I just read a really amazing story about a product that stops table saws from cutting off people’s fingers. You might think that manufacturers would race to incorporate this feature into their products. Yet the opposite happened. A coalition of table saw makers have taken multiple steps over years to suppress this technology.

If you wonder, “Why would manufacturers fight against a product that saves customers’ fingers?” you haven’t been paying attention to the power of association lobbying money.

The article describes all the various methods that the big power tool industry uses to block the incorporation of this technology into their product. It really is fascinating the way they turn losing your fingers into a right while transforming the makers of SawStop into some kind of greedy hucksters.

Steve Colbert did an excellent piece on this over a year ago. What I like about this piece is that they point out the way power tool manufacturing industry uses the same right wing tropes about “nanny state” and “freedom” that we see in the weapons industry. But if you look behind the scenes you see the manufacturers don’t really care about users freedom to cut their fingers off, they really care about their bottom line, the possible costs of lawsuits and having to pay royalties to the patent holders at SawStop.

What if one of them owned the patent for this technology and made it available to everyone for free? Would they then widely introduce it? I’ll bet they would, but after they got a bill passed like the gun makers did, one that keeps them free from liabilities from old saws that were made during the DECADE they fought the introduction of the technology.

I’m sure the people who work against safer products can count on both hands the number of reasons that a safer product like SawStop isn’t necessary and shouldn’t be mandated.  Of course if they were using SawStop those 10 fingers would still be attached.

Photo by Mr. Greenjeans under Creative Commons license

Cross posted on Spocko’s Brain

It’s Cartoon Friday, again!

My spoon is too big!

Don Hertzfeldt at work

For those who have watched, this simple phrase will immediately bring to mind Rejected, Don Hertzfeldt’s Oscar winning short cartoon film. Taking the form of a series of short promo cartoons supposedly created for cable networks, each succeeding segment gets weirder and more disturbed. This cartoon continues to be influential today, as Wikipedia notes:

Rejected has a cult following and has grown into a pop culture icon that is frequently quoted or referenced. In 2009, it was the only short film named as one of the “Films of the Decade” by Salon.com. In 2010, it was noted as one of the five “most innovative animated films of the past ten years” by The Huffington Post.^[4]

Hertzfeldt’s almost childish style combined with absurdist, edgy content has made him a top name in animation and a major influence on modern cartoons, particularly the kind of shows one sees on Adult Swim and its relatives. As Ad Week points out, his outspoken hatred of the advertising industry meant it was only a matter of time before they ripped him off for Pop-Tarts.

What are your favorite cartoons? If I can, I’ll use your suggestions in future installments.

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What’s on your mind tonight? You can talk about anything in the comments.

San Onofre at the No Nukes Brink

An update on the continued troubles of San Onofre from Harvey Wasserman.

In January, it seemed the restart of San Onofre Unit 2 would be a corporate cake walk.

With its massive money and clout, Southern California Edison
was ready to ram through a license exception for a reactor whose botched $770 million steam generator fix had kept it shut for a year.

But a funny thing has happened on the way to the restart:  a No Nukes groundswell has turned this routine rubber stamping into an epic battle the grassroots just might win.

Indeed, if ever there was a time when individual activism could have a magnified impact, this is it (see www.sanonofresafety.org and www.a4nr.org).

This comes as the nuclear industry is in nearly full retreat.  Two US reactors are already down this year.  Yet another proposed project has just been cancelled in North Carolina.  And powerful grassroots campaigns have pushed numerous operating reactors to the brink of extinction throughout the US, Europe and Japan, where all but two reactors remain shut since Fukushima.

In California, it’s San Onofre that’s perched at the brink.

By all accounts Southern California Edison should have the clout to restart it with ease.   The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been a notorious rubber stamp for decades.  The California Public Utilities Commission, which decides how much the utilities can gouge from the ratepayers, has long been in Edison’s pocket.  State water quality regulations could force Edison to build cooling towers, a very expensive proposition that would likely lead to a quick retirement.  But Gov. Jerry Brown has been deafeningly silent on the issue.

But San Onofre sits in an earthquake/tsunami zone halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego.  At least 8 million people live within a 50 mile radius, many millions more within 100. The reactors are a stone’s throw from both a major interstate and the high tide line, with a 14-foot flood wall a bare fraction of the height of the tsunami that overwhelmed at Fukushima.

San Onofre Unit One was shut in 1992 by steam generator issues. Edison recently spent some three-quarters of a billion dollars upgrading the steam generators for Units 2 and 3. But the pipes have leaked and failed.  Units 2 and 3 have been shut since January 2012. Edison has now asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for permission to run Unit 2 at 70% power for five months to see how the reactor might do. An NRC panel has termed the idea “experimental.”

Edison is desperate to get the reactor running before summer.  But in the wake of Fukushima, and in the midst of a major boom in solar energy, southern California is rising up to stop that from happening:

For various reasons I am not going to use names in this post.

High deductible insurance seems designed to cost money through confusion.

Several years ago we (my family and I) were forced to change our health insurance from a classic HMO plan to a “high-deductible” one. That plan is effectively incomprehensible; ever since we were switched to that plan, we’ve been in collection or sued several times every year. As has everyone else – literally – that I have spoken to, who is on one of these plans. All of them. Every single person I’ve spoken to who is on a high-deductible plan has faced multiple medical collections and/or lawsuits. I am not kidding.

The cost has been staggering.

Now, the supposed principle behind high-deductible plans is to force medical consumers (i.e. everyone) to be “wiser”. To make better choices. Not to get wasteful and expensive MRIs, for example, when an x-ray will do just as well.

There’s just one problem with that noble concept: it’s bullshit. Who among us is qualified to know whether an MRI is more or less suitable than an x-ray for any particular case? A doctor, that’s who. And certainly not the vast majority of patients! Most patients couldn’t tell you the difference between an MRI and an x-ray if you pointed a gun at their heads.

But of course, the real purpose of such plans isn’t to make health consumers wiser. It’s to shift costs, away from the employer and health insurer, and onto – you guessed it – the patient. Never mind that since 1980 wages for the middle class and working class have flatlined or declined, while health costs have skyrocketed; we’re scheduled to get the shaft on medical costs nonetheless. Which is why medical bankruptcies have skyrocketed in recent decades.

As has, I strongly suspect, the medical collection industry. Who might be profiting from this explosion in medical costs and lawsuits? Somehow I doubt that it’s the middle class or the poor.

So here’s the most recent thing that happened to us. We got a collection letter from a local hospital. Teri’s doctor had sent her there for some tests a few months ago; nothing terribly unusual, just the kind of test that every woman probably ends up having done sooner or later.

Just to be clear, she’s fine. But there was good and sufficient reason for her doctor to order those tests – they were certainly appropriate and necessary. She’d had such tests before and they’d been fully covered without question.

But this time we got a bill from the hospital where she’d had the test for $1560.00. Need I say that we were horrified? I’ve been through hell with these medical situations before; the thought of going through all that again was really almost unbearable. Still, I girded my mental loins and plunged in.

There are several things to remember when you’re dealing with this sort of situation:

It was thrilling to finally see, on this week’s HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, an articulate guest answering Maher’s frequent screeds that Islam is overwhelmingly the most violent and dangerous religion. Glenn Greenwald was well prepared and answered so swiftly, brilliantly and efficiently we had to replay it several times to fully enjoy it.

The clip shows that, despite Bill’s repeated attempts to marginalize and mock Glenn’s views, Glenn presses on with the truth, winning multiple rounds of applause from Bill’s audience and – a rarity with Bill – the last word. My son’s reaction: “Suddenly Bill Maher looked kind of old.”

With his usual surgical precision Greenwald disproves Maher’s smug insistence that Americans, Christians and Jews no longer make deadly attacks on innocent people of other faiths – when in fact, We’re Number One. In Glenn’s compact comments you may catch a reference to our General Boykin’s military, whose pep talks included: “…My God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.”

(I happen to know both Bill and Glenn a bit: I attended a party at Bill’s house years ago, introduced my mom to him at a taping of Politically Incorrect in NYC, and I’ve spoken with him briefly after shows in Santa Rosa. I met Glenn at a Salon event in 2011; he’s my favorite columnist and was quite proud when earlier this year he praised my political courage in a comment at his Guardian column.)

I have tremendous respect for Bill’s intelligence and humor, but he has been uniquely scarred: as he puts it, “I was the only American to lose his job over the 9-11 attacks.” While unequivocally condemning the attacks in September 2001, Bill dared to point out that, since those who attacked us gave their lives for their beliefs, “cowards” might not be the right word when comparing them to an American who fires deadly cruise missiles from complete safety. In today’s age of death by drone, his comment is more timely than ever. Back then, Politically Incorrect was quickly cancelled.

Of course, HBO turns out to be a much better home for Maher than his former ABC/Disney could be. But it feels like he’s spent a decade trying to prove his disrespect for terrorists by attacking a billion Muslims and Islam generally.

Glenn was well prepared since he recently dealt with Sam Harris, whose efforts to become a leader of New Atheists have been marred (or Mahered) by even more stunning open bigotry aimed directly at Muslims and Islam, thinly disguised as skepticism about religion generally. I was eager to read Harris’s work, but his alarming comments quickly spoke for themselves. His eagerness to treat every Muslim as a terrorist just doesn’t make logical or moral sense. Amid such blind, foaming Islamophobia, I’m sad to say Atheism hasn’t had a more embarrassing champion since Stalin.

Glenn nails it: if they could stop cheering their own superiority for a moment and actually compare the history of deadly attacks – without automatically excluding terror against Muslims and attacks on them – they might see the kinds of patterns that a more honest scientist like Noam Chomsky would notice.

Terror Facts
It’s maddeningly damaging to ordinary atheist scientists when a self-appointed Leader like Harris or Richard Dawkins slides from logical and scientific arguments into hate speech and jingoism, with so few facts and so little insight. By being as irrational and tribal as he claims most Muslims are, under the pretense of science, Harris and his kin smear all of us until we vocally object.

So let’s honor the brave Bill Maher who lost Politically Incorrect for daring to share an unpleasant truth. Let’s ask a few tough questions today, and actually count things – as if we were curious, rational, objective scientists rather than cheerleaders for our team.

Though of course they’re different categories, let’s at least roughly compare muslims with US citizens:

The tax implications of a DOMA repeal in states with gay marriage are much discussed. In short, gay and lesbian couples legally married and living in a same-sex marriage state would be able to file their federal taxes jointly.

What would a Supreme Court decision in favor of gay marriage mean for couple's taxes?

But what about for couples that do not live in a gay marriage state? Specifically, what happens if DOMA is repealed to couples that live, for example, in Florida, and go to Washington, D.C., to get married?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and it is unclear.

I’m a Florida tax attorney and former IRS lawyer, and I have yet to come across the definitive answer to this question. IRS regulations state that state law controls whether couples are married. But which state law applies? There are two possible answers:

Answer one: State of residence

Probably the most likely answer is that the state of residence determines whether the couple is married. Under this rule, even if a Florida couple goes to a different jurisdiction to get married, the federal government still would not recognize their marriage even after DOMA repeal because Florida itself would not recognize the marriage. That means no federal benefits, no joint filing of taxes, and so on.

Answer two: State of celebration

Under this rule, the laws of the state of celebration, or in other words, where the marriage took place, would control whether the federal government recognizes the marriage. Under this rule, as long as the marriage was legally and validly performed in a state, then the federal government would recognize the marriage. Even if you lived in a state, like Florida, that does not recognize the marriage.

This kind of rule would be complicated, however, as state tax returns, among other things, are based on federal returns. It would be unclear how to complete a Florida state tax return, as single individuals, if the federal return was filed jointly. This ambiguity is similar to what couples in gay marriage states face now when filing their federal returns.

Where have we seen this before?

In the past, the IRS had to deal with the question of whether common law marriages would be recognized. A common law marriage is a old, traditional form of marriage that some states allowed. It occured when a man and woman lived together and openly held themselves to the public as a married couple. The IRS states that as long as the common law marriage validly existed in the common law marriage state, then the IRS would recognize it, even if the couple moved to a state that did not recognize the marriage. This principal could apply to same-sex couples married in a state that offers gay marriage but living in a different state.

As a practical matter, the government will need to issue regulations to address this answer this question. Until then couples in a state without gay marriage could try filing jointly and see what the IRS will do. The answer may then be left to the courts.

Eight members of Congress have sent a letter to Google CEO Larry Page asking tough and necessary questions about the Internet giant’s new wearable computing device, Google Glass.

The letter from members of the Bipartisan Privacy Caucus, whose Co-chair is conservative Joe Barton, (R-TX), says, “As members of the Congressional Bipartisan Privacy Caucus, we are curious whether this new technology could infringe on the privacy of the average American.”

It’s great to see that in a largely dysfunctional Congress some members can reach across the aisle and demonstrate that privacy is not a partisan issue. Besides Barton others signing the letter are Rep. John Barrow (D-GA), Rep. Steve Chabot (R-OH), Rep. Henry C. “Hank” Johnson Jr. (D-GA), Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC), Rep. Richard Nugent (R-FL), Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) and Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA).

The letter also poses several questions intended to make sure consumers’ rights are protected. They include:

• When using Google Glass, is it true that this product would be able to use Facial Recognition Technology to unveil personal information about whomever and even some inanimate objects that the user is viewing? Would a user be able to request such information? Can a non-user or human subject opt out of this collection of personal data? If so, how? If not, why not?
• In Google’s privacy policy, it states that the company “may collect device-specific information (such as your hardware model, operating system version, unique device identifiers, and mobile network information including phone number).” Would Google Glass collect any data about the user without the user’s knowledge and consent? If so, why? If not, please explain.
• Will Google Glass have the capacity to store any data on the device itself? If so, will Google Glass implement some sort of user authentication system to safeguard stored data? If not, why not? If so, please explain.

Read a copy of the Bipartisan Privacy Caucus letter here.

The Representatives want answers to their questions by June 14. I’m betting that Google stalls. Ultimately I think the Representatives will need a Congressional hearing where CEO Page has to answer queries under oath.

As word of the Privacy Caucus’s letter was being reported, Google was holding its annual meeting with developers. Google Glass product director Steve Lee claimed in a “fireside chat” that the Glass team takes privacy seriously.

What a joke! The fact is that Google has become a serial privacy violator. It’s executives just don’t understand what privacy means and there is no reason to expect that they will. For instance, asked about whether Glass will offer facial recognition technology, Lee said, “We’ve definitely experimented with it but it is not in the product today. I can imagine that existing…”

Posted by John M. Simpson, Director of Consumer Watchdog’s Privacy Project. Follow Consumer Watchdog online on Facebook and Twitter.