well).
Three dozen people killed in New Year's Eve stampede in Shanghai
Public-policy researcher asks why people weren't warned about the hazard via social media. It seems like that kind of responsiveness is a long time off.
"Ida" - a film worth watching
It's very well-executed from a technical standpoint, and the plot is high-caliber
A brief history of web design
Today is just like the day before
(Video) A real home run of a PSA for disaster preparedness
January 3, 2015
Left-wing, union-backed policy group says trade deficit with China cuts jobs in every Congressional district but one
Without deeply examining their methodology or claims, it's quite possible that there has been some meaningful net reduction in employment in the United States as a result of persistent trade deficits -- not just with China, but with the entire world. But the predominant concern shouldn't be with the jobs "created" or "destroyed" -- it should be with the ultimate impact on net wealth. As a country, if we're importing a lot more than we're exporting, then in the long term, we are sending our dollars overseas and building up a non-trivial balance on a metaphorical national "credit card". If we don't turn that around in a hugely meaningful way, then we'll have to pay down that debt and repatriate those dollars by selling off a significant amount of assets. Not everything, of course, but if our trade deficits linger at about 3% of our national income (about $40 to $45 billion a month on about $1,400 billion in GDP each month), then it's not going to be pretty when the day of reckoning arrives. Let's not overlook the real numbers, either: With a population of 320 million people, it's the equivalent of us each buying about $1600 a year worth of foreign stuff more than we're creating. We need to agree and understand that it's not sustainable and then get to work on debating the proper solutions -- ones that won't squash all of the benefits we do obtain from free trade (and there are many).
Critics want Gates Foundation to stop focusing on specific diseases
While it's understandable that they want a more holistic approach to "health-system strengthening", they're overlooking the fact that accountability requires at least some specificity. The broader and more vague the mandate, the more likely it is that any organization will fail to actually achieve its mission. One could scarcely expect to get good value by assigning someone a large pile of money and saying, "Go fix transportation". But if instead, the options (air travel, ships, trains, cars, and so on) were carefully evaluated for their likely effectiveness at achieving certain specific goals (like getting food to market, or moving people at low cost to metropolitan centers), then specific and worthwhile investments could be made with a reasonable expectation of getting results. Health is the same: The Gates mission is to find specific causes of illness and death, target them relentlessly, and eliminate them. There will be some unintended consequences, mistakes, and oversights along the way to be sure. But if you're not specific about what you're trying to fix, you're likely to do a lot worse.
Customers sue Apple over iOS 8
They say it takes up a lot of storage space on their devices -- particularly when upgraded from a previous version -- and that it's a shadowy way to force people to pay for cloud storage. The claim holds that a device advertised as having 16 Gb of storage really only offers about 80% of that amount once the OS has taken up residence. It's probably a silly and frivolous suit, but it does highlight the fact that people need to realize that they can't store endlessly, nor is the listed storage capacity of a device what they'll actually get in practice.
"The smuggling and sale of oil provides ISIL with as much as $1 million per day"
Americans probably don't realize how far we are from saving enough
Saving enough for a comfortable and independent retirement requires thinking on the order of about a million dollars. Maybe more, maybe less, but that's the order of magnitude of the thinking required.
Show notes - WHO Radio Wise Guys - January 3, 2015