Disparity in Life Spans of the Rich and the Poor Is Growing →

Some people talk about raising retirement ages for payouts from social security because the average person is living longer, but they're missing the fact that those who rely on social security the most aren't.

The poor are losing ground not only in income, but also in years of life, the most basic measure of well-being. In the early 1970s, a 60-year-old man in the top half of the earnings ladder could expect to live 1.2 years longer than a man of the same age in the bottom half, according to an analysis by theSocial Security Administration. Fast-forward to 2001, and he could expect to live 5.8 years longer than his poorer counterpart.
New research released on Friday contains even more jarring numbers. Looking at the extreme ends of the income spectrum, economists at the Brookings Institution found that for men born in 1920, there was a six-year difference in life expectancy between the top 10 percent of earners and the bottom 10 percent. For men born in 1950, that difference had more than doubled, to 14 years.
For women, the gap grew to 13 years, from 4.7 years.

Gravitational Waves Exist: The Inside Story of How Scientists Finally Found Them →

Just over a billion years ago, many millions of galaxies from here, a pair of black holes collided. They had been circling each other for aeons, in a sort of mating dance, gathering pace with each orbit, hurtling closer and closer. By the time they were a few hundred miles apart, they were whipping around at nearly the speed of light, releasing great shudders of gravitational energy. Space and time became distorted, like water at a rolling boil. In the fraction of a second that it took for the black holes to finally merge, they radiated a hundred times more energy than all the stars in the universe combined. They formed a new black hole, sixty-two times as heavy as our sun and almost as wide across as the state of Maine. As it smoothed itself out, assuming the shape of a slightly flattened sphere, a few last quivers of energy escaped. Then space and time became silent again...

And now we're learning to listen to the universe.

UK politicians green-light plans to record every citizen's internet history →

Surveillance legislation proposed by the UK last November has been examined in detail by the country's politicians, with a new report recommending 86 alterations, but broadly approving the powers requested by the government. The parliamentary committee scrutinizing the draft Investigatory Powers Bill said that companies like Apple and Facebook should not be required to decrypt messages sent on their services, but approved plans to record every UK citizen's browsing history for 12 months. The committee also gave a thumbs up to the bulk retention of data, and the targeted hacking of individuals' computers, known as "equipment interference."
...The Bill has been attacked by ISPs, privacy advocates, the UN, and the world's largest tech companies, with critics agreeing that the Bill is being rushed into law and that its wording is confusing. Critics point to portions of the law like the statement that "data includes any information that is not data." The UK's home secretary and the Bill's principal architect, Theresa May, later explainedthat this was supposed to refer to things like paper.

Whether or not the language is clarified, we're slowly moving to a world where everything we do may be known by everyone else. Governments will only be the first to afford mass surveillance technology.

President Obama's budget calls for a new wage insurance program. Here's what that means. →

The basic theory of wage insurance is that this could be a natural expansion of the existing social insurance state, which currently helps people out in the case of illness, disability, retirement, or temporary unemployment. But what the current system doesn't do much is help people or communities hit by the inevitable ups and downs of structural economic change.

The current unemployment insurance system implicitly imagines a world of generic workers, generic companies, and generic skills. You're minding your business, and then — bam — unexpectedly the company you work for shuts down. Now you're out of a job for a bit, and you need some money to help keep you afloat while you look for new work. Soon enough, you get a new position at a new company doing similar work for similar money.

Of course, that does happen, which is why unemployment insurance exists in the first place, but there are lots of people who lose their jobs and then can't find similar work at similar pay.

My mother, for example, was an analog-era page designer for magazines, and when the world shifted to digital desktop publishing software her years of skills and experience were substantially devalued. Factories leave a town and never come back. Often, workers left behind by these kinds of changes turn to lower-paid, lower-skilled jobs.

NSA Reorganizing →

An interesting and ongoing debate, in the middle of this reorganization:

I think this will make it even harder to trust the NSA. In my book Data and Goliath, I recommended separating the attack and defense missions of the NSA even further, breaking up the agency. (I also wrote about that idea here.)
And missing in their reorg is how US CyberCommmand's offensive and defensive capabilities relate to the NSA's. That seems pretty important, too.