The star exploded more than nine billion years ago on the other side of the universe, too far for even the Hubble to see without special help from the cosmos. In this case, however, light rays from the star have been bent and magnified by the gravity of an intervening cluster of galaxies so that multiple images of it appear.
Are Pilots Deserting Washington’s Drone War? →
The U.S. drone war across much of the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa is in crisis and not because civilians are dying or the target list for that war or the right to wage it just about anywhere on the planet are in question in Washington. Something far more basic is at stake: drone pilots are quitting in record numbers.
There are roughly 1,000 such drone pilots, known in the trade as “18Xs,” working for the U.S. Air Force today. Another 180 pilots graduate annually from a training program that takes about a year to complete at Holloman and Randolph Air Force bases in, respectively, New Mexico and Texas. As it happens, in those same 12 months, about 240 trained pilots quit and the Air Force is at a loss to explain the phenomenon. (The better-known U.S. Central Intelligence Agency drone assassination program is also flown by Air Force pilots loaned out for the covert missions.)
On January 4, 2015, the Daily Beast revealed an undated internal memo to Air Force Chief of Staff General Mark Welsh from General Herbert “Hawk” Carlisle stating that pilot “outflow increases will damage the readiness and combat capability of the MQ-1/9 [Predator and Reaper] enterprise for years to come” and added that he was “extremely concerned.” Eleven days later, the issue got top billing at a special high-level briefing on the state of the Air Force. Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James joined Welsh to address the matter. “This is a force that is under significant stress — significant stress from what is an unrelenting pace of operations,” she told the media.
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The Air Force explains the departure of these drone pilots in the simplest of terms. They are leaving because they are overworked. The pilots themselves say that it’s humiliating to be scorned by their Air Force colleagues as second-class citizens. Some have also come forward to claim that the horrors of war, seen up close on video screens, day in, day out, are inducing an unprecedented, long-distance version of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD).
But is it possible that a brand-new form of war — by remote control — is also spawning a brand-new, as yet unlabeled, form of psychological strain? Some have called drone war a “coward’s war” (an opinion that, according to reports from among the drone-traumatized in places like Yemen and Pakistan, is seconded by its victims). Could it be that the feeling is even shared by drone pilots themselves, that a sense of dishonor in fighting from behind a screen thousands of miles from harm’s way is having an unexpected impact of a kind psychologists have never before witnessed?
Krugman Nails It on NAIRU →
So, we must make tradeoffs all the time. There can be too much of a good thing...
One economic concept most probably haven't heard of is the NAIRU. In short, it's about balance between the unemployment rate and the inflation rate. If we step on the economic gas to try to provide more jobs, that's likely to lead to higher inflation. At some point, chasing the lowest possible unemployment rate, we'll start hurting the economy through too-high inflation. Figuring out that point, though, is not easy; the exact number will never be perfectly known, and it's subject to change over time, as the economy itself changes. But some people get stuck on one number, and won't forget it:
...Krugman points out that we really don't know the level of unemployment that is low enough to trigger accelerating inflation, although many people have put it in the 5.3-5.5 percent range. If the Fed acted on this view then it would be raising interest rates very soon to keep the unemployment rate from falling below this level.
But there was a widely held view back in the 1990s, back up by a considerable amount of evidence, that the magic number was close to 6.0 percent. Alan Greenspan had the good sense to ignore this view and allowed the unemployment rate to continue to fall, eventually bottoming out at 3.8 percent in some months in 2000. The result was that millions of people had jobs who would not otherwise have been able to, and tens of millions saw pay increases. And, we had trillions of dollars in additional output.
The gains from lower unemployment contrasted with the risks of higher inflation seem so asymmetric that it is difficult to see why the Fed should move to dampen growth until there is real evidence of higher wage growth and accelerating inflation. There clearly is none now, so why shouldn't the Fed be prepared to take the Greenspan gamble?
The weaker sex →
The reversal is laid out in a report published on March 5th by the OECD, a Paris-based rich-country think-tank. Boys’ dominance just about endures in maths: at age 15 they are, on average, the equivalent of three months’ schooling ahead of girls. In science the results are fairly even. But in reading, where girls have been ahead for some time, a gulf has appeared. In all 64 countries and economies in the study, girls outperform boys. The average gap is equivalent to an extra year of schooling.
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To see why boys and girls fare so differently in the classroom, first look at what they do outside it. The average 15-year-old girl devotes five-and-a-half hours a week to homework, an hour more than the average boy, who spends more time playing video games and trawling the internet. Three-quarters of girls read for pleasure, compared with little more than half of boys. Reading rates are falling everywhere as screens draw eyes from pages, but boys are giving up faster. The OECD found that, among boys who do as much homework as the average girl, the gender gap in reading fell by nearly a quarter.
Beijing's Toxic Sky →
Environmental disasters like this are increasing pressure on China's central government.
In Beijing, awareness of the dangers of the polluted sky is now on the rise, thanks to growing data. China will "declare war on pollution," Premier Li Keqiang told parliament in an opening address in 2014. A tougher environmental law took effect on January 1, while a new environment minister took charge on Friday...
The TSA's FAST Personality Screening Program Violates the Fourth Amendment →
I'm not sure how quickly we're approaching a reality where anyone could know anything about anyone else if they just buy the right app, but, conceptually, it seems possible within our lifetimes. And our legal system still hasn't caught up to addressing privacy implications of 30-year-old technology like email...
...FAST scans, however, exceed the scope of the administrative search exception. Under this exception, the courts would employ a balancing test, weighing the governmental need for the search versus the invasion of personal privacy of the search, to determine whether FAST scans violate the Fourth Amendment. Although the government has an acute interest in protecting the nation's air transportation system against terrorism, FAST is not narrowly tailored to that interest because it cannot detect the presence or absence of weapons but instead detects merely a person's frame of mind. Further, the system is capable of detecting an enormous amount of the scannee's highly sensitive personal medical information, ranging from detection of arrhythmias and cardiovascular disease, to asthma and respiratory failures, physiological abnormalities, psychiatric conditions, or even a woman's stage in her ovulation cycle...
Chris Jenks on the Petraeus Plea →
Among other reasons to hate the two-tiered justice system on full display in Petraeus's case:
Appreciated your comments on Petraeus. One additional factor which resonates with me and I think most military folks is that Petraeus was a general court martial convening authority for a decade or more. He decided what cases were referred to a court-martial. He decided on the terms of plea deals. He decided what post trial clemency should or should not be given. He has sent people to jail and ended careers for far less than what he did.
Also absent from the discussion was how apparently the Army was not interested in recalling him to active duty and taking action against him for misconduct that occurred while on active duty. Instead, he will continue to receive 4 star general retired pay, literally the most [money] anyone in the US military could potentially receive.
Email Privacy, Overseas Jurisdiction, and the 114th Congress →
This is stunning. We've had to wait this long to address privacy issues around email? The world is changing, faster than ever! And Congress *needs* to step up the pace.
Two years ago, I wrote about a bipartisan effort (in which I was and still am participating) to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. That effort, sadly, went nowhere.
I am, however, happy to report that progress is being made to revive that effort in the 114th Congress. This year two separate but related bills are being considered in the House and Senate that bear on these issues.
One, the Leahy-Lee bill (Yoder-Polis in the House) addresses email privacy. The current structure of ECPA, which was adopted in 1986, stems from a time when nobody could imagine that anyone would ever store lots of data (like emails) for long periods of time — the expense was too great. So ECPA adopted an odd rule that communications stored for longer than 180 days would be accessible by law enforcement through a subpoena rather than by a warrant. This had the result of making long-term stored email less well protected than, say, diaries or letters or your telephone communications. Who knew that Gmail was in the future?...