MedStar Health was forced offline this week after hackers took over its computer systems. An unconfirmed virus reportedly strangled the network and rendered it completely useless. Because of the attack, the healthcare operator’s 30,000 staff members and 3,000 affiliated physicians can’t access online record systems, check their emails, or look up phone numbers. Patients also can’t book appointments, according to the Associated Press.
Why a man with intellectual disabilities has fewer rights than a convicted felon →
Ryan King is 33. He has been working at a Safeway in Washington for 15 years. He pays his bills on time, budgets saving and spending money every month, uses exact change for his ride to and from work each day, makes a mean shrimp scampi, and has never been charged with a crime.
Yet, in the eyes of the courts, he has fewer rights than most convicted felons. Legally, Ryan cannot decide where to live, where to work, where to spend his free time, what medicine to take or with whom to talk.
Why? He has intellectual and developmental disabilities as well as sickle cell disease. And, as with many people like him, he is trapped in a legal guardianship that he’s longed to end for nearly a decade...
Is It Game Over for Coal? →
Last Friday, Oregon became the first state to ban coal outright, passing a bill that will phase out any electricity generated by coal by 2035. Several days earlier, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported that 80 percent of last year’s retired electricity was coal-powered. In 2016, natural gas is expected to produce 33.4 percent of electricity versus coal’s 32 percent. At a time when the coal industry is facing one setback after another, it prompts the question: Has the “war on coal” been won?
Automatic emergency braking will be standard in most US cars by 2022 →
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) announced today that 20 automakers have agreed to make automatic emergency braking (AEB) standard by September 1st, 2022, representing "more than 99 percent" of the US auto market.
NHTSA has long praised automatic braking systems as a safety win, but the technology has only recently started rolling out on a wide scale. Using forward-looking sensors, automatic braking can slow or stop a vehicle that senses it's at risk of colliding with a car, pedestrian, or other object ahead of it, even when the driver takes no action. Like many high-tech systems, automatic braking first started showing up on luxury vehicles over a decade ago before trickling down to the mainstream; nowadays, it isn't difficult to find a sub-$40,000 car that has it, but the agreement is intended to ensure that automakers stay on the path.
Notably, today's announcement is strictly an agreement, not a rule...
Automatic braking, like lane keeping and dynamic cruise control, is considered a precursor to fully autonomous vehicles...
Confronting the Fiscal Bogeyman →
The world economy is visibly sinking, and the policymakers who are supposed to be its stewards are tying themselves in knots. Or so suggest the results of the G-20 summit held in Shanghai at the end of last month.
The International Monetary Fund, having just downgraded its forecast for global growth, warned the assembled G-20 attendees that yet another downgrade was pending. Despite this, all that emerged from the meeting was an anodyne statement about pursuing structural reforms and avoiding beggar-thy-neighbor policies.
...
Negative rates, moreover, have begun to impair the health of the banking system. Charging banks for the privilege of holding reserves raises their cost of doing business. Because households can resort to safe-deposit boxes, it’s hard for banks to charge depositors for safekeeping their funds.
In a weak economy, moreover, banks have little ability to pass on their costs via higher lending rates. In Europe, where experimentation with negative interest rates has gone furthest, bank distress is clearly visible.
The solution is straightforward. It is to fix the problem of deficient demand not by attempting to further loosen monetary conditions, but by boosting public spending. Governments should borrow to invest in research, education, and infrastructure. Currently, such investments cost little, given low interest rates. Productive public investment would also enhance the returns on private investment, encouraging firms to undertake additional projects.
North Carolina’s Voter ID Law Could Block 218,000 Registered Voters From the Polls →
Ethelene Douglas, an 85-year-old African-American woman who grew up in the segregated South and first registered to vote in 1964, was one of them. Her struggle to obtain the necessary ID vividly illustrates the problems with the law.
In September 2012, Douglas’s niece, Clara Quick, took her to the DMV in Laurinburg, North Carolina, to get a state photo ID. Douglas was told she needed a copy of her birth certificate to get an ID. So they traveled across the state line to Dillon, South Carolina, where Douglas was born, to find her birth certificate. But the government office there said she needed a photo ID to get a birth certificate, and Douglas was caught in a seemingly unresolvable catch-22. (This account comes from an affidavit Quick filed in federal court.)
Her niece called the South Carolina’s Vital Records office, paid $17 for an expedited birth certificate, but still couldn’t get one. Instead, she was told to find her aunt’s marriage certificate, which was in Bennettsville, South Carolina. After getting that, they made a second trip to the North Carolina DMV, but were once again told Douglas couldn’t get a photo ID because she didn’t have a birth certificate.
They were so frustrated that they gave up trying for a time. In the fall of 2013, after North Carolina passed the voter ID law, they made a third trip to the DMV. An employee told Quick to get a census report to confirm her aunt’s identify, which she purchased for $69. Quick brought her aunt’s census report, marriage certificate, Social Security card, and utility bill during a fourth trip to the DMV in September 2014 and was finally able to get her the photo ID needed to vote.
It took two years, four trips to the DMV, two trips to South Carolina, and $86 in government documents for an 85-year-old woman to continue to vote. Quick called it “an absolute nightmare. There are other voters out there that do not have the money, time, access to transportation, and family assistance to obtain a NCDMV photo ID. It should not be this difficult to obtain an ID for voting.”
Revealed: the 30-year economic betrayal dragging down Generation Y’s income →
A combination of debt, joblessness, globalisation, demographics and rising house prices is depressing the incomes and prospects of millions of young people across the developed world, resulting in unprecedented inequality between generations.
A Guardian investigation into the prospects of millennials – those born between 1980 and the mid-90s, and often otherwise known as Generation Y – has found they are increasingly being cut out of the wealth generated in western societies.
Where 30 years ago young adults used to earn more than national averages, now in many countries they have slumped to earning as much as 20% below their average compatriot. Pensioners by comparison have seen income soar.
...
In two of these countries – the US and Italy – disposable incomes for millennials are scarcely higher in real terms than they were 30 years ago, while the rest of the population has experienced handsome gains.
It is likely to be the first time in industrialised history, save for periods of war or natural disaster, that the incomes of young adults have fallen so far when compared with the rest of society.
More Workers and Less Work →
Every bit of this graph is quite troubling. The US greatly lags in workers during prime working years and fails to retire many of its old people, who are forced instead to work until death.
...
If the US had Finnish employment rates, it would have 4.4 million additional workers (3.1% more workers). If it had Norwegian employment rates, it would have 17.8 million additional workers (12.4% more workers). There are multiple reasons why the US trails the Nordic countries by so much, but probably chief among them is that its lack of leave and child care benefits keeps many women out of the labor force.