Tuesday, September 02, 2014

I realize thumb prints or finger prints are used for some private or public companies to absolute identification. Retinal scans is another extreme method of protecting ID, but, to even concern such measures on public sites connected to the internet is not a good idea.

I can only imagine a thumb print being lifted from some security data base and used in committing crimes. It just not a good idea. The only defense is to prove there is no DNA that matches the thumb print, but, in some instances that won't work either.

An offline dedicated computer to store personal files is the only way any information is secure. But, just to be safe, don't let anyone with a thumb drive near it.

Ms. Maria Fernandes is one of a growing population of homeless.


August 28, 2014
By Jay Hathaway

A 32-year-old woman was found dead (click here) inside her SUV in a convenience store parking lot, where she was trying to get some extra sleep between shifts at her four part-time jobs, the New JerseyStar-Ledger reports.
Police say Maria Fernandes, who worked at two New Jersey Dunkin locations, left her car running while she napped Monday morning, and died after inhaling carbon monoxide and fumes from a spilled gas can.
She kept the gasoline container in the car because she sometimes ran out of fuel while commuting between jobs. Police said Fernandes would often nap in the car for a few hours before her next shift started.
Her body was discovered 8 hours later by workers at the Wawa convenience store where she was parked. She had made plans to lend her SUV to a friend that day.
"This sounds like someone who tried desperately to work and make ends meet, and met with a tragic accident," Elizabeth police Lt. Daniel Saulnier told the Star-Ledger.

I know for a fact the zero percent for North Carolina is incorrect. (click here) NC just doesn't keep statistics, because they simply don't care and cutting corners all the time.

NC Site (click here) with no numbers for permanently homeless. Homelessness is frequently thought about as transitory. No so.

There is data listed on the NC Site (click here).


March 22, 2014
The Editorial Board (NYT)

The across-the-board cuts to federal programs (click here) that took effect last spring receded from the headlines after Republicans were shamed into allowing the government to pay its bills. But the cuts, known as the sequester, continue to take a toll on crucial housing programs that are intended to shield the elderly, the disabled and impoverished families with children from homelessness.

These cuts arrived in the midst of an affordable housing crisis, at a time when only one in four families who would qualify for federal rental assistance actually get it....

The Republicans want to cut programs to reduce spending, BUT, they don't make sure there are supports to the citizens that will be hurt by their actions. They never put an increase in the minimum wage in place when they voted for cuts to social programs. The Republicans make the excuse people receiving federal funding are lazy and need incentives to work. Well, Ms. Maria Fernandes is dead now because she didn't make enough money to house herself.

"Wouldn't It Be Nice" if they weren't convicted in the first place. Like. Maybe the US Justice System might actually work for everyone.

There should be a law stating when a conviction is overturn because the original evidence was weak and won't hold up; the defense attorneys should serve the rest of the sentence and pay reparations to those victimized by lousy representation. This stuff makes me very upset. 30 years were taken away from these men and their families. That is tragic.

September 2, 2014
By Jonathan M. Katz and Erik Eckholm

LUMBERTON, N.C. — Thirty years (click here) after their convictions in the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in rural North Carolina, based on confessions that they quickly repudiated and said were coerced, two mentally disabled half-brothers were declared innocent and released Tuesday by a Robeson County court.

The case against the men, always weak, fell apart after DNA evidence implicated another man with a history of rape and murder.

The startling shift in fortunes for the men, Henry Lee McCollum, now 50, who has spent three decades on death row, and Leon Brown, 46, who was serving a life sentence, provided one of the most dramatic examples yet of the potential for false, coerced confessions and also of the power of DNA tests to exonerate the innocent.

As friends and relatives of the two men wept, a superior court judge, Douglas B. Sasser, said he was vacating their convictions and ordering their release....         

Workers are demanding better wages while their employers expand their dollar menus.

September 1, 2014
Hundreds of fast food workers (click here) plan to strike and protest across the country on Thursday, the latest step in their push for a $15 hourly wage, organizers said Monday.
The plans, discussed by organizers on Monday’s U.S. Labor Day holiday, include preparing to participate in civil disobedience. The workers involved are willing to be arrested as they try to get their message across, organizers involved in the Fight for $15 movement said. The effort is supported by the Service Employees International Union.

A number of workers from chains including McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, KFC and Domino’s plan to participate in the protests, along with community supporters, organizers said....

This is the insanity of the USA landscape today. Who is correct and who is wrong?

Let's settle this right now. Have you ever spent a half hour near the order counter in McDonalds? No? I would say the majority of the orders, including the drive-up window, are off the dollar menu. The consumers in McDonald's can't afford the regular menus. So, as the demand for the dollar menu increases and the stockholders are collecting more than comfortable profits the competition is introducing it's own dollar menus.

Why? What dynamic is at work here?

Cheap food and for the impoverished sometimes this is cheaper than purchasing the groceries to prepared anything at home. The entire of corporate strategies are self-defeating. The more they cater to low cost food options on their menus the more it is demanded.

Why? Whom are the customers?

The customers are primary poor folks. Why are they poor?

They are poor because they don't have good paying jobs. They can't make a living wage. Who are in the food banks for groceries?

L0w pay workers are in the food banks. Yes, indeed, Wendys, McDonalds, Burger King, Taco Bell and all the rest have subsidized persons as employees. 

The Wall Street so called giants including Walmart are losing their own battle to increase their quarterly incomes. The industries of the impoverished are finding a leveling. Don't take my word for it.

July 24, 2014
By Maggie McGraph
...McDonald’s (click here) reported $7.2 billion in second quarter sales, a 1% improvement over the same time in 2013 but $100 million shy of the Street’s $7.3 billion estimate. Net income came in at $1.39 billion, down from $1.4 billion in the year-ago quarter and resulting in earnings of $1.40 per share, a figure that missed the $1.43 per share analyst consensus. Stateside, same-store-sales declined 1.5%, a drop the company attributed to a decline in traffic amid other “broad-based” challenges.

European comparable sales also declined — by 1% — while in Asia, comparable sales increased 1.1%, thanks to strong sales in China. Whether sales in that region will continue their strength going forward remains to be seen: a recent TV report in China accused McDonald’s of using a meat supplier that re-used meat that had fallen to the floor. As Forbes’ Brian Solomon noted, “if, as they have in the past, Chinese customers again spurn fast food chains associated with the safety problems, it could negatively impact the earnings for McDonald’s.”

On a global basis, comparable store sales were flat compared to the prior year....

The reason China sales are buoying the company is because the quality of products aren't regulated and there are short cuts to create profits. McDonald's CEO wants to believe he is competing with "Chipotle." "W"rong. Excuses, excuses. "Chipotle" doesn't have a dollar menu and if they did there would be gross loses in the profits of these other Wall Street companies.

THE FACTS ARE CLEAR, the reason these companies and the USA economy are faltering is because there is low cash flow from the MAJORITY of the employed. Who is the largest employer in the USA? Walmart. If they provided an increase in wages across the board to all their hourly employees and low level management what would happen to the USA economy?

September 20, 2014
By Henry Bloget...Walmart (click here) employs an astounding 2.1 million people.  In the United States alone, the company employs 1.4 million people.  This is a staggering 1% of the U.S.'s 140 million working population....

Simple math. Let's assume all the 1.4 million in the USA working for Walmart are part-time and receiving a $1.00 per hour increase which translate into $20 per week. Do the math. What happens with the USA economy?

1.4 million people are going to receive $20 per week more in their pay that comes down to an additional cash flow in the USA economy of $28,000,000 in liquidity PER WEEK. 

What does that come to in a year? $1,456,000,000.00 Too many zeros for you? One trillion, four hundred, fifty-six million dollars per year. How much was the stimulus in 2009 when President Obama took office? The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act put $787 billion into the struggling economy. A dollar more an hour for a 20 hour part time worker at Walmart would result increased liquidity in the USA economy of TWICE the 2009 stimulus and it would continue annually and not just a one time dollar amount for one year.

The income of the Middle Class is paramount to economic growth in the USA, NOT, the number of babies born per year.  The CEOs that cater to poverty are destroying their own businesses and putting a huge drag on the USA economy, with that, the global economy.

Walmart will scream, "We can't afford that loss in revenue per week." Right? That is their favorite rant. TO BEGIN: All that comes off taxable profits from the company. The fact is the revenue into Walmart and the companies that cater to the poor can't afford to NOT do this. An increase in personal income to their employees will not change the demographics of those shopping at Walmart. 

The most likely outcome will be the employees continuing to shop at Walmart, hence increasing it's revenue annually. The added revenue to the country will exponentially increase employment which automatically adds consumers to these companies. How much of the income to these companies are actually at home, unemployed and not even able to purchase their dollar menus. It is ridiculous.

One more thing. These CEOs only see their own costs, but, the truth is moving more merchandise/inventory will increase the DEMAND for their merchandise and will increase the sales of raw materials at the factory end of the consumer supply chain, which will increase the factories income, etc., etc. The investment of better wages to these employees will reverberate throughout the supply chain and will cause a vibrant ripple of increased revenues across all those linked to these merchandisers.

I can see where David Cameron would raise the terror alert in the UK.

September 1, 2014

ROTHERHAM, England — It started on the bumper cars (click here) in the children’s arcade of the local shopping mall. Lucy was 12, and a group of teenage boys, handsome and flirtatious, treated her and her friends to free rides and ice cream after school.

Over time, older men were introduced to the girls, while the boys faded away. Soon they were getting rides in real cars, and were offered vodka and marijuana. One man in particular, a Pakistani twice her age and the leader of the group, flattered her and bought her drinks and even a mobile phone. Lucy liked him.

The rapes started gradually, once a week, then every day: by the war memorial in Clifton Park, in an alley near the bus station, in countless taxis and, once, in an apartment where she was locked naked in a room and had to service half a dozen men lined up outside....

This is just unthinkable. It reminds me of the very poor UN ranking of the UK in it's care of the children. Kids don't matter in the UK do they? There needs to be a though investigation and charges filed, not just for the perpetrators but for the officials that allowed this to exist for 16 years. Were they on the take?

...Lucy’s account of her experience is emblematic of what investigators say happened during a 16-year reign of terror and impunity in this poor northern English town of 257,000, where at least 1,400 children, some as young as 11, were groomed for sexual exploitation while the authorities looked the other way. One girl told investigators that gang rape was part of growing up in her neighborhood....

If this is the level of vigilance the British government practices within the UK there is plenty of reason to create stronger laws about interior security of the country. Pedophile heaven? Is that the specialty of the UK? Too bad it was illegitimate income the UK could have collected tax revenue for sixteen years. 

What do we know about the net? We know there is no such thing as a secure site.

September 1, 2014
Apple has patched (click here) a security hole that may have allowed hackers to access the iCloud accounts of several celebrities and leak them on the web forum 4Chan, according to CBS News report on Monday, citing  Engadget.
A vulnerability in Apple’s “Find My iPhone” feature was exposed on the code-sharing site GitHub a day before a collection of nude photos depicting celebrities was leaked. The Find My iPhone service wasn’t equipped with a mechanism for preventing “brute force attacks,” or when hackers create a tool to test thousands of passwords against a users’ account until they find the correct one, according to Engadget...

Apple usually has few breaches but that doesn't make it fool proof. If one wants intimate photos don't hook the digital camera to the net simply put on a thumb drive. 

I really miss the 35 mm. Seriously. I really think they do a better job and people are not unwittingly compromised. Does anyone really stop to think about it's security when taking pictures. Folks are in the moment and enjoying it. The last thing they think about is having their personal photos compromised by some opportunistic jerk.

I like paper. It is private. And in the year 2014 it is recycled.